American University law professor Herman Schwartz, writing in the Nation, opines that conservatives may rue the day the Supreme Court ruled that the feds can arrest medical marijuana users and suppliers in states that have legalized medical marijuana use:

The Supreme Court decision may actually encourage abuses. Those who need marijuana to ease their suffering will still manage to get it from illegal sources, and federal officials have indicated they are not likely to prosecute individual users. But California will no longer be able to justify continuing its current efforts to tighten dispensary regulation and to restrict access to the truly needy, for how can a state justify regulating and implicitly approving what the Supreme Court has found illegal? The decision will discourage more states from permitting medical use of the drug, no matter how carefully controlled.

This small victory for federal authority will do little to stem the right-wing campaign to shrink federal power and undermine the welfare and regulatory reforms initiated by the New Deal. Instead, the vital state experimentation on a common problem, which the federal system is supposed to encourage, will be choked off. More people will be forced into the illegal market, and victims of cancer, AIDS and other serious illnesses will be made even more miserable.