Everybody Must Get Busted

[dweller]

Supreme Court Rules Against the Sick

By STEW ALBERT

The Supreme Court says federal law takes precedent over state law and so government agents can break in on pot smoking cancer or HIV patients and arrest them. They can do this even if state laws allow the use of medical marijuana under the directions of a doctor. It seems everyday we must ask ourselves just how far the George Bush Cruelty State can and will go. It's not enough to lie the country into war, or steal from the poor for the ravenous benefit of the super rich, now sick dying people can be arrested for smoking weed in order to alleviate their crushing misery.

A few years back my old friend Anita Hoffman, former wife of Abbie, lay dying of cancer. The murderous disease started out in her breast and spread to her bones. She was a goner and she knew it. My wife and I visited with her in San Francisco and she was sinking fast. She was in considerable pain and suffered from nausea. She fought these horrors by smoking pot kindly provided to her by two woman who grew it and were attempting to develop strains of pot that were especially aimed at helping ease the pain and suffering sick.

Did the marijuana help? It certainly did. Getting a bit high eased Anita's pain and the nausea. Indeed she was even able to eat a few bites of food and her mood, humor and sociability improved considerably. Medical pot could not save her life but it made her last days easier and she was much more able to relate to visiting friends and family.

Now a two-thirds majority of the Supreme Court says the Bush Justice Department would have had the right to arrest Anita on her death bed. And it would have come to that because Anita didn't need laws to tell her she had a right to do whatever was necessary to keep herself together at the end of her life.

http://www.counterpunch.com/albert06062005.html

dp

[ailsagirl]

1. We can't have those in great physical pain find relief, can we??

God forbid we should alleviate suffering in people who are experiencing excruciating pain or dying.

:grr:

Correction: so it's not the neocons... but it's still abominable!!

What's it to them?? I don't get it.

[Internut]

2. The "neocon" Supreme Court Justices objected to this decision

The "liberal" ones voted for it. Try to wrap your head around that one.

[ailsagirl]

4. Makes no sense to me.

:crazy:

[mongo]

10. It is a matter of fed law trumping state laws

What does the habitat of the spotted owl have to do with interstate commerce? If the ruling went the other way, it would have taken the teeth out of federal environmental laws for starters.

I wish this case had been argued on the right of an individual and their licensed physician to make medical decisions without interference from the federal government. A right to medical privacy and undue governmental interference in their lives.

[Internut]

11. And that is exactly the point -

what does the habitat of the spotted owl have to do with interstate commerce? Why are we supposed look at the SC twisting of the Constitution to the point that it means nothing favorably when it is good for our pet cause?

[newswolf56]

9. God Forbids It -- That's Exactly the Dominionist Point

I have not read the Supreme Court decision so cannot comment on its contents. But I have seen the data showing how the Bush Administration has redirected the so-called War on Drugs into a War on Marijuana, and I am also aware of the administration's war on the legal use of painkillers -- so intense that doctors are now increasingly terrified of federal prosecution merely for prescribing barely adequate levels of pain medication.

What unites these two prongs of Bush Administration policy is the Christian belief -- especially intense in Dominionist circles and among Fundamentalists in general -- that suffering is divine punishment for "sin" and that suffering therefore "leads to God." The corollary doctrine is that painkillers therefore lead away from God. Hence the Bush hostility not only to the relief provided by prescription drugs, but by the (decidedly non-Christian) spiritual vision so often awakened by marijuana.

Thus I would anticipate this administration will be especially relentless in its its newly affirmed persecution of medical marijuana users: a modern witch-hunt, a reincarnation of the Inquisition, and for exactly the same reason, intended to suppress "by whatever means necessary" the emergent vision of Goddess or Tao or simply the great cosmic oneness. This is the "dangerous" vision so often enhanced by marijuana -- the sudden "subversive" knowledge that is the diametrical opposite of hatefully dualistic and eternally unforgiving Christianity. By all accounts, to those who are dying this marijuana vision is like a mother's embrace, an infinitely profound comfort in one's final days, hours and minutes.

But its Pagan essence is an ultimate rival to Christianity -- which is why the powers that be attempt to suppress it at any cost.

[The Traveler]

3. It does not speak well of our country

that we deny comfort to the seriously ill and dying. It speaks even more poorly of our country that we have declared war on those of our own people who choose to alter their consciousness. The War on Drugs ... perpetual, expensive, damaging, no exit strategy, vague ideologically defined objectives. Sound familiar?

[dweller]

8. "Frigging consciousness,

you know, it's the only road out of the grease pit of iknorance."

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/060305Mazza/060305mazza.html

dp

[gumby]

5. What are LAWS

if they don't even serve basic human dignity?

When the LAWS become the dictates of brutality, then the people live under a brutal dictatorship.

Yes, "brutality" is the word. This country seems to be careening to the Academy Award of Brutality.

[evlbstrd]

6. I have seen so many friends and family

who could use and did use medical marijuana. My mother suffered from lung cancer, so smoking it was out of the question. But smoking is not the only option.
The fellow that gave my daughter her first piano lessons was prescribed Marinol, which you almost almost describe as legal hash oil (Oh, the old days!), and would smear it on doobies. It helped him immensely. But he wasted away anyway.
And I never asked him for any of it. He needed it more than I did, and my daughter learned (at the age of seven) a little bit about the justice and injustice of the law, medicine, the drug war and homosexuality. That's a lot for a little girl to absorb.
Now, at nineteen, she is a committed democrat. She cried the day after election day last year. It was her first ever election.
Yesterday, she even asked me what kind of democrat she might be, and what socialism means.
I pointed her to Michael Harrington.
I am so proud of my daughter.

[NMMNG]

7. Gah!

Marijuana has dozens of legitimate medical uses. It is not physically addictive, has fewer side effects than many prescription and OTC drugs on the market and to date has not caused one death by overdose. Nonetheless our fanatical rightwingnazi government will not legalize it even for carefully controlled, legitimate medical use.

But Rush can be an Oxycontin hound.

Freaking hypocrites.:grr: :crazy: