Death With Dignity wins in the Supreme Court. Roberts, Scalia and Thomas dissenting. There's little doubt this would have been a 5 - 4 with Alito on the court instead of O'Conner, part of the reason hard-core conservatives want him in the game.
This is something I know a bit about since my mom worked on the campaign in Oregon, where the law was passed. It's a good victory for state's rights, compassion, and rationality. Die-hard conservatives see this as a slippery slope at the bottom of which is some kind of soylent green dystopia, but frankly that's quite farfetched. It seems rather straightforward to me that in a free society, one should be free to determine the time and place of their dying, and that if a doctor feels it is within their professional ethics to make that choice as painless and safe as possible, there's nothing wrong with that.
I find it strange that a state can legislate to allow you to kill yourself but not to allow you to smoke pot, even if both freedoms are restricted to the very very ill. I think laws against suicide are silly, ditto the prohibition of marijuana, but then I suppose I'm a little ahead of the curve. Or behind it maybe. Time will tell.
