This AP photo of Gary Farnsworth toking up appears designed to make San Fransisco's "medical cannabis cooperatives" look like crack houses. The Supreme Court ruled today that people with prescriptions for marijuana in the ten states that allow medical use may still be prosecuted under federal laws.

The closely watched case was an appeal by the Bush administration in a case involving two seriously ill California women who use marijuana. At issue was whether the prosecution of pot users under the federal Controlled Substances Act was Constitutional.

Under the Constitution, Congress may pass laws regulating a state's economic activity so long as it involves "interstate commerce" that crosses state borders. The California marijuana in question was homegrown, distributed to patients without charge and without crossing state lines.

As in the marriage debate, social liberals once again find themselves on the side of state's rights and federalism. LBJ could probably appreciate the irony on that one.

"The states' core police powers have always included authority to define criminal law and to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens," said O'Connor, who was joined by two other states' rights advocates: Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas.

I don't often agree with William Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas. Still, it's nice to see the ailing Chief Justice go out on a high note.

Meanwhile, a recent Harvard study confirmed the blindingly obvious:

And last week, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman and more than 500 other economists endorsed a report that said state and federal coffers could reap a net gain of $13.9 billion if marijuana were legalized.

The study by Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron estimated that law enforcement would save $7.7 billion, while taxes on the drug could amount to $6.2 billion. Miron's study was largely funded by the Marijuana Policy Project, a Washington, D.C., lobbying group that supports liberalizing marijuana laws.

The Bush administration's drug czar, John Walters, countered by claiming that "A growing body of evidence now demonstrates that smoking marijuana can increase the risk of serious mental health problems." That claim is backed up by a government report that found that adults who had used marijuana before age 12 were twice as likely to have experienced a serious mental illness in the last year as those who began smoking it after age 18; therefore, marijuana causes mental illness.

And homeless bums are far more likely to have schizophrenia than the gainfully employed; therefore, being homeless causes schizophrenia. Meanwhile, prohibition robs us of more than $6 billion in tax revenues. We make 1.5 million drug arrests each year, and in the past decade, that has shifted from mostly cocaine busts to mostly pot busts. Thousands of children in my neighborhood of D.C. alone are growing up with fathers in prison for marijuana possession. Some family values, right?

And an even more insidious side effect of our War on Pot is this:

"My big worry is that if you tell a 14-year-old that if you smoke pot, you're going to become psychotic, and then he tries it and nothing happens, you lose credibility," said Earleywine, author of "Understanding Marijuana." "So when you tell him that using meth will make your brain smaller, which it absolutely will, he'll think, 'You lied to me about the marijuana, so I think I'm going to smoke this meth.'"

I feel like the only person left in the country who remembers the 18th Amendment. Blech.

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