Jim Finnel
Fallen Cannabis Warrior & Ex News Moderator
Robin Prosser was a former concert pianist and systems analyst who suffered from an autoimmune disease similar to lupus for over 20 years. The disease left her in constant pain and made her allergic to most pharmaceutical painkillers. Only medical marijuana brought her relief, but the DEA seized her medicine. ...
YouTube - Robin Prosser "Forbidden Medicine" (complete) 1 of 4
YouTube - Robin Prosser "Forbidden Medicine" (complete) 2 of 4
YouTube - Robin Prosser "Forbidden Medicine" (complete) 3 of 4
YouTube - Robin Prosser "Forbidden Medicine" (complete) 4 of 4
For over 20 years, Robin Prosser, a musician and mother from Missoula, Montana, had suffered from an immunosuppressive illness similar to lupus. Her muscles stiffened, impeding her ability to move, and she suffered from chronic pain, heart trouble, nausea, and migraines. She was allergic to many prescription drugs, and others simply didn't work.
Beginning in April 2002, at age 45, Prosser staged a 60-day hunger strike to draw attention to her plight. She sought assurance from local law enforcement authorities that she could grow her own marijuana - so as to maintain a steady supply of medicine - without fear of arrest or prosecution. However, Missoula Police Chief Bob Weaver maintained that Prosser would "be busted if she grows pot and we learn about it."
In May 2004, Prosser had run out of marijuana. She e-mailed her psychologist that she planned to commit suicide because she could no longer stand to live in pain. When police arrived at her house, they found her nearly unconscious in bed after taking prescription sleeping pills that she ordered over the Internet. They also found a small quantity of marijuana and two pipes. Prosser was charged with possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia, charges that could have brought up to a year in prison.
Missoula Police Captain Marty Ludemann explained that "the reason we charged her is Montana does not allow the medical use of marijuana." He added that "if it happened tomorrow under the same circumstances, we would arrest her again."
In September 2004, Prosser's charges were dismissed as long as she remained "law-abiding" for nine months; the plea agreement was unclear if this meant she was allowed to use marijuana.
It seemed as though Prosser's trouble had ended when Montanans passed a medical marijuana initiative by an overwhelming 63% to 37% margin that November.
However, in the spring of 2007, federal law enforcement officers intercepted the medicine her licensed caregiver had sent her in the mail. Following the incident, Prosser had great difficulty acquiring the type and quality of medical marijuana she needed to alleviate her symptoms.
According to Prosser and those close to her, she experienced excruciating pain in the following months until on Oct. 18, 2007, she took her own life.
Source
YouTube - Robin Prosser: Remembering a Medical Marijuana Advocate (MPP-TV)
Robin Prosser: Victim of Paternalistic Totalitarianism
At one time, Robin was a well-paid systems analyst with a refined gift for playing the piano. At the time of her untimely death last week, she was living in a small, unventilated apartment, penniless and deeply in debt, unable even to go for a long walk: What for most people would be the welcome caress of sunlight to her would be an unbearable assault. Like many others dealing with chronic pain produced by incurable degenerative diseases, Robin benefited from the medical use of marijuana.
Robin was elated when Montana voters approved the state's Medical Marijuana Act in 2004. Although she was probably too weak and tired to be outraged by the Supreme Court's Gonzalez v. Raich decision the following year upholding the federal government's claim that it could ignore state laws permitting the medical use of marijuana, enforcing its own edicts by arresting sick people who use marijuana for the purposes of pain abatement and the compassionate health care providers who help them obtain it.
The Raich decision is marked by a singular cruelty. The majority opinion concedes that the California residents who brought the case, Angel Raich and Diane Monson, are people suffering from incurable diseases who endure “excruciating pain” and could die without the medically supervised use of marijuana. Neither of them was “trafficking” in marijuana; Monson cultivated her own, Raich received hers through two anonymous caregivers. Their behavior was perfectly legal under California's 1996 “Compassionate Use Act,” and had no nexus of any kind with “interstate commerce.”
When deputy sheriffs, in the loathsome company of a group of armed parasites from the DEA, visited Monson's home in August 2002, they concluded that “her use of marijuana was lawful as a matter of California law. Nevertheless, after a 3-hour standoff, the federal agents seized and destroyed all six of her cannabis plants.”
For this act of malicious vandalism, the feds should have been arrested by the deputies and frog-marched to the nearest jail. The deputies should have turned their guns on the Feds and defended Monson's right to life and her personal property – which is the sole reason why the office of County Sheriff exists in the Anglo-Saxon Common Law tradition. Instead, they behaved in the fashion we should expect, now that the Homeland Security apparatus has absorbed every formerly independent police agency in the country.
