FEDS RENEW APPEAL OF SUICIDE LAW

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department said Friday that it will fight a
judge's ruling that banned the department from interfering with an
Oregon law that allows doctors to help terminally ill people kill themselves.

Attorney General John Ashcroft challenged the law last November,
prohibiting doctors from prescribing lethal doses of federally
controlled drugs to sick patients. After the state sued, he was
rebuffed by a judge who ruled in April that the Justice Department
lacked the authority to overturn the law, the only one of its kind in
the nation.

U.S. District Judge Robert Jones in Portland said Ashcroft was wrongly
trying to "stifle" nationwide debate on assisted suicide. The judge
issued an injunction barring the federal agency from trying to keep
Oregon residents from using the law.

Justice Department lawyers filed paperwork Friday on their plans to
appeal to the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The department did not explain the grounds for the appeal, but in a
separate handout to reporters, the agency repeated its contention that
"there are important medical, ethical and legal distinctions between
intentionally causing a patient's death and providing sufficient
dosages of pain medications to eliminate or alleviate pain."

"It's the right thing to do. Assisted suicide is not a medical
procedure," said Dr. Gregory Hamilton, co-founder of Physicians for
Compassionate Care, a Portland-based organization that opposes
assisted suicide. "People are being frightened into thinking they need
overdoses when they don't."

Ryan Ross, a spokesman for the Hemlock Society, an organization
devoted to right-to-die issues, said Ashcroft "is just doing this for
political points."

"It's an unfortunate further indication of the attorney general's
determination to rob states of the right to decide for themselves how
to regulate the practice of medicine," Ross said.

The law, approved by voters in 1994 and 1997, allows the terminally
ill to request a lethal dose of drugs if two doctors confirm a patient
has less than six months to live and the patient is mentally competent
to make the request. Patients must act alone in taking the fatal dose.

State health officials say about 90 people, most with cancer, have
killed themselves using the law.

The Justice Department argues that dispensing drugs for a suicide does
not serve a "legitimate medical purpose" under the federal Controlled
Substances Act. A directive last fall warned doctors who assist
suicides that they would be stripped of their licenses to prescribe
federally controlled substances.