LEAVE OREGON ALONE

Oregon leads the nation in formulating policies to accommodate our
changing society. It legalized abortion long before the Supreme Court
issued the Roe v. Wade decision. It was the first to decriminalize
marijuana. And its laws for managing sprawl have become a national
model.

Oregon was also the first state to allow for physician-assisted
suicide for terminally ill patients. Anti-abortion conservatives are
up arms over the law, which has survived legal challenges and was
approved twice by Oregon's voters. U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft has
taken up their cause and now seeks to eviscerate Oregon's Death with
Dignity Act.

Mr. Ashcroft did not attack the law directly. He would leave the
Oregon law on the books. Instead he ordered the Drug Enforcement
Administration to punish doctors who prescribe lethal drugs by
removing their licenses to prescribe medication. In other words, the
DEA can destroy livelihoods of doctors who follow it.

Let us not ignore state rights. It happens that regulating medical
practices is generally a state function. So-called conservatives
display no small amount of hypocrisy when they demand more power for
the states, then call in the federal police when the states do
something they don't like.

Oregon's physician-assisted-suicide law recognizes the realities of
modern medicine. In former times, a serious disease would carry off a
sick person rather quickly. Now medicine can keep people with several
potentially fatal ailments going for years in pain.

For example, pneumonia was called "the old man's best friend" because
it took an elderly and dying person out of his misery with dispatch.
Today a quick injection of antibiotics can revive a seriously ill
person for many more months of agony.

The Death with Dignity Act gave modern medicine the legal means to
help patients end miserable lives. It lets doctors write lethal
prescriptions for patients with less than six months to live, as
certified by two physicians. The patients must take the drugs
themselves. About 70 people have used the law to hasten their deaths.
Others keep the drugs only as a kind of insurance that leaves them
the option to escape a horrible end, should they choose to.

Of course, doctors already help patients die through the back door of
"pain reduction." Narcotics, such as morphine, ease pain, but by
repressing the patient's breathing, they also rush death. Medical
experts in states without an assisted-suicide law fear that Mr.
Ashcroft's order will involve the federal government deeply in crisis
situations best handled by doctors and patients.

Choosing this time of national crisis to insert himself into a
complicated social issue reflects serious misjudgment on Mr.
Ashcroft's part. "This attorney general is supposed to be figuring
out who's responsible for the anthrax," said Oregon Gov. John
Kitzhaber, himself a physician. "To introduce this divisive issue at
this point in time is just, to me, unthinkable."

Oregon has filed suit in federal court to stop federal interference
in its physician-assisted suicide law. We urge Mr. Ashcroft to back
off from this campaign against patients, doctors and state
sovereignty.