MEDDLING WITH OREGON'S LAW

There is something cruel and intrusive about a bill passed by the
House of Representatives this week making it a federal crime for
doctors to prescribe lethal drugs so that terminally ill patients can
end their own lives.

Congress is behaving like a bad-tempered elephant, stomping and
trumpeting to overturn an assisted-suicide law approved twice by the
voters of Oregon. The Oregon law, a responsible effort to ease
suffering at the end of life, allows physicians to aid suicides of the
terminally ill under carefully defined circumstances.

As America's population ages and medicine's ability to keep people
alive improves, some terminally ill patients may want to end their
lives rather than endure more misery.

But as captives to a system whose ethic is to help them live, they
cannot do so. To fill that void, Dr. Jack Kevorkian emerged in
Michigan as a self-anointed angel of death who helped more than 100
people end their lives.

But when he actually killed someone himself, public sympathy ended and
a jury sent him to prison.

In Oregon, an alternative was developed with the help of the
terminally ill, their families, the legislature, the voters, the
courts and the state health bureaucracy. Oregon's Death With Dignity
Act allows a terminally ill adult -- judged by two physicians to be of
sound mind, with less than six months to live -- to request a lethal
dose of drugs.

There has been no rush to death as a result.

Only 15 people killed themselves that way in 1998, many with their
families around them. But Congress, alarmed by the Oregon example, is
determined to overturn it. The bill that passed the House masquerades
as a progressive attempt to ensure pain relief.

It says that doctors may legitimately prescribe high doses of drugs to
alleviate pain, even at "the risk of death." But if the drugs should
be prescribed "for the purpose of causing death," then the prescribing
doctor could spend 20 years in prison.

That draconian provision will discourage aggressive pain relief, since
doctors may fear they could be charged with intent to kill whenever a
patient dies from the effects of pain medication.

The House vote is already stirring anxiety and worry that the Drug
Enforcement Agency will be hanging over the shoulders of physicians
caring for people at the end of life. The Senate or, failing that,
President Clinton should kill this bill, and let people deal with
their own issues of life and death, in states that permit it. ---