Under Washington State’s Death With Dignity Act, his physician has given him a prescription for a lethal dose of barbiturates. He would prefer to die naturally, but if dying becomes protracted and difficult, he plans to take the drugs and die peacefully within minutes.
“It’s like the definition of pornography,” Dr. Wesley, 67, said at his home here in Seattle, with Mount Rainier in the distance. “I’ll know it’s time to go when I see it.”
Washington followed Oregon in allowing terminally ill patients to get a prescription for drugs that will hasten death. Critics of such laws feared that poor people would be pressured to kill themselves because they or their families could not afford end-of-life care. But the demographics of patients who have gotten the prescriptions are surprisingly different than expected, according to data collected by Oregon and Washington through 2011. (...)
Oregon put its Death With Dignity Act in place in 1997, and Washington’s law went into effect in 2009. Some officials worried that thousands of people would migrate to both states for the drugs.
“There was a lot of fear that the elderly would be lined up in their R.V.’s at the Oregon border,” said Barbara Glidewell, an assistant professor at Oregon Health and Science University.
That has not happened, although the number of people who have taken advantage of the law has risen over time. In the first years, Oregon residents who died using drugs they received under the law accounted for one in 1,000 deaths. The number is now roughly one in 500 deaths. At least 596 Oregonians have died that way since 1997. In Washington, 157 such deaths have been reported, roughly one in 1,000.
In Oregon, the number of men and women who have died that way is roughly equal, and their median age is 71. Eighty-one percent have had cancer, and 7 percent A.L.S., which is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The rest have had a variety of illnesses, including lung and heart disease. The statistics are similar in Washington.
There were fears of a “slippery slope” — that the law would gradually expand to include those with nonterminal illnesses or that it would permit physicians to take a more active role in the dying process itself. But those worries have not been borne out, experts say.
Dr. Wesley, a pulmonologist and critical care physician, voted for the initiative when it was on the ballot in 2008, two years after he retired. “All my career, I believed that whatever makes people comfortable at the end of their lives is their own choice to make,” he said.
But Dr. Wesley had no idea that his vote would soon become intensely personal. (...)
In both Oregon and Washington, the law is rigorous in determining who is eligible to receive the drugs. Two physicians must confirm that a patient has six months or less to live. And the request for the drugs must be made twice, 15 days apart, before they are handed out. They must be self-administered, which creates a special challenge for people with A.L.S.
Dr. Wesley said he would find a way to meet that requirement, perhaps by tipping a cup into his feeding tube.
The reasons people have given for requesting physician-assisted dying have also defied expectations.
Dr. Linda Ganzini, a professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University, published a study in 2009 of 56 Oregonians who were in the process of requesting physician-aided dying.
“Everybody thought this was going to be about pain,” Dr. Ganzini said. “It turns out pain is kind of irrelevant.”
At the time of each of the 56 patients’ requests, almost none of them rated pain as a primary motivation. By far the most common reasons, Dr. Ganzini’s study found, were the desire to be in control, to remain autonomous and to die at home. “It turns out that for this group of people, dying is less about physical symptoms than personal values,” she said.
by Katie Hafner, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Leah Nash
