A Plaintiff Speaks: Why I’m Suing for Safe Access
September 26th, 2012Posted by Michael Krawitz
I am a disabled United States Air Force veteran who is one of the plaintiffs suing over the placement of marijuana in the Controlled Substances Act, in the ASA v DEA case which will be heard by the United States Court of Appeal for the DC Circuit on October 16th. In order to understand why I would be willing to put my name on the line in this lawsuit over the schedule number of cannabis it is first important to review a little bit of history.
Most people know that marihuana (spelled just that way) was the subject of a national law called the Marihuana Tax Act but less known is the fact that this law was based upon the Machine Gun Tax Act. It was legal trickery at best, as the whole point of the new law was to prohibit the sale and possession without the bother of a Constitutional Amendment as was done with alcohol prohibition.
I think the chief drug bureaucrat at the time, Harry Anslinger, knew full well that the Marijuana Tax Act was on shaky Constitutional ground as he made it his life’s work to sure up the law. In the 1960¹s he succeeded with the Single Convention treaty and thereby sought a back door Constitutional authority for his prohibition because it is written in our Constitution that treaties, once ratified, become “the supreme law of the land.”
The United States Supreme Court wasn¹t impressed with Mr. Anslinger¹s efforts. however, and in 1969 they sided with Dr. Timothy Leary and ruled the Marihuana Tax Act unconstitutional. This opened the door for Congress to create a new federal law on marihuana using the Interstate Commerce Clause to define their jurisdiction and the new treaty system as part of its basic constitutional authority.
The new federal law, the Controlled Substances Act, is a basically good law that allows for fairly seamless control of and access to thousands of medicinal substances, but unfortunately the arbitrary inclusion of marihuana in the most restrictive category – Schedule I – makes this good law as bad at the Marihuana Tax Act in practice.
Every day the federal government maintains marihuana’s Schedule I status, the more damage it causes to our system of government. It is no surprise that this Schedule I placement of marihuana is now causing a serious rift between many states and the federal government that to an outside observer appears to be an extraordinary conflict, even a constitutional crisis.
The definition of cannabis as Schedule I has caused my fellow patients to be imprisoned, denied work, housing, right to own a firearm, a place on a transplant list, and of greatest concern to me, is the latest casualty of the drug war, my VA doctor. My Veterans Affairs Medical Center doctor is now prohibited from recommending cannabis to me and instead the VA has explicitly relegated their sovereign power to the state to handle all aspects of a veteran¹s medical treatment with cannabis. Since the recommendation of cannabis has been shown by court cases in the 9th Circuit to be a free speech activity crucial to the doctor patient relationship it is now apparent that the VA can not effectively operate while this conflict between state and federal law exists.
That is why I am very proud to put my name on this effort to right a wrong and acknowledge that cannabis does in fact have accepted medical use in the United States.
Michael Krawitz is a plaintiff in the case ASA v DEA.
September 29th, 2012 at 9:28 am
I am curious how one gets to be a plaintiff in this case. I have the same bone disorder as Irv Rosenfeld, one of the Federal cannabis patients. I have been jailed countless times (50-100 times, literally), even prison once for a year, for my use of cannabis as medicine for the exact same painful condition that Irvin receives 300 cannabis medicine joints per month for. If that doesn’t violate my right to equal protection under the law, I don’t know what does.
September 29th, 2012 at 10:24 am
I am a Veteran on disability for chronic back pain and have been on Morphine from the V.A. i have no PAIN DOCTOR i go through PURE HELL everyday i do not want back on the pills and all there SIDE EFFECTS I want and NEED acess to to MEDICAL MARIJUANA I live in Ohio the Suicide Hot Line is a FUCKIN JOKE From what i have been and still go through has given me Mental Problems as well please HELP me anyway you can thank you and may God Bless
Rick Crawford
September 29th, 2012 at 10:41 am
I am a disabeled veteran that goes through PURE HELL everyday from PAIN i live in OHIO PLEASE HELP ME and may God Bless
Rick Crawford
September 29th, 2012 at 2:17 pm
I’m a Vietnam Era (USAF) veteran, disabled primarily by the air jet injectors in Basic Training which resulted in Hep C which ate up 3/4 of my liver over the 26 years before I was diagnosed in 2001. I’ve been battling it out with the VA for Service Connection since 2007, but they reject me time and time again. I also am disabled by excruciating back pain the entire length of my spine. I have chronic pain, HCV, chronic insomnia, type 2 diabetes, hypothyroidism, rheumatoid arthritis, cataracts, half my teeth are gone, and there are days I can’t even stand. I signed every document to enlist, even had to claim citizenship (letting go of my French birthright) in order to sign away my very life for the country I loved, during wartime, served the best I could and always gave 110%, and now they deny me any reparations. Not even acknowledgement that the air jet injectors might have been at fault when I provided them with an original copy of Bivouac magazine, a military publication, in which was an article addressing this very subject (transmission of blood born pathogens by air jet injector multi-use pneumatic injector guns, which were used on myself and many other men. You dutifully allowed them to press a bloody nozzel against your biceps and shoot molecules of other men’s blood into your arms, and your bloodstream. I’m still alive, but for how long? They owe me bigtime. Living in Florida with stubborfn political barricades against legalization is not acceptable in my case, because the miracle plant, the one God placed in my path just in time, kept me from taking my own life while I was in my second round of treatments to fight HCV, because the poison they had me take made me completely lose hope. Cannabis is real, highly valuable medicine, and I believe in it’s healing properties just as strongly as I believe in God, and will cannot allow anyone to stand in the way of my healing path. I’m a law abiding veteran, but this law against my healing I have no choice but to challenge, since it is not in alignment with God’s will in healing me.
God bless, and please, everyone challenge the laws that must be changed.
September 29th, 2012 at 2:21 pm
I left out chronic depression. I still battle it daily, but the plant miraculously cures it for a while, so I testify this now, that if you suffer from depression, the plant works wonders for many, many folks.
October 1st, 2012 at 9:05 am
Thanks for asking. The lawsuit has several named plaintiffs who originally submitted a petition in 2002 to reschedule cannabis. The lawsuit is titled ASA v DEA and so all members of ASA are plaintiffs! But if the suit is successful and cannabis is rescheduled, anyone with a medical need for cannabis will benefit, not only the named plaintiffs.
- Jonathan Bair, ASA Social Media Director
October 1st, 2012 at 4:03 pm
Where is the power of the people we voted for Proposition 215 it passed but it seems that our vote which is Judicial (highest law of the land) has been brought down to Legistative Branch. What that say’s to me, instead of Government working for the people. Government has the people under their control with Health and safety code 11362.5. I voted for Proposition 215.
October 5th, 2012 at 12:38 am
why are we not hearing more about this i follow most major mmnews an i stumbled upon this , this could possobaly end the war on mm !!!!! you got to get the word out , i am trying to tell everyone ,!!!
October 6th, 2012 at 2:32 pm
my comment short and sweet, I have bone cancer (mulitple myeloma and hepitis c why can’t I get the medicnal marijunna in Indiana? because its not a legal state. why should I have to take pills that I hate and will get hooked on. and in time do chemo or radation, so unfair, I want on this law suit… sincerly bonita a tax payer
October 17th, 2012 at 6:04 pm
Been smoking over 40 years and would love to let researchers study and test me for all the bad things weed does to me.
I am living proof that weed is harmless!
Mike