October - November 1997

"THIS JUST IN"

November 24, 1997

NATO expansion could pull U.S. into conflict between Hungary and Serbia
Treaty requires military support, but conflict has little to do with transatlantic security

"Continuing mistreatment of Hungarian citizens in Serbia’s province of Vojvodina" could draw NATO into an armed conflict between Hungary and Serbia, foreign policy experts warned today. The analysis by Ted Galen Carpenter and Pavel Kislitsyn is the second in a series of Cato Institute studies on potential NATO flashpoints. The authors argue that "the prospect of U.S. forces’ slipping into a Bosnia-style morass on the Hungarian-Serbian border is one reason among many that the U.S. Senate should refuse to ratify the proposal to expand NATO."

Vojvodina is a region of Serbia directly adjacent to Hungary, and the 350,000 Hungarians who live there constitute the third largest concentration of Hungarians outside Hungary’s borders. A period of relative calm ended in 1990, when "Belgrade formally rescinded the autonomous status of Vojvodina . . . [signaling] a surge in virulent Serb nationalism." Troubles became even worse "when the Serbian government encouraged approximately 200,000 Serb refugees from Bosnia to settle in the region," dramatically altering the ethnic balance there. Evictions of non-Serbs from their homes and an effort to shut down Hungarian-language schools have brought tensions to a high pitch, according to Carpenter and Kislitsyn.

The authors note that earlier this year President Clinton acknowledged that "enlargement [of NATO] requires that we extend to new members our Alliance’s most solemn security pledge" and talked of NATO’s "new crisis management and peacekeeping missions." And they point out that "Hungarian foreign minister Laszlo Kovacs was one of the first East European politicians to emphasize that ‘the security risk we now face stems from the instability of the region rather than a traditional military threat.’"

"In other words, supporters of NATO expansion who believe that the United States will be called on to help defend the new NATO members only if Russia turns aggressive are deluding themselves," Carpenter and Kislitsyn observe. "Furnishing security guarantees to the new members could embroil the United States in low-level conflicts that have little importance to American interests or even to the premise of transatlantic security."

Ted Galen Carpenter is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, and Pavel Kislitsyn was a research assistant at Cato during 1997.

Foreign Policy Briefing no. 45 (http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb-045es.html)

November 12, 1997

FDA reform bill approved by Congress doesn’t go far enough
Third-party certification of medical devices should replace FDA monopoly

"The solution to the problems caused by the FDA’s monopoly over market access and dissemination of information is to turn over the certification of medical devices to certification agencies competing in a free market," writes Noel D. Campbell in a new Cato study. Campbell maintains that the reforms of the Food and Drug Administration passed by Congress earlier this month "leave the agency’s monopoly intact and continue the FDA’s power to restrict the flow of information from manufacturer to consumer." Although the new law directs the FDA to accredit individuals and companies to carry out third-party safety and efficacy review of some devices for the first time, the authority involves only the simplest and least innovative medical devices. In any case, the FDA still makes the final decision about whether devices can be marketed.

In "Replace FDA Regulation of Medical Devices with Third-Party Certification," Campbell notes that when the FDA allows unsafe and harmful products on the market, people sometimes die. However, "what is not so clearly seen is that people also die when the FDA fails to act or acts too slowly in allowing a life-saving device on the market," Campbell says.

Delays in FDA approval of medical devices have caused thousands of deaths in recent years. Campbell cites examples of such devices, including a CPR device called the AmbuCardio Pump (7,000 deaths annually) and Physio-Control’s cardiac defibrillators (1,000 deaths).

Campbell reviews experience with third-party certification for potentially dangerous devices, including all electrical equipment, which has proven very successful. He notes that Underwriters Laboratories, Inc. has been certifying product safety for more than 100 years—longer than the FDA has been in existence. Both organizations are committed to public safety and are staffed by expert scientists and technicians, but, unlike the FDA, UL cannot deny consumers choice and has no incentive to minimize some types of errors in favor of other types. Campbell argues that "certifying organizations, anxious to maintain their reputation as guardians of safety and efficacy, will protect consumers."

Campbell is an assistant professor of economics at Gordon College in Barnesville, Georgia.

