Court Opinion

ID: 9545287
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 17:09:34.408638+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:14:28.633387
License: Public Domain

ELLETT, Chief Justice
(dissenting).
The legislature listed 120 drugs as “controlled substances,”1 i. e. substances that the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare or the Attorney General of the United States has found after investigation and by regulation designated as habit forming because of their effect on the central nervous system; or which has a potential for abuse because of their depressant or stimulant effect on the central nervous system; or which has a hallucinogenic effect on the user.
The legislature sought to control the use of all such drugs and thereby protect those of its citizens who might use them to their own damage and harm. It realized that there might be other harmful substances not then known which would be equally dangerous to users and so a provision was inserted into the law2 that authorized the Attorney General of the State of Utah to add such substances to the list of proscribed drugs.
The authority thus given to the attorney general is not, in my opinion, a delegation of legislative powers. He is strictly limited in his determination as to whether the substance is injurious to the user. The substance must be of one of the classes set out in the statute. Notice of a hearing to determine whether the new drug should be placed on the list is required to be given, and the right to be heard must be afforded to all interested persons. The statute3 provides that any person who is, or who may be, affected by a designation of any such listed substance has a right to a judicial determination of the validity of the rule or control by filing an action for declaratory relief in the district court of Salt Lake County. The court may also declare the rule invalid for a substantial failure to comply with the provisions of the act relating to the procedure for ascertaining the classification of the new drug.
The pivotal question in this case is, therefore, whether the power of the attorney general to add drugs to the controlled substances schedule is a grant of an unconfined, vagrant power; or whether his function is merely to determine the facts upon which legislative policy depends and to exercise discretion in a narrow area defined by ascertainable standards.
*692The appropriate test to be applied in determining this question was articulated in the concurring opinion of Justice Wolfe in Revne v. Trade Commission:4
To require rigid and minutely defined standards or guides where the matters to be regulated are of such a nature as to require flexibility, might prevent needed remedies. Otherwise, the legislature would be required to anticipate all possible situations which might arise and itself supply a rule or guide to fit each such situation, a requirement which might be palpably impossible.
Roughly, the measure of the detail content of standards or guides is what the matter or subject to be regulated will practically admit of. Otherwise, the legislature could not exercise its power to regulate what might acutely need regulation because the diversity and complexity of the regulative problems involved, would not practically admit the setting of sufficiently detailed standards.
This standard was applied by this Court in Clayton v. Bennett,5 In that case, plaintiff attacked the constitutionality of a statute relating to the licensing of architects because, inter alia, it was an unlawful delegation of legislative authority. In upholding the statute, this Court noted:
certain basic qualifications relating to education, age, moral character and the requirement of satisfactorily passing an examination are set forth in the statutes. It seems obvious that the legislature could go no further than to set up such general standards.
To resolve the question of the constitutionality of the statute in this case, all that remains is to determine if the attorney general’s power to add drugs to the controlled list is subject to those rules and guides that the legislature could be reasonably expected to provide.
It seems to me that there is no merit to the contention that there exists in the law any denial of equal protection or of any unconstitutional delegation of authority.
I would reverse the judgment of the trial court and remand the case for trial on the merits.

. U.C.A., as amended, 58-37 — 4.

. U.C.A., as amended, 58-37-3.

.U.C.A., as amended, 58-37-5(b)(7).

. 113 Utah 155, 186, 192 P.2d 563, 579 (1948).

. 5 Utah 2d 152, 156, 298 P.2d 531, 534 (1956).