In 1996, Californians passed the Compassionate Use Act in order to ensure that seriously-ill Californians who found a benefit to a natural medicine could, in fact, obtain the medicine.
Unfortunately, the medicine was one which numerous persons — sick in other, much more serious ways — deemed so dangerous that no one could make their own decisions regarding whether or not it should be taken. The government was called upon to outlaw the freedom to decide what to put into one’s own body.
U.S. citizens had already lived through a period in history where one group of people decided that putting another drug — alcohol — into one’s body should not be a choice anyone could freely make. But the much more dangerous drug had required a constitutional amendment in order to ban it — which, incidentally, didn’t work, either — and it had been a lot of work to get that amendment passed.
So the United States government, following the lead of numerous local governments before it, simply decided to ignore the United States Constitution and abrogated the rights of U.S. citizens to decide what to do with their own bodies.
Today, the Los Angeles Times reports that these enemies of the United States Constitution are making a resurgence against those who would recognize the rights of the ill to treat their illnesses as they saw fit.
Whereas the voters of the State of California had enacted legislation enabling access to medical marijuana, the courts, siding with law enforcement, have said that individual local governments may ignore that vote and may ban access.