Given that Monson's behavior was perfectly legal and absolutely necessary for her survival, why did the Court rule against her?
This case “is made difficult by [Raich and Monson's] strong arguments that they will suffer irreparable harm because, despite a congressional finding to the contrary, marijuana does have valid therapeutic purposes,” the Court allowed, with “Justice” Stevens employing that tone of sympathetic regret often used by people making indefensible decisions that harm innocent people.
However, the Court was zealous to preserve the power of Congress, as the legislative appendage of the Leviathan, to impose its will on the entire American population – even when doing so results in unambiguously bad policy that expands the compass of human misery. This is because central government supremacy must be maintained at any cost.
According to Stevens' opinion in Raich, the controlling precedent is the pernicious Wickard v. Filburn, the 1942 ruling that turned the Constitution's Commerce Clause into a license for totalitarian regulation. On Comrade Stevens' reading, “Wickard ... establishes that Congress can regulate purely intrastate activity that is not itself `commercial,' in that it is not produced for sale, if it concludes that failure to regulate that class of activity would undercut the regulation of the interstate market in that commodity.”
In the case of Wickard, the commodity was wheat grown by a farmer purely for his own consumption on a tract of land he owned; in Raich, the commodity was marijuana produced solely for the consumption of individual patients under medical supervision (and in Monson's case, she grew her own). Yet because Congress has decreed that marijuana grown and consumed under such circumstances could affect interstate commerce in some way only those omniscient seers can detect, it has the power to criminalize that activity.
Most likely for tactical reasons, the respondents in the Raich case didn't challenge the constitutionality of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention Act; after all, they weren't trying to decriminalize narcotics, they were simply trying to compel the Feds to respect state medical marijuana laws. But in any case, the Court isn't receptive to the idea that there are limits of some sort on the powers of the central government:
“The Supremacy Clause unambiguously provides that if there is any conflict between federal and state law, federal law shall prevail. It is beyond peradventure that federal power over commerce is `superior to that of the States to provide for the welfare or necessities of their inhabitants,' however legitimate or dire those necessities may be.... Just as state acquiescence to federal regulation cannot expand the bounds of the Commerce Clause, ... so too state action cannot circumscribe Congress' plenary commerce power.”
Here Stevens was just a tad precious in trying to demonstrate his even-handedness: His attempt at dialectical symmetry falls apart when he refers to the congressional commerce power as “plenary,” which would mean that it had no place to “expand.” But he's lying (no other word fits) in his depiction of the Supremacy Clause.
The entire point of enumerating federal powers is to restrain the central government to the specific enumerated functions. The entire point of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments is to protect individual rights and reserved state powers against federal encroachments.
And as James Madison instructs us in Federalist essay number 45, under the Constitution it is the states, not the central government, that have plenary authority to deal with “all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State” -- including the issue of whether or not critically ill people can exercise their God-given right to seek palliative care in the form of medical marijuana.
In his concise and well-reasoned dissent from the Raich majority, Justice Thomas points out: “In the early days of the Republic, it would have been unthinkable that Congress could prohibit the cultivation, possession, and consumption of marijuana.”
By ratifying the Bush Regime's policy of ignoring state medical marijuana laws, “Here, Congress has encroached on States' traditional police powers to define the criminal law and protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens.... Further, the Government's rationale – that it may regulate the production or possession of any commodity for which there is an interstate market – threatens to remove the remaining vestiges of States' traditional police powers.”
And this is the entire point, of course – not only of this execrable Supreme Court decision, but of the entire War on Drugs: The consolidation of a unitary, omnipotent State.
To the soul-dead functionaries building that system, the sufferings of Robin Prosser (may she rest in God's peace) and others in her condition are a painful but necessary sacrifice – incense on the altar of the Almighty State.
In March of this year, the DEA – acting on a tip from a UPS employee – confiscated a package bound for Robin Prosser that contained less than an ounce of marijuana. Displaying what he probably thought was heroic magnanimity, Jeff Sweetin, the DEA's regional commissar, said that Prosser wouldn't face prosecution.
“We're kind of protecting people from their own state laws,” gloated Sweetin. “Give me liberty, or give me death,” responded Prosser in a despairing newspaper column.
To be free of the besetting pain inflicted needlessly on her by the paternalistic State, Prosser had to die. Tell me again: In what sense is this a genuinely free country?
Source
Robin Prosser: I Am Amazed By My Own Daughter
I am amazed by my own daughter.
I raised her on my own as her father was abusive, and Samantha was so talented, so smart. I am a musician, and she began playing the violin, I went along and studied with her. She decided on the cello - it was more comfortable.
