Waiting on Ruan

This really needs to be good news for the plight of pain patients and their doctors who are in a desperate situation due to the ongoing unjust war on pain management by the DEA/DOJ.

The basic flaw in all these arguments is that they ignore the threshold issue of jurisdiction. Profound scientific discoveries in 1985-87 rendered obsolete and factually false, the Government's position on its jurisdiction of controlled substances under the Harrison Act. That Act presumed all opioids to enter the US from foreign nations and therefore be within federal jurisdiction under the Commerce Clause. The Harrison Act was absorbed into the Controlled Substances Act, drawing its claim of constitutional jurisdiction from the same exact theory: that Congress could broadly invade state powers to regulate public safety and morality by asserting an interstate commerce power, safe in the belief that not one picogram of opioids ever formed naturally within the US.

The profound discoveries at NIDA in 1985-87 revealed that the opiate Morphine is naturally secreted in the human adrenal gland by metabolism of food, particularly the amino acid tyrosine found in beans, sharp cheeses, meats, soy sauce, and dark beer. More importantly, it is now known that morphine and dopamine act as hormones, regulating the human sleep cycle. Endorphins, which are peptides of morphine and amino acids, occupy sites on nerve receptors that process and prioritize pain. Thus the hundreds of milligrams of morphine made daily by the adrenal glands of every human alive, totally vacate DEA's claim of jurisdiction over all opioids. Most of the opioids in daily use, are used by 100% of the population, and form inside our bodies by natural means. Since the act of digesting a meal in no way requires interstate commerce, the commerce clause is not an absolute source of authority over opioid presence in the body nor its effects, Worse yet, Congress has stepped into a giant bear trap of its own creation, by invading state authority over keeping the domestic tranquility and deciding matters of public morality. It has second guessed what state drug policy should be. And it based all of that on deeply flawed science now thoroughly debunked, as it's basis of jurisdiction, by assuming all opioids to be imported. The growing body of science disproving federal jurisdiction over the morality of opioid use, demands that the early cases considering the constitutionality of the Harrison Act be reviewed de novo in line with the factual findings.

I strongly expect that something similar to another overreach case will emerge. In Roe v Wade, an overly broad Texas statute claimed jurisdiction of "potential children" (defined HOW?), granting police the power to nose into any medical procedure involving a female between puberty and menopause, in case it somehow affected the viability of some future pregnancy. The obvious solution was to invoke the individual right to self-defense found in the Second Amendment and the right to be secure from unreasonable search set forth in the Fourth and tell Texas that it's statute was overbroad. It is noteworthy that today's SCOTUS shows no sign of overturning the Roe ruling as it relates to self-defense and the right to own one's person, property, papers and effects...what's being scrapped is an attempt to legislate when children acquire the right to survive, a matter entirely outside the powers of Congress and within the power of states.

I suspect that a challenge to the constitutionality of the Harrison Act would end in bifurcation. We would get from SCOTUS a ruling upholding a federal power to restrict drug smuggling and regulate drugs sold in interstate commerce...and we would lose federal jurisdiction of addicts and addiction.