ASHCROFT'S MEDDLING

IN TWO STATEWIDE ballot initiatives, Oregonians voted overwhelmingly to let
terminally ill patients arrange for physician-assisted suicide. For four
years the state's residents have been able to avail themselves of this
option in a legally prescribed and regulated way. US Attorney General John
Ashcroft has no business trying to overturn the voters' will by sending
federal drug agents after Oregon doctors who prescribe drugs to assist
suicides.

Since the law went into effect, 70 patients are known by officials to have
arranged their own deaths. The law requires two doctors to agree that the
patient has less than six months to live, is capable of making health care
decisions, and has voluntarily chosen to die. The patient's doctor can
prescribe a lethal drug dose but cannot administer it.

Religious conservatives of many different faiths have opposed the law as an
interference with divine will. After failing to stop it at the Oregon
ballot box, they tried to get Congress to undo it. Two years ago the state
House of Representatives voted to do so, but the measure was never taken up
by the Senate.

Now Ashcroft has instructed the Drug Enforcement Administration to seek to
revoke the license of any Oregon doctor who prescribes controlled
substances to assist a patient's suicide. Oregon won a temporary
restraining order through Nov. 20 from a federal judge, but the state's
doctors now face the specter of DEA agents second-guessing their intent
whenever they prescribe certain drugs.

Whatever the outcome of the legal fight Ashcroft has ignited, he will have
signaled to religious conservatives that their interests have not been
ignored. Many were displeased with the president's decision permitting
federal support for even a limited form of stem-cell research earlier this
year. The Ashcroft order will win points in that camp, even though it flies
in the face of Bush administration rhetoric in favor of states' rights and
against federal intrusion.

In 1997 the Supreme Court addressed the issue of physician-assisted suicide
in a way that Ashcroft should examine. While the court said Americans have
no constitutional right to assisted suicide and upheld bans in two states
against it, the justices affirmed the right of states to legalize it.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor referred to the value of the "laboratory of the
states" in letting them try new approaches to complex problems.

Oregon's experience indicates that assisted suicide is a choice few
individuals make, and only after due deliberation. The Oregon model is more
humane than the freelance actions of a Jack Kevorkian and more transparent
than the informal decisions of doctors to increase morphine doses gradually
for terminally ill patients. Ashcroft should keep his hands off Oregon's
experiment.