Chalk up another body to the drug war. A former classical pianist broken down by disease takes her own life after the government took away the marijuana that helped her cope with her pain:

Robin Prosser, a Missoula woman who struggled for a quarter century to live with the pain of an immunosuppressive disorder, tried years ago to kill herself. Last week, she tried again. This time, she succeeded.

After her earlier attempt failed, Prosser wound up in even more trouble after investigating police found marijuana in her home. She used the marijuana to help cope with pain.

That marijuana charge was eventually dropped in an agreement with the city of Missoula, and Prosser had reason to rejoice in 2004 when Montanans passed a law allowing medical use of the drug.

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.

[...]

“I feel immensely let down,” Prosser would write a few months later, in a guest opinion for the Billings Gazette published July 28. “I have no safety, no protection, no help just to survive in a little less pain. I can’t even get a job due to my medical marijuana use – can’t pass a drug test.”

Federal prosecutors declined to charge Prosser, but fear spread through the system of marijuana distribution set up in the wake of the medical marijuana act. Friends said Prosser turned to other sources for marijuana, but found problems nearly everywhere she turned.

“Most recently, she had found some people who said they could get her what she needed, but it didn’t go well,” said her friend Jane Byard.

Without the relief that marijuana delivered to her, Robin Prosser killed herself at home last week. She was 50.

This part is particularly telling:

“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?”

Not in Bush-Gonzalez-GOP America, where they fought state assisted suicide laws to the Supreme Court (and lost, thankfully). In their world, people with debilitating diseases can get high-dose opiates, can’t get medical marijuana, and can’t seek out a physician to help them end their own lives. Their only option: a slow, painful death.

Here’s the kicker…

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.

Let’s put a name with that quote. It’s Jeffrey D. Sweetin, and with that quote alone, he shows that he’s a pretty loathesome human being.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

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