Here’s an infuriating article that just blew all the circuitry in my irony detector.

A Justice Department lawyer compared the enforcement of idiotic federal marijuana laws to ending Jim Crow in the South.

California and other states that want to make marijuana available to sick or dying patients are flouting federal drug laws in much the same way that Southern states defied national civil rights laws, a senior Bush administration lawyer said.

And here’s a wonder of understatement by his debating opponent:

When government agents shut down marijuana growers who serve sick people, it is “not acting with the same degree of moral propriety as it did to end civil rights abuses,” said Taylor Carey, a California special assistant attorney general who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief backing medical marijuana.

That’s putting it mildly. In fact, in this case, even ignoring the rights of patients to get the potentially most efficacious medicine, the federal government is enforcing civil rights abuses with this insanity. Recall that the point at issue was one of free speech and doctor-patient privilege–the right of a doctor to recommend a course of treatment for a sick client, which the federal law forbids.

It would almost be enough to make me vote Democrat, except for the war, and, of course, the fact that this was a policy initiated by the Clinton Administration…