Kathryn L. Tucker JD

Kathryn Tucker is Special Advocacy Advisor at the National Psychedelics Association. For more than 30 years her work has focused on advocacy to protect and expand the rights of the terminally ill. She served as Executive Director of the End of Life Liberty Project (ELLP), which she founded during her tenure as Executive Director of the Disability Rights Legal Center (DRLC), the nation’s oldest disability rights advocacy organization. Tucker served two decades as Director of Advocacy and Legal Affairs for Compassion & Choices. In periods in private practice she practiced law with Perkins Coie and Emerge Law Group. Professor Tucker has held faculty appointments at Loyola/ Los Angeles, the University of Washington, Seattle University and Lewis & Clark, Schools of Law, teaching in the area of law, medicine and ethics at the end of life. Tucker served as lead counsel representing patients and physicians in two landmark federal cases decided by the United States Supreme Court, Washington v. Glucksberg and Vacco v. Quill, asserting that mentally competent terminally ill patients have a constitutional right to choose aid in dying. These cases are widely acknowledged to have prompted nationwide attention to improving care of the dying, and to have established a federal constitutional right to aggressive pain management. Tucker played a key role in successfully defending the Oregon Death with Dignity Act from attack by the United States Department of Justice, resulting in the landmark decision 0f the United States Supreme Court, Oregon v. Gonzales, representing the patient plaintiffs. Tucker was part of the team that succeeded in enacting the nation’s first state law permitting psilocybin therapy (Oregon Measure 109, 2020) and more recently she was involved in the successful legislative effort to pass the New Mexico Medical Psilocybin Act. She has been representing a Seattle palliative care physician and his integrative oncology clinic in the first effort to apply Right to Try laws to psilocybin therapy, and to reschedule psilocybin off of schedule I. AIMS et al v DEA.