Slashdot Mirror
Massachusetts May Soon Change How the Nation Dies
Hugh Pickens writes "Lewis M. Cohen reports that this Election Day, Massachusetts is poised to approve the Death With Dignity Act, a modernized, sanitized, politically palatable term that replaces the now-antiquated expression 'physician-assisted suicide.' Oregon's Death With Dignity Act has been in effect for the past 14 years, and the state of Washington followed suit with a similar law in 2008. But the Massachusetts ballot question has the potential to turn death with dignity from a legislative experiment into the new national norm, because the state is the home of America's leading medical publication (the New England Journal of Medicine), hospital (Massachusetts General), and four medical schools (Harvard, Boston University, University of Massachusetts, and Tufts). If the act passes in Massachusetts, other states that have previously had unsuccessful campaigns will certainly be emboldened to revisit this subject. The initiative would allow terminally ill patients with six months or less to live to request from their doctor a prescription for a lethal dose of a drug. Doctors do not have to offer the option at all, and patients must make three requests, two verbal and one written. They must self-administer the drug, which would be ingested. The patients must be deemed capable of making an informed decision. 'It's all about choice,' says George Eighmey, a key player in instituting the Oregon law, defending it against repeal and shepherding it into reality. 'You decide. No one else can decide for you. No can can force you into it, coerce you into it or even suggest it to you unless you make a statement: "I don't want to live like this any more" or "I'm interested in that law out there, doctor, can you give me something to alleviate this pain and suffering."'"
I highly recommend Terry Pratchett's 2011 documentary "Choosing to Die." You may watch the full film on youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slZnfC-V1SY I found the documentary extremely informative and moving.
The major need for a doctor and prescription drugs is to make sure the job is done right the first time, and in a way that will not traumatize your relatives (beyond the fact you're going to be a corpse at the end of the process). A failed suicide will leave a very real chance of you being even worse off, and under the current system, kept alive in that state and possibly in a padded room to boot.
For the same reason, that doctors are there to supervise lethal injection executions, a doctor will need to be there to make sure that the method and means are sound and also to ensure that there are no conditions that might complicate the process.
Additionally, the law ensures that you have assistance without that assistant being charged with a crime afterward. Suicides using perfectly effective methods can easily fail, and when they are done by disabled people, are much more likely to fail without assistance.
I don't know how I feel about legal suicide myself. In theory, they aren't impinging on my rights simply by doing so, so it's not my business.
On the other hand, I don't condone it, and if it became subsidized by government money (at some point in the future), then I would then be forced to have an opinion on it because then I become responsible for paying for it.
Hopefully, someone does the smart thing and leaves the funding for the actual actions to a nice, private charity organization made up of people who agree with it.
There was a BBC program on this subject. They investigated many historical methods of execution, deciding on which was the 'ideal' method. Criteria were chosen: It had to be reliable, easily administered by persons of little training, not require difficult-to-source materials, clean and painless. The eventual winner was aspixiation with nitrogen, which met all of these criteria. This idea was then presented to the leader of a pro-death-penalty pressure group in the US.
He rejected it immediately, on the grounds that it was inhumane... to the victims. How is it justice, he asked, for a murderer to die peacefully if his victim did not?
There we have the problem of execution. The death penalty has many purposes. It is a deterrent. It is a way to dispose of those too dangerous to ever free. But it is also a way to satisfy people's base desire for revenge, to see the guilty made to suffer slowly and painfully. Nitrogen could have been introduced a century ago with ease - but it isn't politically viable: It's just *too* painless to satisfy that desire to inflict punishment. If the death doesn't hurt, people feel that the scales of karma remain unbalanced.
You're missing the point.
The point is to die openly and with dignity. You can tell people you're going to do it. You can arrange things legally. You can say goodbye. They might even want to hold your hand or be in the next room when you do it.
It's completely different than letting somebody come home to a dead body or get a phone call from the police because the neighbors are complaining about a bad smell...
No sig today...