Conant

This is an appeal from a permanent injunction entered to protect First Amendment rights. The order enjoins the federal government from either revoking a physician’s license to prescribe controlled substances or conducting an investigation of a physician that might lead to such revocation, where the basis for the government’s action is solely the physician’s professional “recommendation” of the use of medical marijuana. The district court’s order and accompanying opinion are at Conant v. McCaffrey, 2000 WL 1281174 (N.D.Cal. Sept.7, 2000). The history of the litigation demonstrates that the injunction is not intended to limit the government’s ability to investigate doctors who aid and abet the actual distribution and possession of marijuana. 21 U.S.C. § 841 (a). The government has not provided any empirical evidence to demonstrate that this injunction interferes with or threatens to interfere with any legitimate law enforcement activities. Nor is there any evidence that the similarly phrased preliminary injunction that preceded this injunction, Conant v. McCaffrey, 172 F.R.D. 681 (N.D.Cal.1997), which the government did not appeal, interfered with law enforcement. The district…

concurring:

I am pleased to join Chief Judge Schroeder’s opinion. I write only to explain that for me the fulcrum of this dispute is not the First Amendment right of the doctors. That right certainly exists and its impairment justifies the district court’s injunction for the reasons well explained by Chief Judge Schroeder. But the doctors’ interest in giving advice about the medical use of marijuana is somewhat remote and impersonal; they will derive no direct benefit from giving this advice, other than the satisfaction of doing their jobs well. At the same time, the burden of the federal policy the district court enjoined falls directly and personally on the doctors: By speaking candidly to their patients about the potential benefits of medical marijuana, they risk losing their license to write prescriptions, which would prevent them from functioning as doctors. In other *640 words, they may destroy their careers and lose their livelihoods.

This disparity between benefits and burdens matters because it makes doctors peculiarly vulnerable to intimidation; with little to gain and much to lose, only the most foolish or committed of doctors will defy the federal government’s…