Posted on 09/26/2002 6:14:56 PM PDT by bat-boy
Tenth Amendment And Common Compassion Sacrificed In Raw Power Grab
At least the Bush administration is consistent.
Faced with separate new state laws which ( in a number of states ) allow medical patients to use marijuana on a doctor's recommendation, and which ( in Oregon ) allow doctors to provide -- not administer -- life-ending drugs to terminally ill patients, the Bush administration says no and no: Dying patients not only have to live in pain, they have to live a really long time in pain, no matter what their degree of anguish.
In San Francisco on Monday, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft's Justice Department renewed its campaign to have Oregon's 4-year-old "Death With Dignity Act" thrown out, asking a U.S. appeals court to strip participating Oregon doctors of their right to practice medicine -- or even to charge them criminally.
This from an administration, mind you, which campaigned on a promise that the GOP would do better than the meddling Democrats when it came to respecting the 10th Amendment rights of the several states to decide their own course on such matters ( in which the federal Constitution grants the central government no power to meddle, in the first place ).
Under the Oregon law -- overwhelmingly approved by voters there in 1994 and again in 1997 -- patients who are given less than six months to live are allowed to request a lethal dose of drugs only if two doctors confirm the diagnosis and judge the patient mentally competent to make his or her own decisions.
Oregon has reported that at least 91 patients have used the option since Gov. John Kitzhaber, a physician, signed the law in 1998.
According to the federal logic, however, the lethal prescriptions can be banned on the grounds they do not constitute "medications" under the Controlled Substances Act. But this gets the logic of limited government precisely backwards: If the Oregon lethal doses aren't "medications," the federal government has no grounds to ban or control them, any more than it can jail doctors for advising their patients to drink more orange juice on the theory that orange juice is not a "recognized medication."
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 ever be forced to confront the sobering fact that our lives belong to us individually, rather than to the omnipotent state?
Oregon 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 would Mr. Ashcroft propose to prevent that -- stiff new federal restrictions on the sale of bullets?
Whoops -- better not give them any ideas.
They're not talking about physical pain. The pain they speak of is more of an existential one.
My father was always on about trimming
the bush, or something like that. Damn,
this is some good sh!t.
*Snort*
Yep. If marijuana was available in pill form, the term "medicinal marijuana" would never be heard again.
But it is available. It's called Marinol. Why is this available by prescription but you can't grow a plant that contains the same ingredients in your back yard? Could it have anything to do with government hypocrisy?
Marinol is now, I believe, a Class III Controlled Substance, while the plant remains a Class I. They both contain the same active ingredient. Why is one a (nice profitable) prescription drug, and the other "a drug", as in the War on Drugs? Why is a nice capsule legal "medical marijuana", when the plant is not?
Thank you for proving my point. Nobody wants to swallow Marinol; they'd rather toke a dube.
"The Latin American drug cartels have stretched their tentacles much deeper into our lives than most people believe. It's possible they are calling the shots at all levels of government." - William Colby, former CIA Director, 1995
BTW, why is any of this your's or Ashcroft's business? It should be between a doctor and patient.
But you and Ashcroft feel it is the government's job to say "Administer via the stomach = good. Administer via the lungs = bad." The drug companies support that theory.
And you seriously don't think this has anything to do with the fact that people can't grow pills in their backyard?
My brother died from colon cancer, and administered morphine to himself, intravenously, for three years. It seemed to blunt the pain; we went to DisneyWorld in Orlando while he was under this regimen.
Look, if somebody needs to snort marijuana for pain, that's fine with me. I'm just not convinced that all of this "medicinal marijuana" stuff is about medicine.
But, my dear friend dead, you're a drug legalizer, so we will never agree on this subject.
Toke one for me, and I'll slam some Cabernet for you.
LOL.
I've got better things to with my time. There's intelligent debaters on this site.
I don't want the things you describe. Not at all. However, I believe in the 10th amendment and the citizens of Oregon have voted for it. Regardless of how I feel about it, I don't live in Oregon.
One problem that may help alieviate the problem is proper pain management without government interference. I'm not speaking of pot. I'm speaking of doctors being afraid of prescribing the proper amount of medication due to fears of the DEA coming down on them. This is a real problem of which many articles have been written about.
I don't recall doing that. I recall calling you a drug legalizer. There's a difference.
I've got better things to with my time. There's intelligent debaters on this site.
Yes there are. Some can read, some can't.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.