Physician-assisted suicide law goes into effect in March

With Washington voters last week approving physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients, doctors, pharmacists and other health-care workers are scrambling to figure out how the controversial law will change the way they do business.

Initiative 1000, known as the Death with Dignity Act, will go into effect as law in March -- four months after voters approved it.

The people behind the initiative said they wanted to leave plenty of time for everyone to understand exactly what it means.

Patients with six months or less to live can now ask their doctors for a prescription for lethal medicine they would self-administer to end their own lives. Doctors opposed to the practice aren't required to write such a prescription, and pharmacists opposed to the practice aren't required to fill it.

Private hospitals, such as Providence Regional Medical Center Everett, a Roman Catholic institution, aren't required to allow patients to take lethal drugs.

"Anybody can opt out," said Eli Stutsman, an Oregon lawyer who wrote the text of both the Oregon and Washington physician-assisted suicide laws. "Entire health-care institutions can opt out. We disagree with our opponents, but we respect their right to opt out."

Voters approved the initiative by 59 percent -- a majority some say constitutes a landslide. The vote came 17 years after the state first considered physician-assisted suicide. The initiative failed then. Advocates say Washington voters likely felt more comfortable with the initiative this year because Oregon has shown that the worst-case scenario situations some opponents warned against aren't likely to occur. Oregon voters approved their Death with Dignity Act in 1994.

"Trust that your neighbor to the south has dealt with this readily," Stutsman said.

The Washington State Medical Association opposed the initiative, but now plans to support doctors who choose to participate in the practice.

"We continue to oppose physician-assisted suicide, but we respect the public's wishes," association spokeswoman Jennifer Hanscom said. "We don't want to be a barrier to this law."

The association has posted the entire law on its Web site and will provide doctors with a summary in the next association newsletter.

Stutsman warns against using the phrase "assisted suicide" to describe the law. Assisted suicide without a doctor's involvement and within the confines of this new law is a crime, and no one is arguing to change that, he said. He also noted that only doctors specializing in end-of-life care are legally able to write a prescription for a lethal drug. A patient won't be able to doctor-shop to get a prescription, he said. It must be written by that patient's primary care physician.

"We want no part of Jack Kevorkian," he said, referring to the Michigan doctor who was jailed for administering lethal injections on patients.

"We would have put Jack Kevorkian in jail in Oregon, and I would have joined that cause," he said.

Backers of Washington's initiative said former Gov. Booth Gardner, the man behind this year's initiative, has said that he would prefer a law that would allow him to end his own life, but he also thinks the law that voters approved this week is good public policy, Stutsman said.

"Booth was very honest," he said. "He acknowledges that his own disease process will likely preclude him from hastening his own death. But he understands the difference between his personal desire and public policy. He knows that as a matter of public policy, this is appropriate."

Reporter Krista J. Kapralos: 425-339-3422 or kkapralos@heraldnet.com.