ASHCROFT: NOT BUSY ENOUGH

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, obviously not busy enough with
investigations on multiple terror fronts, will now be looking over the
shoulders of Oregon doctors who care for terminally ill patients.

His order Tuesday directing federal drug agents to go after doctors
who participate in assisted suicide--a practice legal under Oregon
law--is an unwarranted intrusion that makes no sense except as an
exercise of unvarnished ideology.

Ashcroft is a longtime critic of assisted suicide.

His directive is aimed squarely at overruling an Oregon law, twice
approved by voters, that permits doctors to prescribe lethal drugs for
terminally ill patients who ask for them under narrow and tightly
controlled circumstances. But under the order to the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration, any doctor who prescribes such drugs, even
one acting within the terms of the Oregon law, can lose his or her
license to prescribe, effectively making the physician unable to practice.

Exactly what is the problem Ashcroft believes needs
solving.

Since Oregon's law took effect in 1997, about 70 people have killed
themselves in this way. The relatively small number of suicides--and
the long application process required to obtain the prescriptions--has
disproved opponents' predictions that the law would lead to a massive
body count.

What happened to the rights of states to make their own decisions on
most policy matters, a principle that Ashcroft would usually hold
dear. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1997 rejected arguments that the
Constitution embodies a right to assistance in dying.

But the court cleared the way for Oregon's law to take effect by
turning aside an appeal that had kept the measure tied up in court.
Ashcroft imperiously dismissed the court's measured decision by simply
declaring that assisted suicide "is not a legitimate medical purpose"
for prescribing federally controlled substances. But the line between
prescribing enough medication to make a wasted, dying person
comfortable and to hasten the end can be precariously thin. Even the
Supreme Court acknowledged that this gray area is one for "earnest and
profound" debate.

And by directing drug agents with no medical expertise to second-guess
the decisions of physicians, Ashcroft's order conjures the specter of
G-men big-footing their way into hospital rooms and medicine chests.

Four times in the past three years Congress has rejected legislation
that would have invalidated Oregon's law through prosecution of
physicians who prescribe under its authority.

Ashcroft's directive borrows liberally from those failed efforts
without explaining where exactly the federal interest lies.

Oregon officials filed suit Wednesday seeking to block the
directive.

In the meantime, however, Ashcroft's order is likely to hinder new
efforts by doctors in Oregon and elsewhere to ease the suffering of
their terminally ill patients.

Effective pain management, often by the use of opiates, has long taken
a back seat to nonsensical fears that dying patients would become drug
addicts.

The result has been that far too many of the 550,000 patients who die
each year of cancer spend their last days in agony. Ashcroft said his
order will not impede the efforts of physicians to manage patients'
pain--which still leaves patients to wonder why he butted in in the
first place.