The Columnist Manifesto

In my Constitutional Law class, we are studying Gonzalez v. Raich, the pending U. S. Supreme Court case which challenges the power of Congress to define the growing of marijuana in one's backyard solely for personal use for treatment of one's own serious medical condition as illegal interstate drug trafficking. My students read through the transcript of the November 29, 2004 oral argument, reading the parts of the Justices and the advocates.

At one point during the argument on behalf of the marijuana-using patients, this interesting colloquy took place:

JUSTICE BREYER: Well, here, they say -- look, I take it you're using this because I was going to ask you. You know,he grows heroin, cocaine, tomatoes that are going to have genomes in them that could, at some point, lead to tomato children that will eventually affect Boston. You know, we can -- oil that's never, in fact, being used, but we want an inventory of it, federally. You know, I can multiply the examples --

MR. BARNETT: Well --

JUSTICE BREYER: -- and you can, too. So you're going to get around all those examples by saying what?

MR. BARNETT: By saying that it's all going to depend on the regulatory scheme, what the --

JUSTICE BREYER: Yeah.
[Transcript, pp. 30-31]

When we were done with the transcript, I asked the class for its comments and questions. The student who read the part of Justice Breyer eschewed the cheap laugh (not "what was he smoking"), but instead asked in all candor: "Can you tell me what in the world I was talking about?"

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