And now, the federals won't even let us die
FOR EMBARGOED RELEASE DATED NOV. 13, 2001
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
And now, the federals won't even let us die
Richard Holmes, 72, of Salem, Ore., has terminal liver cancer. Several doctors have determined he has less than six months to live; a battery of psychological exams have concluded he's of sound mind and capable of making his own medical decisions.
"I understand that it will be very unpleasant at the end, and I want to be able to end my life on my terms," says Mr. Holmes, who has completed the state's legal requirements to obtain a prescription for life-ending drugs.
Under Oregon's Death with Dignity law, doctors may provide -- but not administer -- a lethal prescription to terminally ill adult state residents.
But now, "My only option is to suffer," Mr. Holmes told a Nov. 7 news conference organized by Compassion in Dying, which supports doctor-assisted suicide.
Why? His doctor has refused to help him, following a new directive from U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft which effectively blocks the Oregon law -- a law under which at least 70 terminally ill people have ended their lives since 1997.
Mr. Holmes is among three terminally ill patients who have joined a lawsuit, filed Nov. 7 by Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers, challenging Mr. Ashcroft's authority to limit the practice of medicine by Oregon's doctors. A motion was granted in U.S. District Court in Portland Thursday, temporarily barring the federal government from implementing Ashcroft's order.
"Ultimately, what we're seeking to do is waylay the federal government from illegally interfering in the practice of medicine in Oregon," Kevin Neely, a spokesman for Oregon's attorney general, told Associated Press reporter Christy Karras.
Opponents of assisted suicide have welcomed Ashcroft's intervention, saying patients "need help living, not dying." Indeed, the undermedication of pain in such patients -- often motivated precisely by legal concerns that doctors will be accused of allowing patients "too much" and thus hastening their ends -- is a national scandal. Much more needs to be done to give terminal patients the option of living out their lives in pain-free dignity -- no one should ever be encouraged to make a quick exit because no one has any more time for them ... or is afraid to give them the medicine they need.
But sometimes that doesn't work. And what does it mean to insist Americans still live in a "free" country, if we don't even retain title to our own lives and bodies -- if those who are sound of mind are to be forced to live out their final days in agony and physical humiliation just so no government bureaucrat will be forced to confront the sobering fact that our lives belong to us individually, rather than to the omnipotent state?
Of course, barring suicide is a doomed venture in the first place -- this issue only arises as an artifact of von Mises' Law, which stands as a warning that federal authorities will be drawn ever deeper into such ethical dilemmas when they start trying to "regulate" medical practice and doctors' use of drugs, in the first place.
Local patients have already threatened to shoot themselves if Mr. Ashcroft's directive goes into effect, reports George Eighmey, executive director of Compassion in Dying. How does (self-avowed) Second Amendment champion Mr. Ashcroft propose to deal with that?
But more to the point, the federals make the same mistake here -- sacrificing the last vestiges of participatory democracy and revealing their true desire to rule as absolute tyrants -- that they've made in violating California's medical marijuana law, even when doing so required the judicial execution (they simply took away his legal medicine) of harmless AIDS patient Peter McWilliams, author of the book "Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do," by federal Judge George H. King on June 14, 2000.
The Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution make it clear that the default setting under our federal system leaves such decision-making power to the states and the people -- not Washington City. Since the federal government is not delegated any specific power to regulate medical practice in the several states, federalism lives -- centralized, Napoleonic tyranny is held at bay -- only so long as the residents of states like Oregon retain the right and power to decide such matters for themselves.
"It sends a terrible message to every doctor in the country that the federal Drug Enforcement Agency is going to decide whether doctors have used medications appropriately," says Barbara Coombs Lee, the author of Oregon's Death with Dignity law. "It has never been the job of the DEA to do that."
As a supposed Constitutional conservative, Attorney General Ashcroft should be deeply ashamed to be barging in where he's neither wanted nor empowered, declaring that Mr. Holmes must die in agony and on the government's schedule, rather than as he and his own doctors decide.
Give it up, Mr. Ashcroft. What kind of man are you? If you will allow us no other freedom -- if we can no longer retain the privacy and dignity even of our phone conversations and our e-mail and our bank accounts -- can't you at least allow us to die in peace?
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Subscribe to his monthly newsletter by sending $72 to Privacy Alert, 561 Keystone Ave., Suite 684, Reno, NV 89503 -- or dialing 775-348-8591. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at 1-800-244-2224.
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
