Pubdate: Sun, 18 Nov 2001
Source: Houston Chronicle (TX)
Copyright: 2001 Houston Chronicle Publishing Company Division, Hearst Newspaper
Contact:  http://www.chron.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/198
Author: Ellen Goodman, Special to the Chronicle
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/ashcroft.htm (Ashcroft, John)

ASHCROFT'S GOING AFTER WRONG 'ENEMY'

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, and 
he's worried about doctor-assisted suicide.

It was bizarre enough last month when federal 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 
that permits and regulates assisted suicide. He issued a blunt directive to 
the Drug Enforcement Administration 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 federal law.

Assisted suicide has been on the national agenda since Jack Kevorkian used 
carbon monoxide 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. Voters passed the 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 U.S. senator lost one in 2000, 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. A group of doctors and patients have won a temporary 
injunction, but the whole mess goes to court 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 also frighten doctors 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 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.

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Goodman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Boston Globe.
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