ASHCROFT: NOT BUSY ENOUGH?

Attorney General 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.

Exactly what is the problem Ashcroft believes needs solving? Since Oregon's
law took effect in 1997, about 70 people have taken their lives 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. And on Thursday, a federal judge temporarily
blocked enforcement of Ashcroft's order.

Even so, Ashcroft's effort is likely to have a chilling effect on doctors
in Oregon and elsewhere who hope 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 ha s 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.