By Tony Snow / The Detroit News

Between Reno and Kevorkian, dignity of life under attack

    WASHINGTON

he quality of justice has always been somewhat erratic in the Justice Department of Janet Reno. It thus didn’t come as a complete surprise last week when the attorney general decided not to prevent physicians in Oregon from prescribing lethal doses of controlled substances for patients who want to die.

    Reno delivered her decision in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, who had asked whether Oregon’s “Death with Dignity Act” violates the federal Controlled Substances Act.

    In rendering judgment, Reno had to balance three considerations: federal law, the Constitution and the regulatory regime of the Clinton administration.

    Begin with federal statutes. In an opinion dated Nov. 5 of last year, Drug Enforcement Agency administrator Thomas Constantine told Hyde: “(The DEA is) persuaded that delivering, dispensing or prescribing a controlled substance with the intent of assisting a suicide would not be under any current definition of a ‘legitimate medical purpose.’ ” In other words, Oregon’s law violates the federal statute.

    Reno disagrees. She told Hyde that a) assisted suicide doesn’t threaten public health or safety, b) it falls within “the course of professional practice” and c) it’s none of the DEA’s beeswax whether the Oregon law violates the Controlled Substances Act. If the law needs parsing, Reno said, she’ll do it.

    Unfortunately, Reno sometimes reads statutes in idiosyncratic ways. Witness her reluctance to appoint an independent counsel in Chinagate. In this case, she also followed her instinct for taking the road less traveled. Immediately after arguing that the Oregon law doesn’t conflict with the Controlled Substances Act, she reassured Hyde that the act probably does apply to assisted suicide everywhere else.

    The Constitution may support this view. She could have argued that the 10th Amendment, which reserves to states all unenumerated powers, makes Oregon sovereign in the controversy. She almost claimed as much when she wrote Hyde: “There is no evidence that Congress, in the CSA, intended to displace the states as the primary regulators of the medical profession. ...”

    Unfortunately, she almost never hews to that position. She authorized legal action against California when its voters approved the “medicinal” use of Marijuana. She also unleashed the hounds after Arizonans passed a more sweeping measure, which would let ailing citizens use any number of controlled substances to allay their misery. In both cases, she didn’t hesitate to let Uncle Sam “displace the states as the primary regulators of the medical profession.”

    That may be because the Controlled Substances Act permits the Department of Justice to play the role of sheriff when states adopt lax attitudes in the drug war. It all but urges the feds to track down doctors, pharmacists and others who might dispense potentially dangerous drugs in an intentionally reckless matter.

    Finally comes the most interesting wrinkle of all. The Clinton White House and Congress are locked in a battle over how to regulate cigarettes. The administration wants to define cancer sticks as “narcotics delivery devices,” for the purposes of controlling their distribution and sale. Tort lawyers want to sue tobacco companies into obsolescence on grounds that cigarettes kill.

    In short, Team Clinton and the legal profession want to wring a half-trillion dollars or more out of the tobacco industry because its companies distribute lethal substances.

    Yet every cigarette sale has the essential elements of an assisted suicide: You have competent consumers — only an imbecile wouldn’t know the reported dangers of smoking. You have consensual use. You have the legal distribution of a product. The only difference is that a tobacconist merely wishes to fulfill a consumer’s desire, while a physician in an assisted suicide wants to kill the client.

    So why can the administration wage full-scale war on cigarettes, which kill slowly, but not against physicians who want to kill quickly? What’s the key moral difference between the two events? The chief variance is this: Tobacco companies make a great target for lawsuits. Depressed people who contemplate suicide don’t.

    Reno probably was right on the legal merits. The Supreme Court has affirmed states’ rights to adopt assisted-suicide laws, and the 10th Amendment provides a sufficient reason for Uncle Sam to butt out.

    But as Jack Kevorkian mutilates victims to cull their cooling vital organs, and as doctors in the Netherlands kill off elderly patients to relieve the “burden” on society, it is becoming increasingly obvious that something is going terribly wrong around the world. If our laws and policies don’t soon acknowledge life’s sacredness, we’ll soon start getting a lot more medically induced deaths — and a lot less dignity.

Tony Snow is The News editorial page’s Washington columnist. His column is published on Monday and Thursday. Write letters to The Detroit News, Editorial Page, 615 W. Lafayette Blvd., Detroit, Mich. 48226, or send an e-mail to letters@detnews.com