No Last Rights

In a week when Attorney General John Ashcroft was struggling with anthrax, investigating September 11 and overhauling his department, he still managed to take on another threat: the voters of Oregon. And the federal courts that have sustained them. Somehow, Ashcroft found time to throw out Oregon's assisted suicide law, which allows doctors to provide lethal drug doses, on request, to terminally ill patients near the end of life. The measure was passed by Oregon voters twice (the second time overwhelmingly) and survived federal court and Congressional challenges--but was targeted by antiabortion and religious right forces.

The law has been in effect four years without setting off the bloodbath darkly envisioned by its opponents. The greatest effect, say many, has been on terminal patients who don't choose assisted suicide but have benefited from the state's greater emphasis on treating pain in late-stage cancer and nerve disease. Still, Ashcroft proclaimed, "I hereby determine that assisting suicide is not a 'legitimate medical purpose'...and that prescribing, dispensing or administering federally controlled substances to assist suicide violates the Controlled Substances Act." To bolster his ruling, Ashcroft cited a recent Supreme Court ruling on medical marijuana that found that federal rules about controlled substances could not be abridged by states--despite states' traditional oversight of medical care.

But Ashcroft ignored the 1997 Supreme Court decision that directly addressed assisted suicide. That ruling declared that while there is no constitutional right to assisted suicide, the Constitution doesn't forbid it. Most of the Justices, in fact, called for testing the idea at the state level. "There is no reason to think the democratic process will not strike the proper balance between the interests of terminally ill, mentally competent individuals who would seek to end their suffering and the state's interests in protecting those who might seek to end life mistakenly or under pressure," wrote Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

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