We moved from Chicago to Montana when she was eight. The city had become so dangerous. We both thrived here in our new home, Samantha took part in music, sports, dance, had numerous friends, excelled in her academics.
She was on her way to the science competition in Bozeman at the age of twelve when the bus overturned and Samantha suffered a traumatic brain injury. I never knew what brain injuries can do, now I'm an expert in the pain.
This child had twelve years of awards, accolades, performances, and records and I found myself now seeking help for her special education needs to get through school.
For certain reasons, it was better for my daughter to be away from me at the age of seventeen. And brain-injured. I have spent one hour with her in the past four years. I have been to her performances, watched from a distance with pride.
After her injury, they thought she wouldn't be able to handle college. Her personality underwent shifts and change, everything changed. Who she is now is not who she was - but is stronger, more resilient, and more beautiful than anything I could have imagined, after the news that my child had been so severely hurt.
Samantha will graduate this May from the University of Montana with her degree in Music. She's been a member of the Missoula Symphony since seventeen. She is a member of The University Orchestra, and also The Blue Mountain Trio, winning the Northwest Division competition of the National Music Teacher's Association. She competed in Toronto recently at the National Competition. She was one of several winners of the Concerto/Aria Competition here at UM. She was selected from some two-hundred applicants for a position in the University Library.
It is so very hard for me to describe what it's like to miss her, and to not be able to share time with her - it's unclear what of her childhood she remembers, due to the injury. We were so close, she and I, because we came through a rough bit of the world together and out on top, I guess. Now she is is still my entire heart, all I have in the world - yet I don't have her at all. Still, I know that part of the reason she is as amazing as she is comes from what's ingrained, what I showed her, what I taught her, how I loved her.
I can hear it in her music.
Because of who I am, and at the time, others made a decision they thought was in my child's best interest, and it's taken me these four years to be able to come to terms with this sever, this break in my relationship with my only child - I'm a medical marijuana patient and am termed an 'activist' on the matter. I went on a hunger strike, and sponsored our state law, and am now involved in the federal over state rights problem.
I thought I would die without her. Even though I am not as much a part of her life as I want, it is enough to see that she is happy, and so strong, and vibrant and lovely.
As a young woman - an intelligent, compassionate person - not just as my daughter - I respect, admire and am so proud of her.
I've not had cards these last four Mother's Days. I would somehow like to let my daughter know that I have been enormously blessed to have her, my child. She taught me every good thing I know.
source
YouTube - Robin Prosser "Forbidden Medicine" (complete) 1 of 4
YouTube - Robin Prosser "Forbidden Medicine" (complete) 2 of 4
YouTube - Robin Prosser "Forbidden Medicine" (complete) 3 of 4
YouTube - Robin Prosser "Forbidden Medicine" (complete) 4 of 4
For over 20 years, Robin Prosser, a musician and mother from Missoula, Montana, had suffered from an immunosuppressive illness similar to lupus. Her muscles stiffened, impeding her ability to move, and she suffered from chronic pain, heart trouble, nausea, and migraines. She was allergic to many prescription drugs, and others simply didn't work.
Beginning in April 2002, at age 45, Prosser staged a 60-day hunger strike to draw attention to her plight. She sought assurance from local law enforcement authorities that she could grow her own marijuana - so as to maintain a steady supply of medicine - without fear of arrest or prosecution. However, Missoula Police Chief Bob Weaver maintained that Prosser would "be busted if she grows pot and we learn about it."
In May 2004, Prosser had run out of marijuana. She e-mailed her psychologist that she planned to commit suicide because she could no longer stand to live in pain. When police arrived at her house, they found her nearly unconscious in bed after taking prescription sleeping pills that she ordered over the Internet. They also found a small quantity of marijuana and two pipes. Prosser was charged with possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia, charges that could have brought up to a year in prison.
Missoula Police Captain Marty Ludemann explained that "the reason we charged her is Montana does not allow the medical use of marijuana." He added that "if it happened tomorrow under the same circumstances, we would arrest her again."
In September 2004, Prosser's charges were dismissed as long as she remained "law-abiding" for nine months; the plea agreement was unclear if this meant she was allowed to use marijuana.
It seemed as though Prosser's trouble had ended when Montanans passed a medical marijuana initiative by an overwhelming 63% to 37% margin that November.
However, in the spring of 2007, federal law enforcement officers intercepted the medicine her licensed caregiver had sent her in the mail. Following the incident, Prosser had great difficulty acquiring the type and quality of medical marijuana she needed to alleviate her symptoms.