Policy Analysis no. 288 (http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-288es.html)

November 5, 1997

New study recommends privatization of fisheries to conserve fish populations
Expert says regulation of fleets will only deplete stocks and make fishing harder

Over the past few decades, a number of countries have shifted the management of ocean fisheries near their coastlines from open access to intensive regulation. But those government attempts to restrict harvesting in order to conserve fish stocks have largely failed. In an article in the newest issue of Regulation, Birgir Runolfsson argues that government regulation leaves fundamental incentives that lead to overfishing untouched, and that what is needed is a system of property rights in fishing.

"Overfishing and other inefficient fishing practices have nothing to do with the nature of the resource, the characteristics of fishermen, or the localities in which fish are found," Runolfsson observes. "Fisheries are troubled by overfishing because they are not privately owned. Fishermen only own what they catch. The government, which is to say, everyone and therefore no one, owns the stock of fish from which the catch is taken."

In "Fencing the Oceans: A Rights-Based Approach to Privatizing Fisheries," Runolfsson notes that "rights-based fishing is increasingly recognized as a practical alternative to the inefficiencies of direct controls and regulation. The expansion of property rights as a method of economic organization should extend to individual transferable quotas in fisheries. As do property rights on land, the use of individual transferable quotas for fish will yield substantial economic benefits."

Runolfsson’s article offers an overview of real-world experience with property-rights management of fisheries, especially in Iceland and New Zealand where property-rights management is used extensively. He notes that private ownership of coastal fisheries is quite similar to private property ownership on land. A system of exclusive user rights or territorial user rights in fisheries allows private owners to take exclusive possession of the fish in their areas. To solve the problem of migrating species, Runolfsson describes how individual, tradable quotas of fish owned by firms can preserve stocks while responding to market conditions.

Birgir Runolfsson is an associate professor of economics and director of the Center for Rights-Based Fishing at the University of Iceland. Regulation is the quarterly magazine of the Cato Institute.

Regulation 1997, no. 3 (http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/reg20n3f.html)

November 5, 1997

Cato study: ISTEA is congressional pork gone hog-wild
Transportation bill sticks with process that caused problems to begin with

A bill renewing the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) "is the biggest pork barrel in the 105th Congress," according to the author of a new study published by the Cato Institute. Author Randal O’Toole says that except for a few provisions allowing more toll roads and experiments with congestion pricing where toll roads carry heavy rush-hour traffic, the ISTEA bill "sticks with the same old command-and-control, central planning process that has caused most transportation problems in the first place."

O’Toole notes that with the decline in discretionary spending in other parts of the federal budget, members of Congress have swarmed to the committee that spends money from the highway trust fund. "The demand for seats at the table when the [spending] decisions are made has been so great that the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, with 73 members, has become by far the largest committee in Congress. At 50 members, the House Subcommittee on Surface Transportation may be one of the largest subcommittees in congressional history."

ISTEA and bills to reauthorize it "especially promote mass transit such as light rail and subways," O’Toole notes. "But those systems carry only a fraction of commuters and cost from 10 to 100 times more per mile to build than do roads."

"ISTEA: A Poisonous Brew for American Cities," contains a detailed critique of the legislation, together with useful background information on such issues as the impact of mass transit on air pollution. The study notes, for example, that a Transportation Department/EPA study using data from San Diego and Los Angeles found that "huge investments in both rail and bus transit systems are likely to reduce CO pollution by less than 1 percent."

Rather than wrestle over how to slice up the pork among their states and districts, O’Toole says that lawmakers should simply "get out of the transportation business" and "allow cities to focus on transportation, rather than the game of getting dollars from the U.S. Treasury."

Randal O’Toole is executive director of the Thoreau Institute and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

Policy Analysis no. 287 (http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-287es.html)

October 30, 1997

Fast-track trade authority essential to worldwide drive to lower trade barriers
Cato analysis says "clean" trade bill would prevent president from abusing process

"If Congress fails to pass a clean fast-track bill, agreements to liberalize trade will be virtually impossible for the president to negotiate," according to a new study released today by the Cato Institute.

In "The Fast Track to Freer Trade," Daniel T. Griswold notes that much of the nation’s current prosperity is the result of trade agreements adopted over the past two decades using fast-track authority. Since 1974, "every U.S. president, from Gerald Ford to Bill Clinton, has been granted authority to negotiate trade treaties for an up-or-down, no-amendments vote in Congress. The fast-track approach has yielded impressive fruit," Griswold notes, citing the Tokyo Round of the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade in 1979, the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement in 1988, NAFTA in 1993 and the Uruguay Round of GATT in 1994.

