In what must be one of its most ignorant editorials ever, The Oregonian chooses to cite the US federal controlled substances laws as a worthy grounds for overturning Oregon's Death With Dignity Act ( A State's rights, a state's wrongs 10/19/99). The old saying that politics make strange bedfellows is truly exemplified in the paper's opinion. What is clearly an Oregon medical issue, dealing with health concerns of terminally ill Oregonians, is being distorted by the US Congress through a bill, The Pain Relief Promotion Act of 1999, into a criminal justice issue. Sponsored by Republican Congressman Henry Hyde and other congressional politicians, this proposal turns Oregon's Death with Dignity Law into a pawn in the federal "War on Drugs." However, the US Drug Enforcement Agency's criminal justice approach to drug regulation is one of the least enlightened and most disfunctional operations in the whole federal bureaucracy.
The Oregonian editorial confuses the facts about the federal controlled substances regulations. Only Schedule I drugs, among them heroin and, incongruously, marijuana, are excluded from being used for medical purposes. Other addictive substances controlled under the law as Schedule II drugs, such as cocaine, morphine, etc. are allowed to be prescribed by licensed doctors. The barbiturates used under the Death With Dignity act are listed in the schedule II group. Thus, the issue of Oregon's Death with Dignity Act remains a political definition of proper medical practice. For Oregonians this has been decided at the ballot box twice: lethal doses of barbiturates may, under carefully controlled circumstances, be lawfully prescribed to terminally ill patients for the purpose of ending the patient's life.
The paper even quotes Attorney General Janet Reno as saying states have the right to define "legitimate medical practice." Legitimate medical practice remains the issue, not, as The Oregonian has so ridiculously stated, drug addiction. A lethal dose is not likely to result in drug addiction. The paper picked the wrong strand when it began grasping at threads this time.