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Court should uphold Oregon law

As our nation ages and more families confront end-of-life issues, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in a case involving physician-assisted suicide will only gain in significance. The closely watched case out of Oregon, which the court heard Wednesday, will offer clues about what kind of jurist Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. will be. Roberts pressed the attorney seeking to maintain Oregon's Death with Dignity Act, sounding skeptical of his arguments. Harsh questioning is not always indicative of how a justice ultimately votes, and we can only hope that is the case here.

The people of Oregon have twice voted by referendum to allow physicians to prescribe drugs that will bring a peaceful and painless death for terminally ill patients with less than six months to live. Since the law became operational in 1997, only 208 people have exercised that option. But thousands of others are undoubtedly comforted knowing that they may elect to exert more control over their final days.

This fight was joined because former Attorney General John Ashcroft vehemently opposed assisted suicide. In 2001 he ruled that any physicians that participated in Oregon's program would forfeit their federal prescription-writing privileges. Ashcroft claimed that Congress gave him the authority to do so under the Controlled Substances Act.

There are a number of grounds upon which the court could uphold Oregon's scheme, not the least of which is that states have traditionally been given power to regulate the practice of medicine. But what the court should not do is give the Bush administration the ability to scuttle the will of the people of Oregon by exaggerating the reach of the Controlled Substances Act.

The law was passed to prevent legal drugs from being used for illicit purposes, not to limit state experiments in the right to die. In the past, Congress has refused to pass a prohibition on the use of federally controlled substances to hasten death under a doctor's care, and to read that intent into a drug abuse law would be essentially legislating from the bench - something Roberts promised not to do.

In a prior case in which the high court found that the Constitution does not include the right to physician-assisted suicide, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, in a concurring opinion, said that the issue "belongs among state lawmakers," in the " "laboratory' of the states." And the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing for the majority, said the issue should be decided through the "democratic process." Oregon has taken the court up on its suggestion. Now the court needs to stand by its words.

[Last modified October 7, 2005, 01:49:15]