A woman kills herself to stop the pain of an illness she tried to alleviate with marijuana:

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.

That DEA statement should go down in history as an emblem of the anti-federalist agenda of today's conservatives. It's up there with protecting people from the alleviation of their own pain. Prosser couldn't get the medicine she needed, except from unreliable and sometimes dangerous sources. Unable to cope with the pain of her illness, she took her own life.

“Give me liberty or give me death,” she wrote in July.

That's the American spirit. The government deprived her of liberty and so she chose death. May she and every other victim of the drug war rest in peace.

(Update: here's Obama on the question. He'd pull the feds off persecuting the sick in states where medical marijuana is legal.)

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