"Each of those agreements lowered tariff and nontariff barriers, opened new markets for U.S. exporters and raised the living standards of U.S. consumers. The agreements have locked the gains of free trade into place," Griswold says, adding, "It is almost certain that none of those trade-expanding agreements would have been possible without the fast-track process."

"Today the United States is both the world’s largest exporter and its largest importer," and international trade now accounts for nearly 30 percent of our gross domestic product, Griswold points out. "Export jobs, on average, pay about 14 percent more than jobs in nonexport industries."

Griswold argues strongly for a "clean" fast-track bill, "without language that could allow the president to include trade-restricting agreements on environmental and labor issues." Such a bill "would not preclude the United States from pursuing labor and environmental agreements through other channels. But it would prevent the president from abusing the fast-track process. The only real effect of tying trade to such standards will be to arouse the resentment of less developed countries," something that was much in evidence in recent international trade meetings in Paraguay and Singapore. Dan Griswold is director of trade and immigration studies at the Cato Institute.

Cato Briefing Paper no. 34 (http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-034es.html)

October 29, 1997

Costs of NATO expansion grossly underestimated, Cato budget expert says
Administration’s low-ball estimate is less than half the true cost

"The Clinton administration’s estimate of the costs of NATO expansion is fatally flawed," and the U.S. share will be at least $7 billion, rather than the $1.5 billion to $2 billion touted by the White House, according to a Policy Analysis published today by the Cato Institute. The study’s author, Ivan Eland, is director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute. He is one of Washington’s most knowledgeable experts on defense budgets, having spent the past 15 years as an analyst at the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office.

Eland, who testified on the costs of NATO expansion before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday, says that White House estimates are absurdly low for several reasons. First, they’re based on unrealistic assumptions. He estimates that the true cost of NATO expansion would be at least double the administration’s highest estimate if one accepts their assumptions, and much higher if the assumptions prove false. Moreover, "the administration’s estimate is not a cost estimate at all, but an ‘affordability’ estimate."

"Instead of determining a detailed list of requirements for expansion and adding up their costs, Department of Defense analysts simply estimated how much new and current NATO members could afford to spend in each category," Eland says. "In many cases, that method bore no relation to what would be needed for NATO expansion; furthermore, the analysts often could not even specify how they arrived at their estimates. Although that method created the appearance of precision, the reality was more like ‘garbage in, garbage out.’"

As an example, Eland noted that "DoD analysts simply chose a level of spending for logistics improvements"—approximately $1 billion—that would purchase items such as NATO-compatible fuel nozzles, fuel standards, radios, and computer systems. "Yet when asked how many radios or how many fuel nozzles they assumed would be purchased, DoD analysts replied that they could not specify the number because the estimate was a ‘level of effort.’ They made no effort to find out how many of those and other items new member nations would need or how many their projected level of effort would purchase." In fact, the Defense Department analysts "could not even specify how they arrived at their estimate."

Eland cites a number of faulty assumptions used by the administration, including: that the current benign threat environment will continue for at least a decade; and that no NATO forces will need to be permanently stationed in new member states at any time in the future.

Even if one accepts those and other equally dubious assumptions on which the White House estimate is based, Eland says the true cost of NATO expansion would be about $70 billion. And the U.S. portion of $7 billion could grow even higher "if, as is likely, the new member states were unwilling or unable to pay a more realistic estimate of the expenses that would accrue to them ($34 billion). In that case, the European allies would probably expect the United States to pay more of the new members’ bill because expansion was a U.S. initiative and because European defense spending is under severe constraints induced by the fiscal austerity needed to join the European Monetary Union."

And if the administration’s assumptions indeed prove false, the cost could go as high as $167 billion in a worst-case scenario involving Russia. And Eland notes that it’s not hard to imagine a lesser, though significant conflict involving one of the new member countries. "Three potential flashpoints exist that could force a new NATO to take action in Europe: Hungary’s tension with the belligerent Serbia over the Hungarian minority there, Poland’s border with the erratic regime of Belarus, and Poland’s border with the isolated Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. The second and third flashpoints could involve a confrontation between NATO and Russia," Eland said.

"Congress has a right to a reasonably accurate and methodologically rigorous analysis of how much expanding the alliance is likely to cost," Eland concluded. "The administration’s cost estimate is woefully inadequate in that regard."

