PILL DOES NOT KILL

The pills don't kill: The cover-up
Saturday, March 25, 2000 Oregon Live
By David Reinhard

A terminally ill Oregonian takes his assisted-suicide drugs as his wife and family look on. But the assisted suicide doesn’t go as Measure 16's fans promised. His wife can’t handle the physical symptoms and calls 911. He’s revived and rushed to a Portland hospital, and later taken to a nursing facility. A short time later he dies.

Critics of Oregon’s assisted-suicide law warned this would happen but were called liars for doing so during the 1997 revote on Measure 16. Yet that’s the ugly reality of the law’s pills-only approach -- the federally controlled drugs don't always deliver death in the swift, sweet or even sure way that Measure 16 cheerleaders promised -- and we know about this nameless case only because word slipped out at a Portland Community College workshop on assisted suicide last December. Word didn’t come from the Oregon Health Division, the agency charged with overseeing the misnamed "Death With Dignity Act." It didn’t -- still doesn’t -- know anything about Oregon’s first (?) failed assisted suicide. Word didn’t come from the doctor who wrote the prescription, the medics or the hospital. No, word came only in some offhand remarks from Cynthia Barrett, a friend of Measure 16 author Barbara Coombs Lee, and those remarks might have been lost forever if not for Cathy Hamilton of the anti-Measure 16 Physicians for Compassionate Care and the folks at Brainstorm magazine.

Not only does Barrett refuse to talk to the media about what she said at the PCC workshop, but George Eighmey, who was there as executive director of pro-Measure 16 Compassion in Dying, tried to put the kibosh on any public discussion of Barrett’s revelations. Hamilton was also there and heard Barrett.

Hamilton says Eighmey later approached her in the hall and told her the class was confidential and she should not "go to the media." Eighmey denies this. He told Brainstorm, which first reported this on its Web site and then in its March issue, that he did tell her that "we should respect people’s rights here, that this is confidential." That’s curious -- since Barrett hadn’t named names, why fret about confidentiality? -- but Eighmey was only beginning.

After the Brainstorm article hit the Internet, Eighmey was on Lars Larson’s KXL radio show. Larson first asked if he was familiar with the case Barrett had cited and Hamilton was talking about on that day’s show. "I am not," Eighmey said twice.

Larson then asked him about the article in Brainstorm by Lisa Baker. "Lars, it’s irresponsible, unsubstantiated reporting," Eighmey thundered before saying he’d talked to two workshop attendees and they hadn’t heard Barrett say anything to this effect. As for Hamilton, Eighmey had this to say: "So whether Mrs. Hamilton is hearing things or not we don’t know."

In brief, he was suggesting Hamilton might be delusional, and it might have worked except for one thing. There was a Nixonian smoking gun -- a DNA-laden blue dress a la Monica. Hamilton had taped the session. And not only does the tape feature Barrett telling her botched-assisted-suicide anecdote, but Eighmey himself telling the workshop that the patient wasn’t Compassion in Dying’s. He answered a few more questions, but after Larson returned from a commercial, Eighmey was no longer on the line. Eighmey never returned to the line. He was gone. "I’ve never had this happen before," Larson told me last week. "He has never called me back."

Thus, the tale of Oregon’s first (?) botched assisted suicide under Measure 16 remains a mystery wrapped in rumor and anecdote and covered up with silence and untruths. The Health Division knows nothing, though through no fault of its own. Why? Because the doctor who wrote the Measure 16 prescription, the emergency medical technicians and the hospital reported nothing. Why? Because Measure 16's reporting requirements are a sham.

Oregon became a pioneer of sorts when it became the first political jurisdiction in the world to sanction doctor-assisted suicide. It did so after a campaign in which Measure 16's pills-only approach was the central issue. Now, an unreported Measure 16 suicide gone bad appears to confirm what assisted-suicide opponents and the voluminous research they cited make clear: The pills don’t always kill. Alas, the truth is out there.