COMMENTS
ON THE ARIZONA PROPOSAL TO ALLOW A TERMINALLY-ILL PATIENT TO
OBTAIN MEDICATION FOR THE PURPOSE OF CONTROLLING
SUFFERING, EVEN IF THE PATIENT-DIRECTED USE OF
THE MEDICATION MIGHT AS A SIDE-EFFECT SHORTEN THE PROCESS OF DYING
This proposal is
similar in effect to the Oregon
Death
with Dignity Act.
The main difference is that the prescribing physician
does not prescribe medication for the purpose of causing death
but for the purpose of allowing the patient to control suffering.
The patient takes full responsibility for any
actions thereafter.
The physician merely makes sure that the patient understands
the power of the prescribed medication potentially to cause death.
The dosage of the medication is not controlled by
the physician.
When the doctor controls when
and how much
medication is given,
that is described in this bill as traditional doctor-controlled
pain-management.
Because the doctor is no longer in control
of the
prescribed drugs,
the doctor might feel better about any adverse consequences
that might follow if the patient decides to take all of the prescribed
medication at once in order to die.
There are no safeguards in this proposed legislation
to prevent the patient from using the medication to cause death.
Thus if this bill were to become law,
it might result in irrational suicides and other forms of premature
death.
Because such adverse consequences could so easily
follow from this law,
it does not seem likely to be enacted.
Even people who support the right-to-die
will find the safeguards in this proposal to be inadequate.
A better approach might be to clarify the rights
doctors already have
to prescribe medications for the control of pain,
which can be administered by doctors in all medical settings
with the knowledge of everyone that increasing the pain-medication
might have the side-effect of shortening the patient's process of dying.
This is a completely legal method of practicing
medicine already.
But written laws might need to make this right more explicit,
so that everyone involved will know
that there will be no criminal or civil complaints
against anyone who participated
in the decision to increase the pain-medication.
Such a clarifying bill might also make explicit
three other means of choosing death
that are now completely legal:
(2) terminal sedation;
(3) withdrawing life-support measures; &
(4) voluntary death by dehydration.