Cato Institute
1000 Massachusetts Ave, NW
Washington DC 20001-5403
 Phone (202) 842-0200
Fax (202) 842-3490
Contact Us

Cato Daily Dispatch for October 29, 2004

Subscribe to the Daily Dispatch via email
Subscribe to the Daily Dispatch via PDA (AvantGo)

(Links to outside sources were active as of the date of this dispatch; however, not all news sources maintain links to current stories indefinitely. Some links also may require registration.)

EU Leaders Sign Constitution
Iran's Nuclear Plan Awaits Election Winner
States Will Decide on Marijuana Measures

EU Leaders Sign Constitution

"European leaders on Friday signed the EU's first constitution, a diplomatic triumph they hope will give the union a sharper international profile and speed up decision-making in a club now embracing 25 nations," the Associated Press reports.

"The treaty was the result of 28 months of sometimes acrimonious debate between the 25 EU governments and now faces ratification in national parliaments. At least nine EU nations also plan to put it to a referendum, increasing chances that it may not take effect in 2007 as scheduled."

In "US-EU: The Constitutional Divide," Marian Tupy, assistant director of Cato's Project on Global Economic Liberty, and Patrick Basham, senior fellow in Cato's Center for Representative Government, write: "The EU constitution makes European government more, not less, remote from the citizenry. The EU's operations are expanded, not streamlined, and its bureaucracy is made more complex, not simpler. There are no cuts to the EU's 97,000 pages of accumulated laws and regulations. The EU's powers are supposedly limited in this document but there is an escape clause in case the Brussels-based bureaucracy ever feels boxed in by popular sentiment. The decisions in Brussels are final and EU laws supersede laws made by national parliaments."

Iran's Nuclear Plan Awaits Election Winner

The Washington Post reports: "For all the focus on foreign policy in this campaign, neither presidential candidate has spent much time explaining what may loom as the largest new challenge after Tuesday: what to do about Iran.

"The United States faces a major test with Tehran over its nuclear program just three weeks after the U.S. election. Yet neither candidate has addressed the growing prospects that diplomacy may not work, that the world may be too divided to agree on punitive sanctions, and that military options, after Iraq, could spark major new domestic and international controversy."

In "Iran: Isolation or Engagement?" Charles Peña, Cato's director of defense policy studies, writes: "Ultimately, the United States is left with having to choose from a menu of less than savory options in response to Iran's nuclear weapons program. Efforts to convince the Iranians to give up their quest for nuclear weapons should not be abandoned, but success in that long-shot strategy cannot be the only acceptable outcome. Other options must be explored, such as how to limit the size and scope of Iran's nuclear weapons program and arsenal so that it is not a direct threat to the United States, and ensuring that weapons, materials, and technology are not transferred to terrorists."

States Will Decide on Marijuana Measures

"Alaska will become the first state to make marijuana legal if voters approve a measure on Tuesday's ballot that has drawn criticism from the Bush administration," reports USA TODAY.

"Montana voters will consider a proposal to join nine other states in legalizing marijuana for medicinal use. And in Oregon -- which is one of the states that allows medical marijuana -- voters will weigh whether to allow patients and caregivers to grow and possess larger amounts of marijuana than are allowed now."

According to the Cato Handbook for Congress: "The failures of drug prohibition are becoming obvious to more and more Americans. A particularly tragic consequence of the stepped-up war on drugs is the refusal to allow sick people to use marijuana as medicine. Prohibitionists insist that marijuana is not good medicine, or at least that there are legal alternatives to marijuana that are equally good. Those who believe that individuals should make their own decisions, not have their decisions made for them by Washington bureaucracies, would simply say that that's a decision for patients and their doctors to make. But in fact there is good medical evidence of the therapeutic value of marijuana -- despite the difficulty of doing adequate research on an illegal drug.

"Whatever the actual value of medical marijuana, the relevant fact for federal policymakers is that in 1996 the voters of California and Arizona authorized physicians licensed in those states to recommend the use of medical marijuana to seriously ill and terminally ill patients residing in the states, without being subject to civil and criminal penalties.

"One of the benefits of a federal republic is that different policies may be tried in different states. One of the benefits of our Constitution is that it limits the power of the federal government to impose one policy on the several states."

Gina Verticchio, editor, gverticchio@cato.org