Where I Stand — Mike O’Callaghan: How to kill yourself

Friday, Feb. 11, 2000 | 8:47 a.m.

Mike O'Callaghan is the Las Vegas Sun executive editor.

NO MATTER HOW OFTEN opponents of assisted suicide and euthanasia warned about it being a slippery slope to legalized murder, nobody wanted to listen. Now, within two years, their worst fears are becoming reality in Oregon. In 1997 that state legalized physician-assisted suicide. Last week cable television in two Oregon cities showed a graphic how-to program for committing suicide. It is the 34-minute "Final Exit" created by Hemlock Society founder Derek Humphry. "Forced Exit," by Wesley J. Smith, warned about how assisted suicide put the perpetrators on the slippery slope to legalized murder.

The Netherlands has had legalized physician-assisted suicide for several years. In 1990 Dutch doctors killed about 5,400 consenting patients, and another 5,900 patients were killed without their consent. An official estimate is that more than 20 percent of those killed without consent were competent but were not asked about their desires. The doctors who killed without consent gave excuses that included: patients had a low quality of life, were suffering or were creating a family hardship.

This makes many of us wonder where the American slide toward assisted suicide will eventually lead the medical profession and society as a whole. What some people are now accepting as a feeling of compassion for suffering of terminal patients can quickly become something entirely different. It can become homicide and, over a period of time, be accepted by many as a cheap method to solve the ills of aging Americans.

In 1994, when Jack Kevorkian was on the loose, Smith wrote an article in USA Today about the Dutch already going down the slippery slope.

Smith wrote: "Beyond these concerns are worries about where legalization (of physician-assisted suicide) would take us in the future. You can bet that the killing won't be restricted to those on death's doorstep. (Half of Kevorkian's 'patients' were not terminally ill. One woman exhibited no evidence of physical illness at all.)

"Once the terminally ill can be hustled into death, others will soon be added to the list: the chronically ill, the mentally anguished, babies born with defects, the elderly and disabled who ask for death during a bout of depression.

"Private acts have public consequences. With legalization, we will be well on the road to a death-on-demand society where the old, sick and disabled will be pressured to lead the way."

Oregon has greased that slippery slope and is now showing the ill, depressed and mentally disturbed how to kill themselves. Just turn on their television and it won't be necessary to bother about a physician. The producer, the aforementioned Humphry, believes it's necessary to show his film on television because not everyone has read his book on how to commit suicide.

Evidently not enough Oregonians were killing themselves to satisfy Humphry and his Hemlock Society. In 1998 15 people took the Oregon way out, and most of them did it because of personal beliefs and fear of becoming dependent on families. This comes down to promoting suicide and eventually homicide for economic reasons. Pain relief has long ago been forgotten and been replaced by convenient euthanasia in the Netherlands, where physician-assisted suicide is also legal.

Things just weren't moving fast enough for Oregon's death dealers so a how-to video became necessary. The results of this latest attempt to legalize murder will be most interesting because they are too far down that slippery slope to return to acceptable human decency.