Our View: California wins on medical pot law

On July 31 California's Fourth District Court of Appeal affirmed that California's medical marijuana laws are valid despite the fact that federal law does not make any provision for the medicinal use of marijuana. This means that state, county and local officials, whether they like the laws put in place by the people through the initiative process and later the Legislature are duty-bound the implement those laws.

For years various officials who don't approve of the laws that give bona fide patients the right to use, possess and grow marijuana have argued that because federal law places marijuana on Schedule I (which prohibits any use, including medical) under the 1974 Controlled Substances Act (CSA), that the California law is invalid. The doctrine of "federal suprem-acy," they have argued, doesn't allow states to have less restrictive laws.

That argument was always disingenuous or worse. Our federal Constitution created a system in which the states have wide latitude to take different legal approaches to various issues, explicitly to allow the states to be "laboratories of democracy" and try different approaches, with other states free to study the results and emulate them or not. Only on rare occasions does Congress declare that the feds have "occupied the field" in a way that precludes the states from trying different approaches.

After going back to the original language of the CSA, the Fourth District court concluded that the law not only did not declare that it was supreme over the states, but that it "signifies Congress's intent to maintain the power of states to elect to serve as a laboratory in the trial of social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country . . ."

This was so obvious that the court rejected out of hand the claim that Prop. 215, passed by the voters in 1996, was invalid due to conflict with federal law. It then turned to SB 420, which among other things set up a voluntary patient identification card system and requires counties to do the initial screening of patients who want such a card so the state health department can issue them. San Diego County, joined by San Bernardino County, had filed suit to have that law invalidated, not only because it conflicted with federal law but because the legislature had changed the original law, and only voters can change a law originally passed by the voters.

The court ruled that SB 420 was designed (as its sponsors said at the time) not to change Prop. 215, but to implement and clarify it. Therefore the ID card system, since it is voluntary and doesn't take any rights from patients who prefer not to get an ID card, is valid and counties (which under California law are subdivisions of the state) are obligated to follow it.

It would be a waste of time and taxpayers' money for San Diego to appeal this decision to the California Supreme Court, which recently declined to hear an appeal from another case that raised state-federal issues. San Diego County and all the officials who have been blatantly or subtly dragging their feet are on notice that their legal obligation is to follow state law, not federal law, when it comes to medical marijuana. It's time for the foot-dragging to end.