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Wednesday, May 5, 1976
University Dally Kansan
KANSAN Comment
Opinions on this page reflect only the view of the writer.
And now, honeybees
The 165 members of the Kansas Legislature have gone home to campaign for re-election. During their session in Topeka, they appropriated a somewhat streamlined budget for the state's universities, passed a school finance bill that will allow district budgets to be increased by 107 per cent, and allowed the state court to approve a package of medical malpractice bills designed to assure the availability of malpractice insurance for doctors.
THEY ALSO overspend Gov. Robert F. Bennett's budget recommendations by about $15 million, quarrelled among themselves over who should be the House Speaker and who the Speaker of the House next session, and declared the honeybee the state insect.
They increased the state gasoline tax by one cent a gallon, increased automobile and motorcycle license tag fees, doubled the price of a state park permit and tripled the price of marriage licenses.
IT WAS, FOR the most part, a confused and confusing session. The long-dreamt-for Republican governor didn't usher in a new era of cooperation and efficiency. The Republicans didn't stick together to exploit the vast majorities in the house. The governor didn't get along well with either house or either party.
He seemed to be thinking about long-range goals, such as reorganizing the state government and balancing the budget over the next five years.
Perhaps that is because this is the first time the governor isn't up for re-election along with the legislators.
CERTAINLY THERE were important things the legislature didn't get around to. It didn't establish a department of natural resources, turn the meat inspection program over to the federal government, put liquor by the drink on the ballot or broaden the state's open meeting law.
Both houses and a conference committee wasted a lot of time debating the death penalty. Inadvertently, the legislature did the right thing by not passing any laws that it couldn't decide whom, or under what circumstances, the state should kill.
It sometimes seems that Kansas is so conservative that the less the legislature does the happier everyone is. Conservatives are naturally inclined to preserve the state as it is. Often liberals feel relieved when they hear that the legislature didn't pass the bills it was considering.
THIS MENTALITY can't be allowed to persist. Even now, Kansas is facing many of the problems that urban, industrialized states have been forced to deal with for years. The days of distributing a few state dollars and compulsory taxes over voters will no doubt, keep the need for a more active and progressive state legislature in mind during the coming election.
By John Hickey Contributing Writer
Last Sunday, I went to a soccer game. I didn't go because I especially enjoy soccer. In fact, I don't even want to play the rules. I went because I had never seen a soccer game before.
College is more than classes
AND WHILE I was at the game, I looked around at the empty stands and I began to ponder (pondering becomes a more frequent practice the closer one gets to graduation). What I was thinking about was what a university really is.
A university isn't just classes, studying and exams. It is a learning experience, a broad avenue to new opportunities. It is a place where balllets, operas, movies and music are enjoyed at a minimal cost. It is a place where the opportunity to do something one has never
TOO MANY students become totally involved in attaining high grades. The excuse "I don't have time because I have
done before is constantly available.
about the added attractions— those opportunities that can artistise from the personal experience to develop on a college campus?
EVERYONE KNOWS
By Marne Rindom Contributing Writer
to study” is given time after time. Opportunities slip away while students pore over pages in books.
Certainly most of us came here to pursue a course of study that will lead to a career or to even further study. But what
someone who has a 4.0 GPA or is being recruited by a graduate school of a major university. Some of these people have been remarkably active during their years here but many others have secluded themselves in laboratories, buried themselves
under piles of books and have never seen the "other" side of the University.
I will soon be leaving the University with a 3.3 GPA. It isn't a bad average, but it does look skimpy against many of my friends' 3.7s or 4.0s. I could use it better with it and, most likely, couldn't get into the KU law or medical schools.
I SURE THAT I could have done much better if I had cut out or other social activities. Also, three-hour conversations I've engaged in with roommates could have been eliminated.
traying in the winter. I would never have seen a soccer game. What I would have had was a transcript saying my GPA was 3.6 or 3.7. For my four years at college, I would have a listing of what that would have dwindled in importance as the years went by.
But what would I be left with? I would never have seen a ballet, opera or the Nelson Art Museum. I had been on a canoe trip or zone
YEARS FROM now, when I think back on my years at KU, it won't be my English class that will come to mind. I won't immediately remember the B or C I will get in the class. In short, I think of the time I got up at 4 a.m. and remembered the way Jayhawk Boulevard looked the night of the big streak in 1974.
Someone once said that opportunity knocks only once. here at the university, there is no knocking. It need only be heeded.
