Assisted Suicide Over Latest Hurdle Oregon Representatives Pleased By Justice Department Meeting

Oregon’s legal team scored some constitutional points with Justice Department lawyers Thursday, increasing the chances the state will be allowed to implement its assisted suicide law unimpeded by federal threats, Sen. Ron Wyden said.

“I think we’re going to win at this point,” Wyden told reporters after the meeting in his office. “My judgment that our case is strong was strengthened today.”

Oregon’s Democratic senator and representatives of Gov. John Kitzhaber’s office met with Justice Department lawyers to try to end the dispute over whether the federal government will allow Oregon doctors to help patients commit suicide.

Wyden’s chief of staff, Josh Kardon, and other members of the Oregon team received additional encouraging signals during a meeting at the White House later Thursday with Clinton’s domestic policy advisers.

Oregon voters on Nov. 4 soundly defeated a measure that would have repealed the physician-assisted suicide law first approved in 1994.

The next day, however, the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Thomas Constantine, warned that doctors could lose their licenses to prescribe federally controlled drugs if they dispensed such medications to help assist suicides.

Among those who took part in Thursday’s meeting was Bill Wyatt, Kitzhaber’s chief of staff, who said the Justice Department lawyers were an “open and willing audience, but pretty noncommittal.”

But Wyden said the participants had a “discussion that weighs in Oregon’s favor” in regard to the federal government’s possible use of the U.S. Constitution’s “commerce clause” to block the law.

The Oregon Democrat said he told the lawyers that Congress had an opportunity to evoke its power under the clause to regulate interstate commerce and prohibit use of drugs to assist suicide, but that Congress in fact had not taken that course of action.

“The Oregon team made a compelling case this morning as to why the federal government shouldn’t trample on Oregon’s democracy,” Wyden said. “‘Our case is strong, based on the questions that were asked today.”

Wyden said he personally opposes the practice of assisted suicides and voted twice against the idea in Oregon’s 1994 election and in favor of the repeal earlier this month.

“But I’m not willing to substitute my personal views for the views of the majority of Oregonians who have gone to the polls twice,” he said.

Kardon said he got a similar message later in the day from Clinton administration officials at the White House.

“They made a point of communicating that, while like Sen. Wyden, President Clinton is personally opposed to assisted suicide, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the president agrees with the administrator at the DEA,” he said.

“That was a very important thing for us to hear,” he said.

Wyatt said the DEA’s letter “clearly caught the Justice Department by surprise.”

He said it was important to act quickly to clarify the situation for doctors in the state and that he “wouldn’t presume to give advice” to any doctor confused about how to proceed.

On Wednesday, Kitzhaber sent President Clinton a letter asking for his help in allowing Oregon’s assisted suicide law to be used.