According to Prosser and those close to her, she experienced excruciating pain in the following months until on Oct. 18, 2007, she took her own life.
Source
YouTube - Robin Prosser: Remembering a Medical Marijuana Advocate (MPP-TV)
Robin Prosser: Victim of Paternalistic Totalitarianism
At one time, Robin was a well-paid systems analyst with a refined gift for playing the piano. At the time of her untimely death last week, she was living in a small, unventilated apartment, penniless and deeply in debt, unable even to go for a long walk: What for most people would be the welcome caress of sunlight to her would be an unbearable assault. Like many others dealing with chronic pain produced by incurable degenerative diseases, Robin benefited from the medical use of marijuana.
Robin was elated when Montana voters approved the state's Medical Marijuana Act in 2004. Although she was probably too weak and tired to be outraged by the Supreme Court's Gonzalez v. Raich decision the following year upholding the federal government's claim that it could ignore state laws permitting the medical use of marijuana, enforcing its own edicts by arresting sick people who use marijuana for the purposes of pain abatement and the compassionate health care providers who help them obtain it.
The Raich decision is marked by a singular cruelty. The majority opinion concedes that the California residents who brought the case, Angel Raich and Diane Monson, are people suffering from incurable diseases who endure “excruciating pain” and could die without the medically supervised use of marijuana. Neither of them was “trafficking” in marijuana; Monson cultivated her own, Raich received hers through two anonymous caregivers. Their behavior was perfectly legal under California's 1996 “Compassionate Use Act,” and had no nexus of any kind with “interstate commerce.”
When deputy sheriffs, in the loathsome company of a group of armed parasites from the DEA, visited Monson's home in August 2002, they concluded that “her use of marijuana was lawful as a matter of California law. Nevertheless, after a 3-hour standoff, the federal agents seized and destroyed all six of her cannabis plants.”
For this act of malicious vandalism, the feds should have been arrested by the deputies and frog-marched to the nearest jail. The deputies should have turned their guns on the Feds and defended Monson's right to life and her personal property – which is the sole reason why the office of County Sheriff exists in the Anglo-Saxon Common Law tradition. Instead, they behaved in the fashion we should expect, now that the Homeland Security apparatus has absorbed every formerly independent police agency in the country.
Given that Monson's behavior was perfectly legal and absolutely necessary for her survival, why did the Court rule against her?
This case “is made difficult by [Raich and Monson's] strong arguments that they will suffer irreparable harm because, despite a congressional finding to the contrary, marijuana does have valid therapeutic purposes,” the Court allowed, with “Justice” Stevens employing that tone of sympathetic regret often used by people making indefensible decisions that harm innocent people.
However, the Court was zealous to preserve the power of Congress, as the legislative appendage of the Leviathan, to impose its will on the entire American population – even when doing so results in unambiguously bad policy that expands the compass of human misery. This is because central government supremacy must be maintained at any cost.
According to Stevens' opinion in Raich, the controlling precedent is the pernicious Wickard v. Filburn, the 1942 ruling that turned the Constitution's Commerce Clause into a license for totalitarian regulation. On Comrade Stevens' reading, “Wickard ... establishes that Congress can regulate purely intrastate activity that is not itself `commercial,' in that it is not produced for sale, if it concludes that failure to regulate that class of activity would undercut the regulation of the interstate market in that commodity.”
In the case of Wickard, the commodity was wheat grown by a farmer purely for his own consumption on a tract of land he owned; in Raich, the commodity was marijuana produced solely for the consumption of individual patients under medical supervision (and in Monson's case, she grew her own). Yet because Congress has decreed that marijuana grown and consumed under such circumstances could affect interstate commerce in some way only those omniscient seers can detect, it has the power to criminalize that activity.
Most likely for tactical reasons, the respondents in the Raich case didn't challenge the constitutionality of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention Act; after all, they weren't trying to decriminalize narcotics, they were simply trying to compel the Feds to respect state medical marijuana laws. But in any case, the Court isn't receptive to the idea that there are limits of some sort on the powers of the central government:
“The Supremacy Clause unambiguously provides that if there is any conflict between federal and state law, federal law shall prevail. It is beyond peradventure that federal power over commerce is `superior to that of the States to provide for the welfare or necessities of their inhabitants,' however legitimate or dire those necessities may be.... Just as state acquiescence to federal regulation cannot expand the bounds of the Commerce Clause, ... so too state action cannot circumscribe Congress' plenary commerce power.”
Here Stevens was just a tad precious in trying to demonstrate his even-handedness: His attempt at dialectical symmetry falls apart when he refers to the congressional commerce power as “plenary,” which would mean that it had no place to “expand.” But he's lying (no other word fits) in his depiction of the Supremacy Clause.
