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Policy Considerations This section contains excerpts that reflect public policy considerations in the context of the issues discussed. Pages: ‹1› ‹2› ‹3› ‹4› ‹5› ‹6› ‹7› ‹8› ‹9› ‹10› ‹11› ‹12› ‹13› ‹14›
[Given the California's Compassionate Use Act built-in controls, we find unpersuasive] [T]he Government's assertion that placing medical marijuana outside the CSA's reach "would prevent effective enforcement of the interstate ban on drug trafficking." [...] Moreover, under the CSA, certain drugs that present a high risk of abuse and addiction but that nevertheless have an accepted medical use--drugs like morphine and amphetamines -- are available by prescription. No one argues that permitting use of these drugs under medical supervision has undermined the CSA's restrictions.
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But even assuming that States' controls allow some seepage of medical marijuana into the illicit drug market, there is a multibillion-dollar interstate market for marijuana. Executive Office of the President, Office of Nat. Drug Control Policy, Marijuana Fact Sheet 5 (Feb. 2004), http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/publications/factsht/marijuana/index.html . It is difficult to see how this vast market could be affected by diverted medical cannabis, let alone in a way that makes regulating intrastate medical marijuana obviously essential to controlling the interstate drug market.
To be sure, Congress declared that state policy would disrupt federal law enforcement. It believed the across-the-board ban essential to policing interstate drug trafficking. 21 U.S.C. § 801(6). But as Justice O'Connor points out, Congress presented no evidence in support of its conclusions, which are not so much findings of fact as assertions of power. Congress cannot define the scope of its own power merely by declaring the necessity of its enactments. In sum, neither in enacting the CSA nor in defending its application to respondents has the Government offered any obvious reason why banning medical marijuana use is necessary to stem the tide of interstate drug trafficking. Congress' goal of curtailing the interstate drug trade would not plainly be thwarted if it could not apply the CSA to patients like Monson and Raich. That is, unless Congress' aim is really to exercise police power of the sort reserved to the States in order to eliminate even the intrastate possession and use of marijuana. [...]
It makes sense, then, to treat a sniff as the search that it amounts to in practice, and to rely on the body of our Fourth Amendment cases [...] in deciding whether such a search is reasonable. As a general proposition, using a dog to sniff for drugs is subject to the rule that the object of enforcing criminal laws does not, without more, justify suspicionless Fourth Amendment intrusions. Since the police claim to have had no particular suspicion that Caballes was violating any drug law, this sniff search must stand or fall on its being ancillary to the traffic stop that led up to it.
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The Court today does not go so far as to say explicitly that sniff searches by dogs trained to sense contraband always get a free pass under the Fourth Amendment, since it reserves judgment on the constitutional significance of sniffs assumed to be more intrusive than a dog's walk around a stopped car. For this reason, I do not [...] [think that] the Court [...] [is] actually signaling recognition of a broad authority to conduct suspicionless sniffs for drugs in any parked car, about which Justice Ginsburg is rightly concerned, or on the person of any pedestrian minding his own business on a sidewalk. But the Court's stated reasoning provides no apparent stopping point short of such excesses. For the sake of providing a workable framework to analyze cases on facts like these, which are certain to come along, I would treat the dog sniff as the familiar search it is in fact, subject to scrutiny under the Fourth Amendment.
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I should take care myself to reserve judgment about a possible case significantly unlike this one. All of us are concerned not to prejudge a claim of authority to detect explosives and dangerous chemical or biological weapons that might be carried by a terrorist who prompts no individualized suspicion. Suffice it to say here that what is a reasonable search depends in part on demonstrated risk. Unreasonable sniff searches for marijuana are not necessarily unreasonable sniff searches for destructive or deadly material if suicide bombs are a societal risk.
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