Murray Rojas v. United States

This Court has repeatedly admonished that courts should not construe federal criminal statutes to intrude on traditional state prerogatives like “regulating the administration of drugs by the health professions,” Whalen v. Roe, 429 U.S. 589, 603 n.30 (1977), absent a clear textual indication that Congress intended to upset the federal-state balance. Consistent with that principle, the Court held more than 75 years ago that the Harrison Narcotics Act’s restrictions on the commercial “dispensing” of drugs could not be read to regulate the “administering” of drugs to patients by a medical practitioner. Young v. United States, 315 U.S. 257 (1942). Indeed, the United States found that conclusion so obvious that it confessed error, and this Court affirmed the dichotomy between the commercial “dispensing” regulated by the federal government and the “administering” of medicines regulated by the States. The Harrison Act has since been replaced by, inter alia, the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FDCA), which carries forward the same dispensing/administering dichotomy. Nonetheless, the Third Circuit in the decision below collapsed the dichotomy, dismissed Young as a case about “an old internal revenue law,” and upheld multiple felony convictions against a horse trainer who administered drugs to horses in contravention of state law. The question presented is: Whether the FDCA’s felony prohibitions on “dispensing” drugs reach the administering of drugs by practitioners, which has been left to state and local regulation for more than a century.