Bloomberg has an interesting story about the consequences (or lack thereof) of yesterday's Raich decision:

  Federal law enforcement officials in San Francisco said they don't intend to crack down on medical pot users, who under California state law are allowed to buy and smoke marijuana with a doctor's permission. About 40 marijuana clubs in the city, which operate without interference from local police, are likely to continue in the wake of the Supreme Court decision that federal drug laws ban use of medical pot.
  "We respect the state law," said Javier Pena, special agency in charge at the San Francisco office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. "I can't tell you we are going to shut down all those clubs tomorrow. Our efforts will remain targeted at the trafficking organizations. We've never targeted the user, the sick people, the dying people."
  The DEA in San Francisco has shut down two of the city's pot clubs and arrested two people in connection with club operations in the last two years, said Casey McEnry, an agency spokeswoman.
  . . .
  California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said the U.S. has always been able to prosecute medical marijuana users for violating federal drug laws and has rarely done so.
  "This doesn't represent a big change for the potential for federal enforcement," Lockyer said in a telephone interview. "Our medical marijuana users were always exposed to the possibility of federal prosecution; there haven't been that many."

  This is an important point, I think. The idea of the federal government going after very ill people who are growing marijuana for medical purposes strikes many (including me) as an obvious misuse of power, if not an outrageous one. But the reality is that prosecutions, while not nonexistent, are rare. Giving the feds the power to bring cases doesn't mean that they actually will, and history suggests that they usually don't. As a result, Raich doesn't mean the difference between a world with home-grown medical marijuana for the very ill and a world without it. Rather, it means a world in which home-grown medical marijuana is advertised and public versus a world in which the practice is more quiet and the feds mostly look the other way.

  UPDATE: Judging by trackbacks and my rapidly filling inbox, enough VC readers are sufficiently upset about the Raich decision that I think some additional explanation may be helpful. To be clear, I'm not saying that I think Raich was correctly decided. (I am not a constitional theorist, and in this kind of case I'm not sure I know what it means for a case to be correctly decided.) Nor am I saying that broad laws are a good thing; to the contrary, I have written long and heavily footnoted articles arguing against broad constructions of federal criminal statutes precisely because I distrust overreliance on prosecutorial discretion. I am only making the pragmatic point that, no matter how strongly you feel about the constitutional or policy issues raised in the case, the sky actually is not falling.