The entire point of enumerating federal powers is to restrain the central government to the specific enumerated functions. The entire point of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments is to protect individual rights and reserved state powers against federal encroachments.
And as James Madison instructs us in Federalist essay number 45, under the Constitution it is the states, not the central government, that have plenary authority to deal with “all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State” -- including the issue of whether or not critically ill people can exercise their God-given right to seek palliative care in the form of medical marijuana.
In his concise and well-reasoned dissent from the Raich majority, Justice Thomas points out: “In the early days of the Republic, it would have been unthinkable that Congress could prohibit the cultivation, possession, and consumption of marijuana.”
By ratifying the Bush Regime's policy of ignoring state medical marijuana laws, “Here, Congress has encroached on States' traditional police powers to define the criminal law and protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens.... Further, the Government's rationale – that it may regulate the production or possession of any commodity for which there is an interstate market – threatens to remove the remaining vestiges of States' traditional police powers.”
And this is the entire point, of course – not only of this execrable Supreme Court decision, but of the entire War on Drugs: The consolidation of a unitary, omnipotent State.
To the soul-dead functionaries building that system, the sufferings of Robin Prosser (may she rest in God's peace) and others in her condition are a painful but necessary sacrifice – incense on the altar of the Almighty State.
In March of this year, the DEA – acting on a tip from a UPS employee – confiscated a package bound for Robin Prosser that contained less than an ounce of marijuana. Displaying what he probably thought was heroic magnanimity, Jeff Sweetin, the DEA's regional commissar, said that Prosser wouldn't face prosecution.
“We're kind of protecting people from their own state laws,” gloated Sweetin. “Give me liberty, or give me death,” responded Prosser in a despairing newspaper column.
To be free of the besetting pain inflicted needlessly on her by the paternalistic State, Prosser had to die. Tell me again: In what sense is this a genuinely free country?
Source
Robin Prosser: I Am Amazed By My Own Daughter
I am amazed by my own daughter.
I raised her on my own as her father was abusive, and Samantha was so talented, so smart. I am a musician, and she began playing the violin, I went along and studied with her. She decided on the cello - it was more comfortable.
We moved from Chicago to Montana when she was eight. The city had become so dangerous. We both thrived here in our new home, Samantha took part in music, sports, dance, had numerous friends, excelled in her academics.
She was on her way to the science competition in Bozeman at the age of twelve when the bus overturned and Samantha suffered a traumatic brain injury. I never knew what brain injuries can do, now I'm an expert in the pain.
This child had twelve years of awards, accolades, performances, and records and I found myself now seeking help for her special education needs to get through school.
For certain reasons, it was better for my daughter to be away from me at the age of seventeen. And brain-injured. I have spent one hour with her in the past four years. I have been to her performances, watched from a distance with pride.
After her injury, they thought she wouldn't be able to handle college. Her personality underwent shifts and change, everything changed. Who she is now is not who she was - but is stronger, more resilient, and more beautiful than anything I could have imagined, after the news that my child had been so severely hurt.
Samantha will graduate this May from the University of Montana with her degree in Music. She's been a member of the Missoula Symphony since seventeen. She is a member of The University Orchestra, and also The Blue Mountain Trio, winning the Northwest Division competition of the National Music Teacher's Association. She competed in Toronto recently at the National Competition. She was one of several winners of the Concerto/Aria Competition here at UM. She was selected from some two-hundred applicants for a position in the University Library.
It is so very hard for me to describe what it's like to miss her, and to not be able to share time with her - it's unclear what of her childhood she remembers, due to the injury. We were so close, she and I, because we came through a rough bit of the world together and out on top, I guess. Now she is is still my entire heart, all I have in the world - yet I don't have her at all. Still, I know that part of the reason she is as amazing as she is comes from what's ingrained, what I showed her, what I taught her, how I loved her.
I can hear it in her music.
Because of who I am, and at the time, others made a decision they thought was in my child's best interest, and it's taken me these four years to be able to come to terms with this sever, this break in my relationship with my only child - I'm a medical marijuana patient and am termed an 'activist' on the matter. I went on a hunger strike, and sponsored our state law, and am now involved in the federal over state rights problem.
I thought I would die without her. Even though I am not as much a part of her life as I want, it is enough to see that she is happy, and so strong, and vibrant and lovely.
As a young woman - an intelligent, compassionate person - not just as my daughter - I respect, admire and am so proud of her.
I've not had cards these last four Mother's Days. I would somehow like to let my daughter know that I have been enormously blessed to have her, my child. She taught me every good thing I know.
source
