'RIGHT TO DIE' DEBATE STAYS AT STATE LEVEL

The U.S. Supreme Court's recent right-to-die decision was narrow and
specific rather than broad and general. But it came down on the correct side.

When the court last visited the subject in 1997, it ruled that there
is no constitutional "right to die" at the federal level, and that
the matter of physician-assisted suicide should be fought out in "the
laboratory of the states."

One of those states, Oregon, had adopted the so-called Death With
Dignity Act in 1994. It lets doctors prescribe (but not administer)
lethal drugs when they have been asked for by patients who have been
certified by two physicians to have less than six months to live and
who are found to be mentally competent.

When Congress failed to override the law, then-Sen. John Ashcroft, a
Missouri Republican, voted on the losing side. Ashcroft still felt so
strongly about the matter that he attempted to do something about it
through the back door when newly elected President George W. Bush
named him attorney general in 2001. Ashcroft tried to foil the Oregon
law and keep doctors from prescribing the lethal drugs by prosecuting
them for violating the Controlled Substances Act.

It was these prosecutions that the court has now correctly thrown
out, ruling in effect that the (now former) attorney general was
wrong to use a law intended for another purpose to forward his agenda.

That one was a no-brainer. Left unaddressed, though, is the larger
question of whether or not the legal availability of assisted suicide
is a social good. That issue will loom even larger if, as expected,
this ruling emboldens other states to adopt laws similar to Oregon's.

The debate involves anguishing questions with no easy answers. But we
think the court is right to hold that the debate should continue in
the "laboratory of the states" without being made into a federal case.