From the Party of "Smaller Government"

One of the highlights of the Supreme Court's last term was Oregon v. Gonzalez, in which the Court ruled that the Attorney General (it was Ashcroft at the time) could not unilaterally decide that doctors acting under Oregon's Death With Dignity Act were not engaged in the "practice of medicine" and thus liable to lose their Federal permission to prescribe controlled substances. But, as Jacob Sullum points out over at Reason, GOP Senator Sam Brownback (from Kansas - you know, the "no evolution" people) is sponsoring legislation that would achieve the same result dreamed of by Ashcroft. The problem Brownback seeks to cure, however, simply isn't there, as Sullum explains:

The Death With Dignity Act has been in force for nearly a decade now, and it has not precipitated a mad rush for the exit it unlocked. Last year 38 patients used drugs prescribed under the law to kill themselves, almost the same as the 2004 total and down from a peak of 42 in 2003. Close to half of the patients who use the law to get barbiturate prescriptions do not take the drugs, but presumably they derive comfort from having the option.

Brownback and other critics of physician-assisted suicide imagine this highly constrained experiment in expanded autonomy for people on the verge of death will somehow devolve into a homicidal free-for-all featuring involuntary euthanasia and infanticide. This is like assuming that allowing women to get breast implants will lead plastic surgeons to start kidnapping those they deem insufficiently endowed and cutting into them without permission.

A fundamentalist right winger struggling to solve a non-existent problem. And using the power of your Federal government to do it. *sigh*