I started my organization, the Pain Relief Network, on the premise that the courts would uphold the essential political structure of our nation and that we could end these disgraceful and damaging physician prosecutions by asserting federalist principles articulated in the 9th and 10th Amendments to the United States Constitution. “The CSA’s structure and operation presume and rely upon a functioning medical profession regulated under the States’ police powers,” the US Supreme Court had announced in Ashcroft vs. Oregon, later styled Gonzales vs. Oregon.

I had pinned my hopes on the notion that through working the case law back against the federal government’s campaign to essentially obliterate the distinction between state and federal police powers, we might eventually get to make the same winning constitutional argument to benefit people in pain, as opposed to benefiting those who wanted to be free to end their lives legally and with a physician’s assistance, as was the case in Oregon.

What I didn’t know then, and what I have since come to understand, is that the federal judiciary, for the most part, treats federalism as a kind of quaint anachronism when the notion is brought up in the context of the regulation of medicine by federal law enforcement. Without the support of the federal judiciary to uphold the principles of federalism, or to uphold my First Amendment right to promulgate a strong dissenting opinion in the media, I had to face the fact that there was simply no point in going forward with the Pain Relief Network.

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