Protection Sought for Oregon Suicide Law

WASHINGTON —  As Oregon reported that 27 terminally ill people used the state’s assisted suicide law to end their lives last year, one of the state’s senators urged the Bush administration Wednesday not to do anything that would thwart the unique statute.

“There is no evidence of a crisis that would compel the federal government to pursue extraordinary means to overturn Oregon’s law,” Democrat Ron Wyden wrote to Attorney General John Ashcroft, amid indications that some Republicans may try again to undo the law.

“There has been no substantiated claim of abuse of Oregon’s law, nor has there been a rush to use the Oregon law,” Wyden wrote.

Oregon is the only state that allows terminally ill patients to die with a doctor’s help. The state Health Division announced that 27 people used the law in 2000, the same number as the previous year.

At least 70 people have ended their lives under the care of doctors since the Death With Dignity Act took effect in October 1997, according to a report published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.

Opponents were dealt a blow in 1998 when then-Attorney General Janet Reno ruled federal drug agents cannot move against doctors who help terminally ill patients die under Oregon’s law.

To try to circumvent Reno’s order, Sen. Don Nickles, R-Okla., pushed a bill last session that would have revoked the licenses to prescribe drugs of doctors who deliberately use federally controlled substances to aid a patient’s death. The bill, stridently opposed by Wyden, never reached the floor for a vote.

During last year’s campaign, Bush said he would have supported the legislation. Now, assisted suicide opponents hope he will issue an executive order to make it more difficult for doctors to use the Oregon law.

Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., who supported the Nickles bill, called Bush and followed up with a letter in January asking that any executive order ensure that doctors still be allowed to treat excessive pain and avoid retroactive punishment for patients they had previously helped to die.

Smith predicted that eventually the Bush administration “is going to enforce the law as it had been for 30 years prior to Janet Reno.”

Nickles, the No. 2 Senate Republican, has not reintroduced the bill. His spokeswoman, Gayle Osterberg, wouldn’t comment on discussions between the White House and the senator or his staff.

Ashcroft, then a Missouri senator, was not among the Nickles bill’s 41 co-sponsors. He has spoken, however, against using government money, such as Medicare or Medicaid, to support the state law.

Every terminally patient who has died under the law took a federally controlled substance, such as a barbiturate. To request a prescription, patients must be 18 years or older, an Oregon resident, capable to communicate health care decisions and diagnosed with an illness that will lead death within six months.