Aside from the cannabis prohibition issue, this is a story about a chronic pain patient who commits suicide after years of being thwarted in her efforts to manage her pain.
It IS directly related to cannabis prohibition (Reefer Madness), to America's healthcare crisis, and to the utter mean-spiritedness of the DEA and others who work to put outrageous pressure on medical doctors who try to treat people's pain without being accused of causing people to feel good or supplying drugs addicts with "drugs".
This is ugly and real liberals, progressives and aspiring Democratic leaders should be livid.
First, thanks and praises to Bearmont and joannegmurphy for attempting to get this story the attention it deserves here at Daily Kos. Neither diary went anywhere, liklely because it didn't have Hillary or John or Barack in the title. We'll just have to work around that. While we have our candidates out contributing to global warming with their bloviation and posturing campaigning, we have people suffering and dying because of mean-spirited policies the Democratic party has failed to address(despite the efforts made to get them to notice).
Robin Prosser (link to YouTube Video) was a medical marijuana activist and patient. She was ill for 23 years with something described as "like lupus": painful and largely unresponsive to "traditional" pharmaceutical meds. And forget the outrageous expense of those medications, whether they really work or not.
She complained of being either allergic to or otherwise unable to tolerate these chemical compound medications and apparently - truly - found relief in the Herb. Like a lot of Americans and people around the world have for centuries.
She tried to commit suicide once before and failed. That event led to her being busted for marijuana possession - Law Enforcement gets a very perverse thrill from this sort of antagonism. Check out the attitude of the DEA:
She was a high-profile campaigner for the Montana Medical Marijuana Act, and like others, she was dismayed when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that drug agents could still arrest sick people using marijuana, even in states that legalized its use.
The ruling came to haunt Prosser in late March, when DEA agents seized less than a half ounce of marijuana sent to her by her registered caregiver in Flathead County.
At the time, the DEA special agent in charge of the Rocky Mountain Field Division said federal agents were "protecting people from their own state laws" by seizing such shipments.
The bust and awareness that her mail is monitored appears to have been the final cut. She was reported to no longer be able to get the HErb in any reliable manner. And she clearly had had enough:
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?"
This is a stark example of the Compassionate Conservatism of the Culture of Life.
They went apeshit trying to save the life of Terri Schiavo, a white woman in a permanent vegetative state a couple years ago - remember? The whole Republican party was up in arms - they were going to save her life and set a standard for intruding into the private medical decisions of a family.
Robin Prosser was white too, but poor, and an advocate for medical marijuana and political change. She was targeted for arrest and persecution and that's exactly what she got.
Funded with YOUR tax dollars.
The whole situation is ridiculous. Ms. Prosser could have smoked all the cigarettes she wanted to and likely come down with tobacco cancers and nobody would sand in her way. SHe could drink herself to death, and few people would blink an eye. But when a person smokes pot for their own reasons - medical or recreational or whatever - oh, its a friggin' sin.
Cannabis prohibition combined with the mean-spirited zealotry of the DEA is simply unacceptable in America, if you have a chance to think about it. And that's why this article was composed - to try and get Democratic activists to think about it and see this is a ripe issue for the party to tackle.
How long will the Democratic Party remain complicit?
To the extent Democrats STILL cling to the fiction that cannabis reform "just isn't a priority", is the extent to which the Democratic party condones and is complicit in these ugly realities.
The Democratic party should be slobbering on itself with a zeal to reform cannabis laws and do serious damage to one of the pillars of the GOP's political power. (No, I am not to to re-explain this concept everytime I mention it.)
Again, above and beyond the Nazi-like repression of the cannabis plant and sheer evil of harassing the sick and dying, we also have another stark failure of the American Healthcare system in alleviating suffering or curing an illness for somebody who is not well-off financially. And we have the healthcare issue compunded by the nightmare of chronic pain treatment.
The DEA and insurance companies are so pre-occupied about illegal prescription drug use - such as that by Rush Limbaugh - that normal, everyday people are punished en masse by the reign of terror visited upon pain management doctors who have to live in fear of being accused of "over -prescribing" and losing their license.
So the people suffer.
Thanks, GOP, and DEA and complicit Democrats.
Thanks a lot.
Rest in Peace, Ms. Prosser.