Science can't outwit death
By ALISON GWINN
At 7 on the morning of Jan. 15, two policemen knocked on the door of Urs Peter Hammerren, a prominent physician, and informed him he was under arrest for murder. He thought
As it turned out, Haemmelien wasn't accused of murdering someone, but rather of allison died to patients by die-starvation of
committing murder through passive euthanasia.
OF THE NEARLY 2 million American who die each year, nurses, doctors, or nursing homes, isolated from their families or friends, tied to tubes and machines that that their lives are still going.
The ending of these lives—either passively, through treatment or treatments, or actively, through administering or pain-killing.
drugs that speed death—is an increasingly common phenomenon. It has resulted from a society that can, through the medical advances of transfusions, transplants, respirators and heart surgery, maintain "artificial bodies" of numerous dying people who would once have quickly faded away.
MODERN MEDICAL technology has made the incurable disease so rare and the possibility of euthanasia so imminent, that many think soils full of euthanasia legislation is necessary medially, to protect both the patient and the physician.
The connection between abortion and death-on-demand seems to be an erroneous one. The barriers are frequent, though in blanket approval of abortions, could hardly be accused of heartlessness. They are, in fact, a rather altruistic group, who view themselves as the saviours undergoing immediate suffering.
THESE WHO support euthanasia see themselves in the same light—they think their motives are totally pure when ask that the hopelessly incurable be given some medication to put them out of their physical, mental and emotional well-being. The voluntary euthanasia of rational elderly and-or ill persons as the only heartfelt moral solution.
Some say there is no difference between passive and active euthanasia. Passive euthanasia is merely not doing or not giving something; active euthanasia is doing or giving both; and are perused, they say, and both are induced and desired.
"A DELIBERATE ACT
"A DEMISSION when death is sought
is no worse than a act of com-
munity murder. Fletcher, visiting professor of medicine and ethics at the University of Virginia College
of Medicine. "Ethically, they're the same."
Perhaps Fletcher is right. There seems to be little difference between starving to death a patient who has been permanently deformed and injecting that patient with a lethal dosage of drugs, just as the patient had before. between not eating for three weeks and not eating oneself in the head.
So if the method of euthanasia isn't in question, what is?
THEO WHO oppose all forms of euthanasia present the question of whether life can ever be disqualified or devalued enough to be considered subhuman; whether any life can ever lack the quality to make a person technically unalive. They say the medical profession's today's perfect world have come at the expense of those who are imperfect.
The argument seems fallacious. The technological perfection of the American man is not superior to the detriment of those human beings who are nonmoving and nonthinking. If anything, it is being achieved at the expense of a child or a friend a child or a friend unnecessarily and painfully prolonged. Euthanasia should not be a term implying the wasting of a child by a condemnation of the unheroic
IN SUCH complicated cases as that of Karen Ann Quinlan, by questioning the quality of life in a patient meaning of death. Quinlan has no hope of recovery or rehabilitation, has lost half of her body weight and is slowly can be this position. Can this be called life?
Some would say yes, only because a negative answer had been inscribed "position that they had the ability to determine the quality of life, and to say that Quainan's life is not worth living."
Does survival by the means of tubes and artificial machines imitating life express the fullest hope? What is the sanctity of life? The Bible doesn't reveal the situation when it allows Jesus to face his destiny knowing that he will die, but knowing that he would give it a great challenge.
and in that statement, they are probably right. But what place has faith if it isn't taken as the belief in what you can't control in front of it? It just is unnatural to pretend life as it is to shorten it.
MAN, THROUGH medicine and almost everything else he has done, has long been dedicated to frustrating natural forces. But there must be a time when we can ask for assistance when his struggle for acquiring natural forces has lost its purpose of helping man.
Originally, dying was a solitary thing. The dying person had the power over his death but he could still try to himself that he might likely never "morally" allow to happen to others. Now others determine our rate of dying by how well we age and by removing us to the impersonal confines of hospitals when we malfunction. And when others control our heartbeat, we can formerinating between Quintan-type cases and the cases of inconvenience that could force heartless pressures on the heart or the old to submit to euthanasia.
Drug firms swallow bitter pill
A 1974 GALLUP poll showed that 53 per cent of the American public believes a physician should be allowed to end painlessly the life of a person with a serious condition, and the patient and his family request it. About 75 per cent of physicians interviewed by Medical Economics magazine say they have practiced it. Yet, cases are never reported, and the case statistics distinct between humanistic intentions and abuses of euthanasia are made, and until the dying are given some say in the decisions now being made by medical and law authorities. Legislation is made will the freedom of dying equal the freedom of living.
