Right Side of the Rainbow

Oakland Tribune:

Less than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against her, Oakland medical marijuana patient and advocate Angel Raich will go back before a federal appeals court Monday with a different legal argument.

Her lawyers will try to persuade a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting in Pasadena, that keeping her from using marijuana as medicine unduly burdens her fundamental rights to life and freedom from pain, as protected by the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause and the Ninth Amendment.

I have a lot of sympathy for Ms. Raich, who suffers from a brain tumor. And I have no sympathy at all for the war on drugs or for the Federal Government’s trampling of states’ rights. But if Ms. Raich could not win with the perfectly sensible argument she advanced here, she cannot win with a novel exposition of the Due Process Clause.