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The Week
National Review, Feb 24, 2003
-- State governments around the country are in deep fiscal doo-doo-this we all know. Having used the gushing tax revenues of the dot-com boom years to erect expensive new programs and hire battalions of new employees, they find that in the present lean times they are faced with the inevitable choice: cut spending or raise taxes. The preference of those in power, egged on by public-employee unions and other client groups, is of course for raising taxes. In the state of Oregon, this sometimes requires voter approval, and a tax-raising measure was duly put before the voters. Along with the measure came a sophisticated scare campaign by those client groups, aiming to convince Oregonians that unless they voted the tax increase, state nursing homes would be closed, cops would be laid off, and so on. You will dial 911 and no one will come! Your grandmother will be thrown out in the snow! You know the sort of thing. Well, to their great credit, the good people of Oregon resisted these dire warnings and voted the measure down, 54-46. The state will now have to cut spending. Said one voter interviewed by the Associated Press: "I'm a normal person and when I don't have enough money I have to change my habits."
-- Ed Rosenthal, a 58-year-old Californian, faces a minimum of five years in prison after being convicted in federal court of growing hundreds of marijuana plants. A long-time pot activist, Rosenthal grew the pot to supply users of medical marijuana under California's Proposition 215, passed in 1996, which allows the practice. Federal law prohibits marijuana cultivation, however, even for medical purposes. Rosenthal was not allowed to cite Proposition 215 in his own defense. It makes sense that federal law should trump state law. What do not make sense are our draconian drug laws, especially those that prohibit patients and doctors from turning to marijuana as a relief for the symptoms of terrible diseases or equally terrible cures.
-- It has just dawned on the people of New York City that the smoking ban enacted by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, which covers any place to which the public has access, may apply to the city's prisons. Reactions have been mixed. The president of the corrections officers' union said he didn't think the new law applied to jails because: "I do not believe a city jail is a place where the public has access. There are restrictions to people going in and out of jails." Well, yes. The corrections commissioner himself predicted that prisoners unable to relieve the stress of incarceration by smoking would make trouble for his staff, and asked for $120 million to deal with the problem. The city's legal and financial watchdogs approve, since the ban will reduce prisoner lawsuits on account of "secondhand smoke." We don't much care, beyond a mild regret that yet another traditional feature of American life, the jailhouse tobacco baron, seems to be headed for extinction.
-- For the second time in a decade, the Supreme Court of South Carolina has upheld the conviction of a woman for causing the death of her unborn child. Pro-lifers have but limited cause to cheer: The only reason that the court was able to uphold the conviction is that the mother caused the death by using cocaine, an activity that was already illegal. Nevertheless, the case does illustrate the paradoxes of the post-Roe legal regime: It may be criminal to kill a fetus by smoking crack, but one has a constitutional right to do so by using, say, a pair of forceps. If pro-lifers and pro-choicers can agree on anything, it is that this is a distinction without a difference. For 200-proof pro-choicers, a pregnant woman who smokes crack is no more culpable than any other crack user; for pro-lifers, killing a fetus in a doctor's office is no more acceptable than killing it with drugs. As long as Americans remain ambivalent on the question of abortion, however, these moral inconsistencies will prevail.
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