Jul 14, 2008
California Congressman Jerry McNerney says he will now support an amendment to bar the U.S. Department of Justice from attacking state medical marijuana laws, according to a report in the Oakland Tribune. Last year, McNerney opposed the measure, known as the Hinchey-Rohrabacher amendment, but hearing the real-world stories of medical marijuana patients in his district changed his mind.
McNerney's Republican opponent, Dean Andal, promptly went on the attack, calling medical marijuana "a red herring," and saying federal anti-drug efforts shouldn't be curtailed when "we are facing a drug crisis with meth and other drug use on the rise."
Memo to Andal: Meth is already a legal medicine under federal law, classified in Schedule II of the Controlled Substances Act. No one seriously believes that medical use of methamphetamine by a limited number of patients has anything at all to do with meth abuse.
And let's not even ask what happened to the notion that Republicans were the party favoring local control and limited federal intervention.