Policy Analysis no. 286 (http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-286es.html)

October 23, 1997

Increased federal involvement in child care a "solution in search of a problem"
New Cato analysis tells why the government should stay out of child care

Today’s White House Conference on Child Care, with its enthusiastic advocacy of federal government involvement in child care, is a "solution in search of a problem," according to a Cato Institute study released today. In fact, according to the study, there is no crisis in child care in the United States, and most parents who use child care are satisfied with its quality.

"Current attempts to create an atmosphere of crisis about America’s child care capabilities are largely the product of fact-free analysis," says Cato policy analyst Darcy Olsen, the author of the study.

While advocacy groups claim that there is a shortage of child care facilities, that they’re unaffordable and that unregulated day care is harmful to children, the facts are very different. "Ninety-six percent of parents are satisfied with their child care arrangements; child care fees have not changed in real terms since the late 1970s; and the number of child care providers has kept pace with the swelling demand for child care," Olsen reports. "Likewise, the National Day Care Home Study conducted for the Department of Health and Human Services found no indication that unregulated family day care was either harmful or dangerous to children. In fact, the child care market is healthy and heterogeneous, reflecting the diversity of its buyers."

In "The Advancing Nanny State: Why the Government Should Stay Out of Child Care," Olsen is critical of those, like Mrs. Clinton, who argue for national standards for child care. "The debate about the need for national standards turns on the definition of ‘quality,’ raising the obvious question of who should define quality," Olsen notes. President Clinton and other advocates "define quality, not by results, but by inputs such as accreditation, wages for child care workers, and levels of funding. What ‘quality’ entails begins to look less like a question of children’s needs and more like a political issue pushed by special-interest groups, such as regulated child care providers, rather than concerned parents."

Policy Analysis no. 285 (http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-285es.html)

October 22, 1997

10th anniversary of Florida gun law finds dozens of states following suit
Only disagreement now is how much those laws reduce crime, analyst says

Ten years to the month after Florida’s ground-breaking enactment of a concealed-carry gun law, fully half the states in the union have adopted such statutes, and more are actively considering such a change. Those developments have dramatically changed the landscape of public policy debate in this area, according to a new Cato Institute Policy Analysis.

The study’s author, attorney Jeffrey R. Snyder, notes that, "although advocates of gun control predicted that blood would be running through the streets, no such thing happened. Today "the debate over concealed-carry laws centers on the extent to which such laws can actually reduce the crime rate." Crime rate drops of 7 percent and more have been reported following enactment of those laws.

Concealed-carry laws put into place over the past decade are often referred to as "shall-issue" laws, because they require the local issuing authority—usually a sheriff or police chief—to issue a permit as soon as a citizen can satisfy specific and objective licensing criteria. Typically, those include age and residency requirements, fingerprints and criminal and mental health background checks.

Prior to 1987, states commonly gave the sheriff or other issuing authority discretion to grant concealed-carry permits to persons who had "good moral character" and satisfied some needs-based requirement such as having "good cause"or demonstrating a "need." Those vague standards were applied very differently from one community to the next.

In Denver, the police department granted only 45 permits in a city of a half million people, and one official was quoted as saying, "Just because you fear for your life is not a compelling reason to have a permit." Snyder notes, "Among those denied a permit was Denver talk-show host Alan Berg, who had received death threats from, and was later killed by, white supremacists."

In New York, Snyder says that permits to carry firearms have been issued on the basis of wealth, celebrity status, political influence and favoritism. Permit holders have included such luminaries as Eleanor Roosevelt, Nelson Rockefeller, New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Bill

Cosby, Joan Rivers and Howard Stern. But taxi drivers, who face a high risk of robbery, "are denied gun permits because they carry less than $2,000 in cash."

Snyder says that the growing popularity of shall-issue laws is due in part to a recognition that "discretionary licensing systems invite and produce discrimination on grounds of class, race, religion, country of origin, fame, wealth, or political influence in a manner that has no rational correlation with risk of criminal victimization or with trustworthiness or competence with a firearm. Such systems invite, and in fact produce, wholly inconsistent, arbitrary, and irrational results."

As a result of the successful implementation of shall-issue concealed-carry laws over the past decade, Snyder says that critics have been reduced to arguing that the concealed-carry laws have "no measurable or provable effects on crime." That marks a major turning point in the debate over the appropriateness of private firearms possession and places the burden of proof on gun control advocates.

