DYING WELL

For Ashcroft, Ideology Overrides Suffering

I remember looking into a crib at a woman in her 80s, her translucent skin
blistered with bedsores, her limbs knotted up like pieces of string, her
eyes looking only inward. We tried to talk between the convulsive,
unbearable bouts of pain that bone cancer inflicts.

She is gone now. But cancer isn't. Some other grandmother lies trembling in
a bed right now, repeating the agony.

I think about the friends and colleagues I've known who have lost weight,
lost their spirit, grown bent and weak, unable to eat and hold down
medicine, every cough an ordeal, their eyes fading and finally blinking shut
because one or the other opportunistic disease moved in to assault their
bodies left defenseless by AIDS.

I'll ask the follow-up question with as much bite as is in me: Why would
Attorney General John Ashcroft choose now, this moment, to add to the misery
of our sick and dying countrymen?

Why now, at the start of this war on terrorism? The answer, the blinding
self-righteousness of Ashcroft's old-time religion, is incomprehensible to
me.

I thought every G-man in America was working double time to try and make
America safe and deliver justice. What could be more compelling? What could
divert Ashcroft's attentions and make him redeploy agents and investigators
from these horrifying threats to our children and ourselves? It's the
rebellion we started here in the West. When we in California decided that a
marijuana brownie wasn't too much to offer chemotherapy patients so they
could hold down their medicines without vomiting, just as long as a licensed
physician approved. When voters in Oregon decided that, for truly horrible
terminal illnesses, people ought to have the right to ask their doctors for
the drugs to escape their final suffering. Ashcroft dispatched 30 federal
agents last month to raid and shut down the Los Angeles Cannabis Resource
Center, where 960 sick people are registered to seek relief with approval of
their doctors and, I hasten to add, with the cooperation of the county
sheriff's department.

Then Ashcroft announced that he was sending investigators to crack down on
Oregon physicians who assist dying patients when they cannot endure any more
suffering -- an option used so far by only 70 desperate people in four
years.

Do we really have the law-enforcement horsepower to spare for this
cold-hearted crusade? Have they run out of leads? Don't they listen to their
own threats of attacks to come? Have they not seen the list of 10,000 places
where America is still vulnerable?

Let's be clear: The narrow and merciful laws that Ashcroft has attacked were
approved by voter plebiscites.

Let's be emphatic: There is no possible harm to others with these laws.
These are matters settled by doctors and patients in private homes and
hospices. Let's be angry: On the strength of its own rickety and
still-disputed mandate, this administration defies millions of Americans
whose mandate is unmistakable.

Let's be just: Listen to the federal judge who on Nov. 8 temporarily
suspended Ashcroft's inhumane directive in Oregon.

If a narrow and crusading ideology were not his paramount consideration, an
attorney general of the United States would have his mind focused on serious
business right now, not on what happens in the candlelight behind drawn
curtains on the tear-stained sickbeds of good people.