California Proposition 215 (1996) - Proposition 215 and The Federal Courts

Proposition 215 and The Federal Courts

The U.S. Supreme Court has twice upheld the ability of federal officials to enforce federal law which conflicts with state law.

In 2001, the Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative claimed "medical necessity" as their legal justification for violating the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA). The U.S. Supreme Court struck down this argument, holding there could be no claim of medical necessity because in the CSA Congress had specifically negated this defense by unambiguously classifying marijuana as a substance which can have no authorized medical use.

The 2005 case of Gonzales v. Raich challenged the CSA by claiming that simple cultivation of marijuana plants fell outside of Congress's power to regulate economic activity through its Commerce Clause powers. While initially successful in the Ninth Circuit, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down this argument. The Court found that personal cultivation of marijuana fell within the scope of federal regulation by employing an expansive definition of economic activity, a definition described as "breathtaking" by Justice O'Connor in her dissent because it "threatens to sweep all of productive human activity into federal regulatory reach." However, in the majority opinion Justice Stevens expressed, though denying them support at that time, that he hoped "the voices of voters allied with these respondents may one day be heard in the halls of Congress." Justice O'Connor in her dissenting opinion also stated that "a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments," and that "his case exemplifies the role of states as laboratories." Justice O'Connor disagreed with the majority's opinion because sanctioning this application of Congress's CSA "extinguishes that experiment, without any proof that the personal cultivation, possession, and use of marijuana for medicinal purposes, if economic activity in the first place, has a substantial effect on interstate commerce and is therefore an appropriate subject of federal regulation." Despite the dissent's favorable attitude toward state medical marijuana policies, federal law still controls, and for medical marijuana to be considered legal, change must be effected through legislation by Congress.

The U.S. Supreme court on May 18, 2009, refused to hear San Diego’s case against California, where it claimed it wasn’t required to issue state mandated medical marijuana IDs, because the federal ban on marijuana trumped California’s law.