Gonzales v. Raich

Summary

In 1996 California voters approved Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, which exempted from state prosecution seriously ill patients and their caregivers who possessed or grew marijuana for medical use on a physician's recommendation. Angel Raich and Diane Monson, two California residents with serious medical conditions, used marijuana on the advice of their doctors. Monson grew her own plants; two unnamed caregivers grew marijuana for Raich and gave it to her without charge. In August 2002 county deputies and federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents came to Monson's home. Although the county officers found her conduct lawful under state law, the federal agents destroyed her six plants after a three-hour standoff. Raich and Monson then sued the Attorney General and the head of the DEA, seeking to bar enforcement of the federal Controlled Substances Act of 1970 against their purely local cultivation and use. The Ninth Circuit ordered a preliminary injunction, relying on United States v. Lopez (1995) and United States v. Morrison (2000). The question was whether Congress's power to regulate commerce among the states, together with the Necessary and Proper Clause, extends to marijuana grown at home and used locally for medicine in compliance with state law. Raich's counsel, Randy Barnett, argued that the activity was neither commercial nor interstate, that it never entered any market, and that a separate class of state-sanctioned medical use lay beyond federal reach. The government answered that Congress had created a comprehensive scheme to control the national market in dangerous drugs, that marijuana is a fungible commodity with an established interstate market, and that exempting home-grown supplies would undercut enforcement. On 6 June 2005 the Court reversed, six to three. Justice Stevens traced federal drug regulation from the 1906 food and drug law through the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 to the Controlled Substances Act, which placed marijuana in Schedule I. Drawing on Wickard v. Filburn (1942), he held that Congress may regulate purely local activities that are part of an economic class of activities substantially affecting interstate commerce, and that Congress had a rational basis for concluding that leaving home-grown marijuana outside its scheme would affect the national market. He noted that the law provided a procedure for reclassifying drugs. Justice Scalia, concurring in the judgment, grounded the result in the Necessary and Proper Clause as a means of making an interstate regulation effective. Justice O'Connor, joined by the Chief Justice and in most parts by Justice Thomas, dissented, arguing that the decision made the limits announced in Lopez and Morrison meaningless and denied California its role as a laboratory for policy. Justice Thomas, dissenting separately, argued that activity neither interstate nor commercial falls outside the Commerce Clause. The library text gives Stevens's full opinion and excerpts of the other three, with notes left out. On remand the Ninth Circuit rejected Raich's remaining claims in 2007. Many states have since authorized medical or adult use while federal law still lists marijuana as a controlled substance.

Top Lessons

• The aggregation principle

  Under Wickard, a single farmer's wheat or a single patient's plants may be trivial, but Congress may consider the effect of all such activity taken together. Stevens applied that reasoning to marijuana, holding that Congress could rationally fear that home-grown supplies would leak into the national market.

• Limits on federal power

  The dissenters argued that if Congress can regulate a plant grown and used in one home without sale, the limits recognized in Lopez and Morrison mean little. The majority replied that those cases involved noneconomic statutes, while the drug law regulates a commodity traded in a national market.

• States as laboratories

  O'Connor invoked Justice Brandeis's image of the states as laboratories that may try novel policies without risk to the rest of the country. California had chosen a different policy on medical marijuana; the question was whether federal law left room for that experiment.

• Medicine, law and the democratic process

  Stevens acknowledged the patients' strong arguments about therapeutic value but held that the constitutional question did not turn on them. He pointed instead to the statute's procedure for reclassifying drugs and to the voices of voters and legislators as the proper routes for change.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Raich records how American law has classified drugs by potential for abuse and accepted medical use, from the 1906 labeling law through the Harrison Act to the five schedules of 1970, and it sets physicians' recommendations under state law against a federal finding that marijuana has no accepted medical use, a conflict between medical judgment, state policy and national drug control that remains unresolved.

• Opinion of the Court, Part II, paragraph beginning Shortly after taking office in 1969

  Surveys the history of federal drug regulation and explains how the five schedules of the Controlled Substances Act sort drugs by potential for abuse, dependence and accepted medical use.

• Opinion of the Court, Part I, paragraph beginning Respondents Angel Raich and Diane Monson are California residents

  Describes the patients' physicians' conclusion, after trying conventional medicines, that marijuana was the only effective treatment available to them.

• Opinion of the Court, Part V, at the sentence beginning As the Solicitor General confirmed during oral argument

  Points to the statutory procedure for reclassifying a Schedule I drug as an avenue for those who believe it has medical value.