Using "States' Rights" to Do Wrong.

The U.S. Supreme Court is taking up issues of life and death again, this time in the context of physician-assisted suicide.

Led by new Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court heard oral arguments October 5 in Gonzales v. Oregon. The case involves a 2001 directive by then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, saying that deliberately prescribing lethal overdoses for patients who want to commit suicide is not a "legitimate medical purpose" for federally controlled drugs under the Controlled Substances Act. The state of Oregon, with the nation's only law allowing physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill, has sued against this directive. All of Oregon's reported assisted suicides have used federally controlled drugs (barbiturates).

The Ashcroft directive replaces a 1998 determination by Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno that had been more pleasing to euthanasia advocates. She ruled that by rescinding its own penalties for assisting the suicides of certain patients, Oregon had effectively succeeded in unilaterally amending federal drug laws as well, establishing assisted suicide as a "legitimate medical practice" within Oregon's borders.

But nothing in the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA) indicates that an individual state, by dropping its own state penalties against assisted suicide, can convert such killing into "legitimate" medicine in the eyes of the federal government. In fact, provisions to ensure that narcotics and other dangerous drugs are used solely for a "legitimate medical purpose" and are never used to endanger "public health and safety" were incorporated into the federal Act and its implementing regulations precisely to establish a uniform federal standard ...