A LESSON FOR MR. ASHCROFT

Right To Die

A FEDERAL judge scolded Attorney General John D. Ashcroft on Wednesday for
having exceeded his authority last year when he issued an order to stop
Oregon's legislative experiment in physician-assisted suicide. The judge
suggested that Mr. Ashcroft had tried to impose his ideology on the people
of Oregon, who had twice approved the nation's only assisted-suicide law.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Robert E. Jones won't end the dispute
over the legality or the morality of physician-assisted suicide. But it
allows the Oregon law to continue in force. About 90 people have obtained
prescriptions and used them to end their lives since the law went into
effect in 1997.

Oregon voters enacted the Death with Dignity law in 1994. It survived a
legal challenge and a repeal attempt in 1997. Under the law, two doctors
must agree that a terminally ill patient will die within six months and is
mentally competent to decide to end his or her life.

Two efforts in Congress to overturn the law fell short. Last fall, Mr.
Ashcroft reversed the position of the Justice Department and decided that
federal anti-drug laws prevented doctors from prescribing the drugs because
they were not used for a "legitimate medical purpose." Judge Jones
criticized the attorney general for having acted "hastily" and for
violating a promise to seek Oregon's views before acting. The judge said
that opponents of Oregon's law successfully sought "refuge with the newly
appointed Attorney General whose ideology matched their views."

The Oregon law tested Mr. Ashcroft's conservative principles. On the one
hand, he is a states' rights advocate who criticized "activist" federal
judges for overturning citizen initiatives. But he also has strong pro-life
views. Moral views apparently trumped the legal principles, both for Mr.
Ashcroft and President George W. Bush.

Judge Jones said that Congress intended that the federal drug laws be used
to block illegal drug use, not assisted suicide. To allow the attorney
general to "determine the legitimacy of a particular medical practice
without a specific congressional grant of such authority would be
unprecedented and extraordinary," he said.

The U.S. Supreme Court decided five years ago not to recognize a
constitutional right to die. Instead, it left the issue to the states,
specifically pointing to the Oregon law as one example. As Judge Jones
noted, Mr. Ashcroft's federal order would have abruptly ended this
experiment in democracy.

We, as a society, have been appropriately reluctant to recognize a right to
die. Life has a special character, a sanctity, whether it be found through
devoutly held religious faith or an ethical code. Yet a terminally ill
person's decision about when and how to die is so intimate and personal
that it lies at the heart of individual autonomy. Who is to tell a
terminally ill cancer patient that she can't have a prescription for a
potent medication that will relieve her pain and may end her misery?

Certainly not the attorney general.