ASHCROFT SHOULD BUTT OUT

Tenth Amendment And Common Compassion Sacrificed In Raw Power Grab

At least the Bush administration is consistent.

Faced with separate new state laws which (in a number of states) allow
medical patients to use marijuana on a doctor's recommendation, and which
(in Oregon) allow doctors to provide -- not administer -- life-ending drugs
to terminally ill patients, the Bush administration says no and no: Dying
patients not only have to live in pain, they have to live a really long
time in pain, no matter what their degree of anguish.

In San Francisco on Monday, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft's Justice
Department renewed its campaign to have Oregon's 4-year-old "Death With
Dignity Act" thrown out, asking a U.S. appeals court to strip participating
Oregon doctors of their right to practice medicine -- or even to charge
them criminally.

This from an administration, mind you, which campaigned on a promise that
the GOP would do better than the meddling Democrats when it came to
respecting the 10th Amendment rights of the several states to decide their
own course on such matters (in which the federal Constitution grants the
central government no power to meddle, in the first place).

Under the Oregon law -- overwhelmingly approved by voters there in 1994 and
again in 1997 -- patients who are given less than six months to live are
allowed to request a lethal dose of drugs only if two doctors confirm the
diagnosis and judge the patient mentally competent to make his or her own
decisions.

Oregon has reported that at least 91 patients have used the option since
Gov. John Kitzhaber, a physician, signed the law in 1998.

According to the federal logic, however, the lethal prescriptions can be
banned on the grounds they do not constitute "medications" under the
Controlled Substances Act. But this gets the logic of limited government
precisely backwards: If the Oregon lethal doses aren't "medications," the
federal government has no grounds to ban or control them, any more than it
can jail doctors for advising their patients to drink more orange juice on
the theory that orange juice is not a "recognized medication."

What does it mean to insist Americans still live in a "free" country, if we
don't even retain title to our own lives and bodies -- if those who are
sound of mind are to be forced to live out their final days in agony and
physical humiliation just so no government bureaucrat will ever be forced
to confront the sobering fact that our lives belong to us individually,
rather than to the omnipotent state?

Oregon patients have already threatened to shoot themselves if Mr.
Ashcroft's directive goes into effect, reports George Eighmey, executive
director of Compassion in Dying. How would Mr. Ashcroft propose to prevent
that -- stiff new federal restrictions on the sale of bullets?

Whoops -- better not give them any ideas.