c. 2005 Religion News Service

PORTLAND, Ore. _ Oregon’s dirty little secret is getting out _ finally and just in time for the U.S. Supreme Court to contemplate the regulatory and pharmacological netherworld our assisted-suicide law has created. Our dirty little secret: The pills used in Oregon’s assisted-suicide experiment don’t always kill.

If that has a familiar ring it’s because critics of the state’s approach to assisted suicide had warned that the drugs wouldn’t always lead to the swift, sweet or sure death that assisted suicide’s promoters promised. For their pains, critics were called liars, but last week Oregonians learned that one terminally ill man awoke nearly three days after he took his kill-pill potion. “What the hell happened?” David E. Prueitt Estacada, Ore., asked his wife upon waking up. “Why am I not dead?”

Excellent questions. Critics provided answers years ago, and last week assisted-suicide fans finally had to admit a truth they once deemed a lie. Said Barbara Coombs Lee, co-president of Compassion & Choices: “He just didn’t die.”

Assisted-suicide supporters, and even some non-supporters, hasten to note that this is the first problem in 171 cases. But this betrays a “hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil, see-no-evil” approach to our experiment. In fact, the problems with the assisted-suicide law _ its reliance on drugs, its sham safeguards and feckless reporting regime _ were apparent before last week’s news.

The veil lifted in 1999. Patrick Matheny’s brother-in-law, Joe Hayes, told The Oregonian he felt compelled to “help” Matheny end his life when the drugs presented a problem. “It doesn’t go smoothly for everyone …” he said. Was Matheny reduced to the vomiting that assisted-suicide foes warned of? Did Hayes resort to a plastic bag or pillow over the head to help him die? Hayes wouldn’t say what prompted his intervention or how he helped.

Was this case a fluke? No. In early 2000, a Barbara Coombs Lee friend and assisted-suicide backer told an audience about another less-than-perfect case. After one man took the pills, Cynthia Barrett said, “he began to have some physical symptoms. The symptoms were hard for his wife to handle. Well, she called 9-1-1. The guy ended up being taken by paramedics to a Portland hospital. Revived. In the middle of it. And transferred to a nursing facility.

Like Prueitt, this man later died of natural causes. Barrett refused to describe those complications, and Compassion in Dying’s George Eighmey, who was there, even denied that Barrett had said any such thing when Brainstorm magazine reported her comments. Except that the article’s author, Cathy Hamilton, had taped Barrett’s remarks. This is the same George Eighmey who told The Oregonian last week that the recent Prueitt case is the first failed case. Oh, really?

What’s even more disturbing than assisted-suicide advocates’ conveniently flushing this 1999 case down the memory hole is this: The case wasn’t even reflected in the state’s 2000 report on 1999 assisted suicides.

In fact, an assisted-suicide supporter at Yale University School of Medicine found that the Oregon report wasn’t credible because it included no complications and this didn’t jibe with the Dutch experience. In 21 of 114 Dutch cases where the original intent was to provide assisted suicide, doctors stepped in to give a lethal injection when things went badly.

Viewing Oregon’s report, Sherwin Nuland wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine, “Is it really possible that debilitated, terminally ill people … will unfailingly succeed in attempts to end their lives without medical help? Can any experienced witness to dying believe such a thing?”

This hinted at the state’s feeble monitoring of its new assisted-suicide law. Under the act that advocates themselves drafted, state health officials only compile data on each case and summarize the data in an annual report. They don’t have authority to probe individual cases or ensure the data is factual. And, of course, state health officials can’t provide an accounting of what’s never reported to them in the first place. Finally, those reporting the data have an interest in prettying up the results of Oregon’s experiment.

Yes, Oregon is conducting an assisted-suicide experiment, but its architects have created an experimental and regulatory environment only a Dr. Frankenstein _ or Kevorkian _ could love.

MO/JL END RNS

(David Reinhard is associate editor for The Oregonian of Portland, Ore.)