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June 28, 2007
Still Supremely Dishonest; so, what else is new?
According to my reading of history, the legal and historical roots of our modern drug war are to be found in two misguided 5-4 decisions of the medically naive Holmes-Brandeis Court. Made between 1917 and 1919, they upheld the flagrantly deceptive Harrison Narcotic Act. The decisions effectively awarded the right to practice Medicine to equally untrained federal agents . Although their implicit dangers were warned against at the time (quoted midway through Brecher, Ch 8), the actions seem to have been excused on the basis of that era’s (generally uninformed) notions of “addiction.”
In other words, those decisions on behalf of Harrison represent the first drug exception ever carved out of the Constitution; they've also never been reviewed from that standpoint.
The historical record also shows conclusively that ever since 1920, whatever federal bureaucracy has been responsible for the nation’s drug policy has consistently given its highest priority to preventing Mediciine from studying addiction-related issues with the standards usually applied to other diagnostic and therapeutic issues.
The saddest part of the “Bong Hits” case for me is that none of the commentary I’ve read so far seems even remotely aware of the Court’s key role and dishonest service in first allowing, and later defending, the drug war. Based on the its current dominance by five devout Catholic Men (another little noted phenomenon), the drug exception now seems as judicially safe as the right of the rich to buy elections...and as endangered as a women’s right to choose.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at June 28, 2007 06:09 PM