Subject: Oppose US Senate ban on pain relief

[Note: this bill later expired without action in 2000. Readers should keep alert, however, in case a similar bill reappears.]

Ref: "Boston Globe" article
Date: 11/25/2000
Headline: Senate fight looms on suicide law
By Dan Morgan, Washington Post

I encourage ADG members to contact their own Senators to back Senator Wyden against the Religious Right's Orwellianly-misnamed "Pain Relief Promotion Act."

This bill would discourage pain relief by threatening doctors with barbaric 20-year prison sentences for over-treating terminal pain, and no penalty whatsover for under-treating it. The people behind it claim we can trust them not to prosecute doctors acting in good faith (ie the right-wing Christian faith), but they are, after all, the same fanatics who murdered Peter McWilliams in the name of marijuana prohibition.

Even if the effect of this bill could be limited to "assisted suicide," it would still violate the First Amendment ban on Congressional "establishment of religion."

Nothing could more directly concern religion than the manner of a decent death. Does one's own God require that one spend one's last months or years writhing in pointless agony on a hospital bed? With the First Amendment, the Constitution's drafters deferred such questions to the States, or to the people.

Nevertheless, we cannot always count on the US Supreme Court to throw out unconstitutional laws; it is far safer when legislators like Senator Wyden take seriously their oath to uphold the Constitution.

--Hugo S. Cunningham

The previous article prompted a debate:

AZ writes in response to HSC:

Physician assisted suicide should be illegal. Anyone who thinks otherwise has not taken the time to think the issue through completely.

If "suicide" were legal there would be at least two bad effects. One is that it undermines the value of wealth (a leftist goal anyway which is why Oregon is a hotbed of controversy on this issue) and another is that it creates a loophole through which murder can be committed safely.

Consider what would happen to the elderly aunt, grandparent or parent that has a lot of wealth. Legal suicide would encourage relatives and heirs to lay a guilt trip on that person saying "isn't it about time for you to go?" etc. and day after day with this kind of attitude from the people you love and depend on most for emotional support, it is certain that lots of such people will fall into depression and accept "suicide" on the excuse of some infirmity or another. This is a kind of murder that can not be prevented if suicide is legal. In today's world, if you are rich then being elderly has the benefit that the sicker you get and the nearer your death becomes the more your prospective heirs are motivated to be nice to you. Legal suicide would reverse this and such a result is bad.

Consider the benefit of legal suicide if you happen to be in organized crime. All you need is to buy a doctor off and get him to sign papers proving the patient had a serious painful and terminal disease. Now you can just kill anyone you want. There is no way to fix this since requiring a court order just means that a judge has to be paid off as well. I do not know much about medicine but I feel sure there are fatal conditions that a simple autopsy would not reveal. This kind of thing would raise murder to new heights. This is the kind of thing that clandestine groups like the CIA and crime syndicates like the Mafia just love. Suicide has to be illegal so that there is no gray line between natural death and murder, so that an unnatural death always provokes an investigation by the police.

[end of reply]

HSC wrote in reply to AZ:

At 04:53 PM 11/25/00 -0500, AZ wrote:
>Physician assisted suicide should be illegal. Anyone
>who thinks otherwise has not taken the time to think
>the issue through completely.
>
>If "suicide" were legal there would be at least two
>bad effects. One is that it undermines the value of
>wealth (a leftist goal anyway which is why Oregon is
>a hotbed of controversy on this issue)

a bizarre claim that you don't substantiate below

>and another is
>that it creates a loophole through which murder can
>be committed safely.
>    Consider what would happen to the elderly aunt,
>grandparent or parent that has a lot of wealth. Legal
>suicide would encourage relatives and heirs to lay a
>guilt trip on that person saying "isn't it about time
>for you to go?" etc. and day after day with this kind
>of attitude from the people you love and depend on
>most for emotional support, it is certain that lots of
>such people will fall into depression and accept
>"suicide" on the excuse of some infirmity or another.
>This is a kind of murder that can not be prevented if
>suicide is legal. In today's world, if you are rich
>then being elderly has the benefit that the sicker
>you get and the nearer your death becomes the more
>your prospective heirs are motivated to be nice to
>you. Legal suicide would reverse this and such a
>result is bad.

Unlike your next one, this is a substantive argument, the one most commonly made.

It is still legal in Oregon to rewrite your will and cut out relatives who start becoming obnoxious.

If, in any of the 46 "assisted suicides" we have seen so far in Oregon, the sort of psychological abuse you talk about had happened, I am sure religious-right activists would have publicized it by now.

The best safeguard is for those who know the patient to look over his life and expressed values. Was he, in his prime years, a devout conservative Christian who only now in the last months expresses a wish to cast said conservative Christianity aside? In that case, one should check whether someone with unclean motives is working on his mind. Or has he, for most of his life, had liberal and secular leanings, and expressed abhorrence of deathbed suffering and degradation? In that case, an expressed wish for "death with dignity" is likely to be genuine.

In reply to your "value of wealth" scenario, I offer another: An honorable man, after a lifetime of hard work, has put aside enough money for his widow to live in dignity and to make a generous endowment to the scholarship fund of his favorite school. Is it wrong for him to pass that money on as he had always dreamed, rather than drooling and defecating it away in some Alzheimer's ward? or screaming it away in some cancer ward where drug-prohibitionists block painkilling with heroin?

Under the First Amendment, such value judgements should not be imposed on the 50 States by Congress.

>    Consider the benefit of legal suicide if you happen
>to be in organized crime. All you need is to buy a doctor
>off and get him to sign papers proving the patient had
>a serious painful and terminal disease. Now you can just
>kill anyone you want. There is no way to fix this since
>requiring a court order just means that a judge has to
>be paid off as well. I do not know much about medicine
>but I feel sure there are fatal conditions that a simple
>autopsy would not reveal.

It is already possible to murder someone and try to disguise it as suicide, disease, accident, or whatever. Bringing in a second person (the crooked doctor willing to sign a false affidavit) would simply increase your chance of getting caught.

Indeed, even if the doctor didn't intend to rat on you, his affidavit, under Oregon law, would be closely examined by others before the suicide is authorized.

And a crooked doctor cannot get a patient to tell his friends and family over many years that he would prefer "death with dignity" to months of painful agony and/or mind-destroying degradation.

>This kind of thing would raise
>murder to new heights. This is the kind of thing that
>clandestine groups like the CIA and crime syndicates
>like the Mafia just love.

Who is this supposed Mafia hitman trying to murder? His own father the Don? The possibility doesn't worry me very much, and, as I said before, so many other methods are currently available.

>Suicide has to be illegal so
>that there is no gray line between natural death and
>murder, so that an unnatural death always provokes an
>investigation by the police.

These 46 Oregon "assisted suicides" have been far more closely investigated than the average death in Oregon.

--Hugo S. Cunningham