Dead is dead (unless you're in Soviet America)

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that people dying of cancer could not use unapproved drugs to treat their otherwise-untreatable cancers because the unapproved drugs might... uhm... kill them.

Now, I don't know the difference between being killed by cancer and being killed by an unapproved drug. Seems to me that dead is, well, dead. Regardless of what you call it. Passed on. No more. Ceased to be. Expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late patient. It's a stiff, bereft of life, resting in peace, pushing up the daisies. Whatever you call it, this patient is, uhm, dead. Yet it appears that the U.S. Supreme Court is intent upon playing out a Monty Python skit...

Remember, in Soviet America, it doesn't matter whether dead is dead, what matters is, uhm... err... what? Oh yeah. What matters is that people must die the way the Party apparatchniks want them to die, not the way that they themselves choose to die. Why, if we let people choose how they wanted to die, they might think they, uhm, lived in a free country or somethin'. Eeep! Can't have that!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin