Ruling preserves assisted suicide in Oregon -- for now

Advocates of physician-assisted suicide won the first round of the latest judicial battle.

By Andis Robeznieks, AMNews staff. May 6, 2002.

A federal judge's ruling that U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft had overstepped his authority when he declared that writing lethal-dose prescriptions was not "legitimate medical practice" gave some observers of Oregon's physician-assisted suicide debate a feeling of déjà vu.

"We've been through this before," said Oregon Medical Assn. Associate Executive Director Jim Kronenberg.

This thought was echoed by Scott Swenson, executive director of Oregon Death With Dignity.

Swenson noted that Oregon had approved physician-assisted suicide in two statewide referendums, that the U.S. Congress twice had failed to overturn the law, and that -- in 1997 -- the U.S. Supreme Court essentially had ruled that it was up to individual states to decide whether physician-assisted suicide should be permitted.

"If we need the Supreme Court to say it twice, perhaps they will do so," Swenson said.

Portland-based U.S. District Judge Robert Jones ruled April 17 that Ashcroft had overstepped the authority of the federal Controlled Substances Act when he declared that physician-assisted suicide was not a "legitimate medical purpose" and threatened to revoke the license to prescribe narcotics from any doctor who wrote a lethal-dose prescription to a patient who requested one.

"The determination of what constitutes a legitimate medical practice or purpose traditionally has been left to the individual states," Jones stated in his ruling. "State statutes, state medical boards and state regulations control the practice of medicine. To allow an attorney general ... to determine the legitimacy of a particular medical practice without a specific congressional grant of such authority would be unprecedented and extraordinary." [...]

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Oregon Medical Assn. (http://www.ormedassoc.org/)

Oregon Death With Dignity (http://www.dwd.org/)

Physicians for Compassionate Care (http://www.pccef.org/)

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