WILL OF OREGON VOTERS MEANINGLESS TO ASHCROFT

Let me see if I have this straight.

We have terrorists on the loose, anthrax wafting through the mail and
the Justice Department is in hot pursuit of ... terminally ill
patients?

We have another plane crash to investigate, a network of foreign
"sleepers" apparently eluding the FBI, and Attorney General John
Ashcroft is taking aim at ... the state of Oregon?

What's going on here? The rest of us are worried about suicide
bombers. He's worried about doctor-assisted suicide. Who is
Ashcroft's public enemy No. 1: Oncologist bin Laden?

It was bizarre enough last month when federal law-enforcement
officers began a crackdown on cannabis clubs in California that
provide medical marijuana to AIDS and cancer patients. I chalked that
up to reefer madness.

Then Ashcroft, using the same legal ploy, decided to go after an
Oregon law permitting and regulating assisted suicide. He issued a
blunt directive to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) that
doctors would lose their licenses to prescribe federally controlled
drugs if they prescribed them for assisted suicides. Doctors obeying
the state law would be breaking the federal law.

Is it possible that the attorney general took the president too
seriously about getting back to "normal"? Politics as usual?

Assisted suicide has been on the national agenda since Jack Kevorkian
used carbon monoxide - not a controlled substance, by the way - on
his first patient. He jump-started a passionate argument about the
right to die and a deep conversation about the need for compassionate
care at the end of life.

Oregon was the first state to pass a careful law allowing doctors to
provide, though not administer, a lethal prescription to patients
with less than six months to live who wanted the drugs and were
judged capable of making that choice. The voters passed this
referendum in 1994 and again by a wider margin in 1997. Since then,
only 70 Oregonians have chosen assisted suicide. But more have found
comfort in having the option.

Now it appears that elections make little impression on Ashcroft.
After all, the former senator lost one in 2000 to the late Mel
Carnahan, only to gain a Cabinet seat for his conservative views.

Remember back in 1997 when the Supreme Court ruled that there wasn't
any right to die in the Constitution but encouraged state
experiments? In Chief Justice William Rehnquist's words, "Our holding
permits this debate to continue as it should in a democratic society."

But the attorney general ordered the DEA to do what Congress, the
courts and the voters didn't do: stop the debate and upend the state
law. A group of doctors and patients have won a temporary injunction,
but the whole mess goes to court next Tuesday.

Ashcroft is not the only opponent of assisted suicide who frames it
as a "pro-life" issue. But there is something particularly perverse
in applying "pro-life" politics and "rescue" rhetoric to patients who
are dying.

Richard Holmes, one of the patients in the suit, told a reporter,
"I'd love to stay alive... But I've also had enough medical diagnosis
to know this, that my days are numbered." Near the end of a long
battle with liver cancer, he wants to be able to choose that number.

Of course, no one needs a barbiturate to end his life. "I could do
myself in a lot of other ways. I've got three guns in the house," he
says. But isn't this where we came in?

Scare tactics will not only frighten doctors away from prescribing
drugs for patients considering suicide. It will frighten doctors away
from giving patients an alternative: enough painkillers to make their
last days bearable.

In his order, Ashcroft writes blithely, confidently, that there are
"distinctions between intentionally causing a patient's death and
providing sufficient dosages of pain medication necessary to
eliminate or alleviate pain."

But that is not nearly as clear to doctors who use, say, morphine in
a delicate balance between relieving pain and hastening death. As we
lie dying, do we want our own doctors worrying that DEA agents are
counting how many painkillers make a criminal?

Every study will tell you that dying patients are more terrified of
pain than death. Surely, the attorney general of the United States
should be fighting terror, not promoting it.