General Overview: Washington's Death with Dignity Act
By Elenor K. Schoen
Washington's Initiative 1000, the "Death with Dignity Act," duplicates Oregon's physician-assisted suicide law, is fraught with problems, and is, in some cases, even worse than Oregon's law. It was passed by Washington State voters in November 2008 and implemented on March 5th, 2009.
The following TV and radio ads were created by the Coalition Against Assisted Suicide. These ads tell the real story about the dangers of legalized assisted suicide. They include actor Martin Sheen, Oregon cancer patient Barbara Wagner(who died of cancer shortly after the ads were aired), ALS patient John Peyton, and former dean of the UW nursing school Rheba DeToryay. Suicide proponents dumped millions of dollars into deceptive advertising in the last weeks of the campaign, thus muting the poigant messages contained in these ads.
Rita Marker, executive director of the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, has analyzed Washington's so-called Death with Dignity Act , which classifies a lethal drug overdose as a medical treatment option and permits a doctor to help a patient commit suicide if he has a life expectancy of six months or less. She finds that under the Initiative 1000/Washington's Death with Dignity Act:
- Physicians are not required, but only encouraged, to notify family members in advance of a patient taking the lethal prescription.
- There are no safeguards for the patient once the prescription is written, no monitoring required to insure the competency of the patient at the time of the overdose, and no checking for overt pressure or force being applied to the patient to take the drug against his will.
- Government health programs, managed care programs, and HMOs are allowed to approve prescriptions for health care cost-cutting purposes. Although coercion and force are prohibited, there is nothing preventing a physician from suggesting or encouraging patients to use assisted suicide.
- Doctors are permitted to prescribe lethal barbiturates for mentally ill or depressed patients. A referral for counseling is only necessary if the attending or consulting physician believes a patient may be suffering from a psychiatric or psychological disorder or depression that "caus[es] impaired judgment." If the counselor believes the patient's judgment is not impaired, the lethal prescription may be issued.
- Although physicians are required to report assisted suicide deaths to the state, there are no penalties for not reporting them or for filing incomplete or inaccurate reports.
- A patient must make two oral requests and one witnessed, written request for assisted suicide. The two oral requests (which need not be witnessed) can be phoned in, the written request can be mailed to the doctor, and the doctor can fax the prescription to a pharmacy, where the patient-or someone designated as the patient's agent-can pick it up.
- Using the term "suicide" is not allowed. All state agencies must refer to assisted suicide as "obtaining and self-administering life-ending medication." Death certificates must refer to the cause of death as the illness the patient was diagnosed with before dying by assisted suicide.
In Washington, it is required that physicians must falsify the death certificate to put the cause of death as the underlying disease rather than the lethal drug overdoses - in Oregon, such falsification was suggested rather than required.