This is a story that saddened and sickened me, and is an illustration of the road to Hell paved by the good intentions of those who would "protect" us from our own impulses.
I thank Michael Moore, reporter for the Missoulian, for bringing this sad tale to the public.
Concert pianist and systems analyst Robin Prosser, after struggling for years against an autoimmune disease who crippled her and filled her life with unceasing pain, had turned to marijuana to stem her suffering when conventional meds failed. A tireless advocate for patients' rights, she had reason to celebrate when 2004 saw the passage of the Montana Medical Marijuana Act.
The Feds, however, were nonplussed. Courts ruled that incomprehensibly, even state laws sanctioning its use would not hinder federal DEA authorities from prosecuting pot users, even those in severe pain.
Sure enough, a DEA bust earlier this year caused Prosser's pot sources to dry up. And even though the DA declined to prosecute (presumably not wanting to add to her suffering), her lack of ability to fight pain by any other means led her to her own terrible final solution.
I find it horribly ironic that the same rightwing ideologues who reviled the Federal Government for enforcing federal civil rights laws and still condemn it for enforcing environmental regulations in states that are lax in those areas, suddenly turn into Federalists when it comes to states that have independently (and sensibly) liberalized drug legislation.
This oughta break your heart. If not, you don't have one:
Without the relief that marijuana delivered to her, Robin Prosser killed herself at home last week. She was 50.
Prosser suffered from an autoimmune disease that gave her allergic and dangerous reactions to most pharmaceutical painkillers. So she turned to marijuana. When that was no longer available she had no where else to turn.
"She just said she couldn't take it all anymore," Byard said.
In her guest opinion, Prosser wrote that: "I'm 50 years old, low-income and sick. I spend most days in my apartment in bed, with no air conditioning, unable to go outside because I can't tolerate the sun."
Beset by financial problems, troubled by depression, unable to find a reliable source of pain relief, she took her own life three months after the piece was published.
"Give me liberty or give me death," she wrote in July. "Maybe the next campaign ought to be for assisted-suicide laws in our state. If they will not allow me to live in peace, and a little less pain, would they help me to die, humanely?"
Before being disabled by her disease, Prosser was a concert pianist and a systems analyst. After the disease hit her, she became a tireless advocate for legalized use of marijuana in medical situations.
"She had so many difficulties, but she was a wonderful person," Byard said. "She was kind and funny and just as smart as a whip. She was a very good friend to me, and it's a very sad story what happened to her."
How many others will suffer and die because of Federal blindness and rightwing hypocrisy?