WASHINGTON—"It is better," C. Wright Wills wrote, "to take one dime from each of 10 million people at the point of a corporation to $100,000 each gun. It is also safer." The blacksheet gang on the benches of the nation's courtsrooms has generally ruled that it is too much trouble to stop big corpse stealing nickels and dimes from large hordes of small customers.
MANUFACTURERS WHO collude to rig prices against their wholesalers have occasionally found that they have to pay the treble damages of an insurer under the Claxton Act. Judges are most likely to be just when having to settle a quarrel between two corporations. But if a bunch of baskies conspire to fix prices so that they can get a dime more a loaf from retail stores, then the company generally ruled that the victims of this kind of theft can't get their money back, much less treble damages. The reason the judges proffer is that such cases are "unmanageable." If you were to sue an insurer under the Claxton Act, you punished, if you steal from the working people, you won't.
YET NOT every man or woman in a black sheet is lazy, alcoholic, ignorant or biased. Even with the most careful
screening procedures a good judge监护 onto the bench now and then, and that explains the difference. The teacher Miles W. Lord, who supervised
EVER MINDFUL of the passage of time, two full years later the commission overruled that statement, that some of the companies had
By Nicholas von Hoffman
THEY SAY that only fate should decide death, and that it is a profound sin to consider ourselves as humans "in our fates." We are not our fates. Believing as such is the antithesis of faith, they say,
(C) King Features
the repayment of almost $40 million to 885,000 people who, it was alleged, were overcharged by companies for broad-spectrum coverage. There has never been a case like it and may never be again, because Judge Lord's conduct leaves him vulnerable to removal on the grounds of gross misconduct and excessive farness.
played fast and loose with the Patent Office and that five of them had conspired to fix the patent and to create tetracycline. Time marches in 1966 a Federal Court of Appeals, in its turn, throws out the commission's decision, because he heard and then back to court again with the final result in 1968 being that two of the companies involved would have their patients with others.
In keeping with its tradition of interminable futility, the Federal Trade Commission opened this case in 1983 with an inquiry into the antibiotics industry. Five years later it had gotten its act sufficiently complex to necessitate a number of drug companies of a variety anti-competitive naughtiness. By 1961 an FTC hearing examiner exonerated the defendants.
In 1959 the Senate investigated the matter, and for all we know they're still at it. Mr. Sullivan departed the Department joined in the fun by bringing criminal charge Pfizer, Cyanamid and Bristol with conspiracy to fix the drug supply at the Office. Squibb and Uplow were
unindicted co-conspirators.
Acting with dispatch, Justice took case to trial a mere 9 years later, and the defendant corporations were found guilty on all counts. Don't rejoice. Four years after that the convictions were reversed, and I responded after that-20 years after that the hostage was started-all were re-tried, found not guilty on all counts and dismissed.
MEANWHILE, MORE than 100 civil suits were piling up in the courts. Everybody was suing—states, retailers, industry representatives, length the companies offered to settle the mess for $100 million. Practically everybody accepted but California, Kansas, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington. The $13 million they would have under the settlement didn't seem to be enough for them.
They filed a class-action suit on behalf of themselves, as institutional purchasers of these drugs, and their citizens. Under the system, which are designed to make class-action suits as difficult as possible, the states had to send a letter informing every household within their county about the quarter of a million documents had to be subpoenaed and studied. Twenty-thousand
pages of previous testimony had to be gone over, but when it was not kidding, that he wasn't going to dismiss the suit on the grounds that it was too difficult to settle for just short of $40 million.
To do this, a computer company was hired, along with an analyst and a number of countants, market researchers and various consultants. A system had to be worked out to meet the demands of thousands of claims. To
NOW, UNDER the supervision of Judge Lord, Operation MoneyBack began. The court intended to see that everyone who was allegedly overcharged or companies confessed guilt to this day—would actually have their dough returned.
do this, millions were notified by mail that they might have a claim. TV, radio and computer facilities to explain what these letters were about. And by the time Operation Killarney was finished, nearly 900,000 people had gotten their money back. The total cost of the distribution barely exceeded the interest the money earned while Operation Killarney was being designed and executed.
MOST JUDGES wouldn't permit such a massive act of justice to take place in their courts. If the judge illustrates how civil suits might do what Justice Department, Trade Commission and Treasury have tried to happen, though, Judge Lord can't hear all the cases.
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