The Supreme Court did what conservative court-watchers should welcome. It looked the California situation in the face and said: If Congress doesn't like the law, let Congress change it, but don't look to the Supreme Court to improvise on the drug laws.

There are now four collateral movements in the matter of the use of medical marijuana where individual states have authorized it:

1) Federal prosecutors are free, after this clarification from the Supreme Court, to proceed to arrest users, on the grounds that the law is the law.

2) The plaintiffs in the current case were two ailing women. Having lost with the Supreme Court, they have said that they intend to continue to use marijuana. One of them said that, actually, she has no alternative, because if she doesn't take the drug, she will simply die.

3) Observers sympathetic to the state laws allowing marijuana for medical purposes take comfort in realism. There aren't enough federal prosecutors in town to move against all the users. One estimate is that only one percent of such transgressions is actually meeting up with intervention by the federal constabulary.

4) In his opinion, Justice Stevens hinted that there were two ways to address the deadlock. The first and most obvious, of course, is for Congress to revise the current statute to make the exception for medical marijuana. But there is another approach, namely for the Executive to reclassify marijuana for medical purposes.

How will these sentiments and inclinations fare?

The easiest way is to treat laws banning medical marijuana about as anti-sodomy laws were treated for generations: Don't repeal them, but don't act on them. There is a theoretical objection to this escapist remedy ? we like to think that laws are there to be obeyed. But to proceed under its empirical protection is an easygoing solution to hard, conflicting pressures.

The relief ? hinted at by Justice Stevens ? that might be got by the Executive's adjusting the proscribed list to permit medical marijuana is opposed by the hardliners in the administration. Continued...