Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Oregon Assisted Suicide Case.

When the United States Supreme Court hears the case of Gonzales v. Oregon, the justices will review a split decision of a three-judge panel that struck down a directive banning the use of federally controlled drugs in assisted suicides.

The Court will hear the case in the term that begins next October, the first time the justices will have addressed the assisted suicide issue since 1997. In Washington v. Glucksberg, a unanimous Court held there is no right to assisted suicide in the United States Constitution.

At issue in Gonzales is not the "right" to assisted suicide, although that is a misleading shorthand description found in a number of early news accounts. The issue is rather whether a state, in this case Oregon, can unilaterally override what had been uniform federal policy against allowing the use of federally controlled drugs to kill patients. The case has been in the courts since November 2001.

Background

Oregon voters first legalized assisted suicide in 1994, but the law did not finally take effect until November 1997. The law, as bioethicist Wesley Smith has written, presented state regulators with a problem: "They wanted to authorize doctors to prescribe barbiturates as killing agents."

But under the Controlled Substances Act the use of narcotics and other dangerous drugs is generally prohibited except when a doctor prescribes them for a "legitimate medical purpose." On November 5, 1997, then-Drug Enforcement Administrator Thomas Constantine announced that since assisting suicide is not "a legitimate medical purpose[,] ... prescribing a controlled substance with the intent of assisting a suicide" violates federal law.

However, a mere seven months later, Clinton Administration Attorney General Janet Reno partially overruled Constantine's decision. She agreed that "adverse action" might be warranted "where a physician assists in a suicide in a state that has not authorized the practice under any conditions, or where a physician fails to comply with state procedures in doing so."