In his conclusion to "Fighting Back: Crime, Self-Defense, and the Right to Carry a Handgun," Snyder says, "We now have at least 10 years of actual evidence from 25 different states with diverse rural and metropolitan populations, including the cities of Miami, Houston, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Richmond, Atlanta, New Orleans, Seattle, and Portland, regarding perhaps as many as 1 million permit holders carrying their weapons for hundreds of millions of man-hours." The results, he says, show clearly that "shall-issue licensing systems work. They accomplish the twin goals of providing a mechanism by which law-abiding citizens can carry the means with which to defend themselves from a violent criminal assault that imminently threatens life or grievous bodily harm and provide the public reasonable assurance that those who receive permits are persons who will act responsibly."

Snyder argues that concealed-carry laws reaffirm the bedrock right of American citizens to defend themselves against criminal attack. Gun control advocates, he says, must be reminded that "in a free society, the burden of proof is borne by those who would restrict the liberty of others."

Jeffrey Snyder, who practices law in New York, is currently writing a book entitled Ethical Blindness and Moral Vanity: What the Gun Control Debate Tells Us about the American Ethos.

Policy Analysis no. 284 (http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-284es.html)

October 16, 1997

Internet domain names need freedom from government regulation
U.S. government should move administration of domain names to the private sector

A government-caused scarcity of top-level domain names (TLDs) threatens the orderly growth of the Internet, according to the author of a new Cato Institute briefing paper. TLDs such as .com, .org and .edu determine an e-mail or Web site address on the Internet, and since the number of such addresses is increasing geometrically, a critical shortage is developing.

"The current domain name crisis is the product of a legal and administrative vacuum for which the U.S. government is directly responsible," writes Milton L. Mueller, an associate professor at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies. "That vacuum perpetuates confusion and invites the Internet equivalent of land grabs and squatting."

Mueller argues that the problem should be solved through privatization, by establishing procedures that will permit and encourage competition among Internet administrators. He offers ground rules to guide the privatization process rather than a specific plan for administration of TLDs.

In "Internet Domain Names: Privatization, Competition, and Freedom of Expression," Mueller says that since domain names express and communicate vital information about their owners, permitting a variety of top-level domain names and resisting pressures for compulsory national domain names will further the free expression that fuels the Internet.

Mueller notes that at the moment, "no existing entity has a direct, unambiguous legal right to establish rules and procedures to determine what the TLDs will be or how many there will be." Once these rights are clarified, procedures should be set up that would allow new TLDs to be added in response to "consumer demand, entrepreneurial effort and market evolution." He rejects proposals to retire generic TLDs from circulation and make two-character country codes compulsory, arguing that "such a course of action would be a disastrous mistake."

"Resolution of domain names issues will determine whether the people who control the Internet of the future will be in the state sector or the private sector, whether national governments can control Internet content, and whether the Internet will be controlled by state monopolies or market forces," explains Mueller. Congressional hearings on domain names began last month.

Cato Briefing Paper no. 33 (http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-033es.html)

October 14, 1997

Supercomputer tariffs are superhigh, Cato analyst says
Cray-NEC case shows how U.S. stacks deck against foreign competitors

"In the market for a supercomputer that can simulate weather patterns? No problem. There’s a Japanese model available on a five-year lease for $35 million. But don’t forget to add the anti-dumping tax of 454 percent," writes international economist Christopher M. Dumler in a new briefing paper from the Cato Institute.

Dumler notes that the Cray-NEC supercomputer case, in which the U.S. government decided to impose tariffs of between 173 percent and 454 percent on all supercomputers ordered from Japan, "demonstrates everything wrong with U.S. anti-dumping law. Throughout the case, importers confronted a hostile agency—the International Trade Administration—operating under rules that virtually guarantee a hostile ruling, with the end result that overseas competitors have been forced out of the U.S. supercomputer market in the name of defending competition."

The ITA is assigned responsibility for helping U.S. businesses compete in the global marketplace, even as it is supposed to render fair and impartial judgments on "dumping" complaints. Dumler points out that in the last 17 years the ITA has found foreign firms guilty of dumping in 96 percent of cases filed, the natural result of making the agency both judge and advocate for one side.

In "Anti-Dumping Laws Trash Supercomputer Competition," Dumler says, "the real purpose of the anti-dumping laws is to block imports in selected industries." Few people realize that complaints under the law are not brought against individual companies like NEC; they are brought against all firms in a foreign country. The supercomputer duty is now being assessed against NEC and "all other manufacturers" of vector supercomputers in Japan, at an arbitrary rate of more than 313 percent for the next five years. "That preemptive duty effectively seals off the American market from any other Japanese company that might develop a supercomputer, even though the potential competitor had nothing to do with the initial case," Dumler explains.

