It’s not easy being green.

A defeat for medicinal weed is a victory for federal authority under the Interstate Commerce Clause in today’s 6-3 Supreme Court ruling upholding federal laws against marijuana. Wrote John Paul Stevens in the majority opinion, “[t]he Controlled Substances Act is a valid exercise of federal power, even as applied to the troubling facts of this case.” (The losing side consisted of Justices O’Connor, Rehnquist, and Thomas.) This is a tough one. I think prosecutions of sick people seeking medicinal marijuana to alleviate their daily miseries are grotesquely ill-conceived, but, then again, I’m not for rolling back federal power to pre-Civil War levels, either. And, for what it’s worth, “some lawyers who have followed the controversy closely predicted that the ruling, while disappointing, would not bring sweeping changes, since most marijuana prosecutions are undertaken by state and local officials rather than federal authorities.“