Because NEC passed up an ITA investigation in favor of an ultimately unsuccessful court challenge, the agency made its decision based on data supplied by Cray, NEC’s American competitor. The ITA concluded that NEC had priced its bid more than 80 percent below market cost. According to Dumler, such "use of ‘best information available’ is the biggest source of bias in ITA dumping decisions."

Cato Briefing Paper no. 32 (http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-032es.html)

October 3, 1997

Cato blazes new trail for think tanks with live Webcast
Fed chief Alan Greenspan keynotes 15th Annual Monetary Conference

In a first-of-its-kind venture for a major Washington think tank, the Cato Institute will "Webcast" its 15th Annual Monetary Conference on October 14. People with Internet access will be able to watch the day-long conference on their own office or home personal computers after downloading video "streaming" software called VDOLive. Video production and Internet Webcasting of the event are being handled by TV on the WEB Live (www.tvontheweblive.com), a division of Gardy McGrath International, a television and video production company based in Reston, Virginia.

The keynote speaker at the popular annual event will be Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. This year’s conference is on "Money and Capital Flows in a Global Economy," and expert panels will consider "How to Avoid International Financial Crises," "Lessons from the Mexican Peso Crisis," "Policy Options in a World of Mobile Capital" and "The Future of Money in a Global Economy." The Cato monetary gathering has become an important annual event for members of the international financial community, with many of the world’s leading experts coming together to discuss the policy implications of such trends as increasingly mobile money and capital flows.

The conference will be held at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., and will be televised via satellite to groups gathered at conference centers in London, New York, Chicago and Dallas. To make the program available to a much wider audience, it was decided that this year’s conference would be offered via the Internet as well.

"Over the past few years, the Internet has become an increasingly viable means of communicating with very large audiences," Cato president Ed Crane observed. "Now, technology enabling live transmission of video and audio from events like this has matured to the point where it makes a lot of sense to embrace it. It’s exciting to be among the first to travel this new technological road."

The annual monetary conference is among the few programs held each year at the Cato Institute for which there is a charge. The registration fee for attendees in Washington is $375 (early registration was $300); for satellite locations in London, New York, Chicago and Dallas, registration is $100; and there is no charge for viewing the Webcast. The registration fee for Washington and the satellite viewing cities includes refreshments, lunch and a reception afterward.

Registrations for the event may be made via the Cato Web site (click here), by fax (202-842-3490), by regular mail, by e-mail (money@cato.org) or by phone (202-218-4633).

October 1, 1997

Cato legal scholar: No federal authority to ban medical use of marijuana
Attempt to override state medical marijuana referenda unconstitutional, Pilon says

Both the medical marijuana movement and the federalism movement "reflect the growing frustration of Americans with the accumulation of power in Washington," Cato scholar Roger Pilon told the Subcommittee on Crime of the House Judiciary Committee today.

Pilon, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies, was invited to testify on the federalism implications of the administration’s efforts to override the voters of California and Arizona. Last November those voters decided to allow doctors to prescribe marijuana for their patients suffering from specified diseases. Pilon told the subcommittee that under our system of dual sovereignty, "there simply is no power under the Commerce Clause, or under any other clause of the Constitution, that allows the federal government to regulate" such intrastate matters.

Just two years ago, Pilon said, the Supreme Court made it clear that the power of Congress to regulate commerce among the states "is not a power to regulate anything and everything, which would make a mockery of the doctrine of enumerated powers." The administration’s rationale for overriding state policies on medical marijuana, he added, "will not even pass the straight-face test."

Pilon also attacked the war on drugs generally, calling it a "a monumental failure—indeed, a monumental disaster, wreaking havoc on lives, communities, and institutions across this nation."

"Did we learn nothing from Prohibition?" Pilon asked. "If we cannot keep drugs out of our prisons, and we cannot, what makes us believe we can keep them out of the larger society?"

"The abuse of drugs now declared illegal, like the abuse of legal drugs, should be treated as a medical matter, not as a crime," Pilon concluded. The medical marijuana referenda movement is evidence "that a growing number of Americans are coming to that view too."

Testimony of Roger Pilon: (http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-rp100197.html)