Suicide Video Airs in Oregon

By Dave Andrusko

On February 1, a tiny nonprofit cable station that broadcasts in Eugene and Springfield, Oregon, made history when it aired Final Exit: the Video, literally a 34-minute recipe for suicide based on the book of the same name that has sold more than a million copies.

Such brazen effrontery, in one sense, comes as no surprise. Author and narrator Derek Humphry has spent decades pushing the envelope on suicide. Typically, he tells reporters that the video is to "help desperately ill people and their loved ones, not all of whom are accustomed to seeking help from libraries or books," according to the Portland Oregonian. In other venues Humphry is more candid.

The video's "high" points, as it were, include listing the three most potent drugs and offering suggestions how to obtain them-- with or without a physician's prescription. In the video Humphry, 69, shows how to mix the lethal drugs in a yummy, easy-to-gulp pudding.

"It can be yogurt, applesauce, fruit preserves--whatever his or her taste buds like best," he assures the viewer.

According to reports, hundreds of copies of the 34-minute video have already been sold to members of Humphry's Euthanasia Research and Guidance Organization. Since December the public has had ready access to the video: Amazon.com ($20, plus shipping and handling. Interesting, it is labeled "NR" for No Rating).

Even the leading lights in the Oregon assisted suicide movement have balked.

Barbara Coombs Lee, the executive director of the Portland, Oregon-based Compassion in Dying Federation, told the Oregonian that the video "takes assisted dying out of the context of medical care, and puts in the context of a hardware store." It was Ms. Coombs Lee who successfully led the campaign that culminated in Oregon becoming the first jurisdiction to formally legalize the practice of doctors prescribing lethal medications.

Consider these etched-in-irony observations from Coombs Lee, as reported in the Jan. 31 Oregonian. "Oregonians don't need demonstrations or bags and masks," she said.

"The wide airing of this information is dangerous," she added, citing an argument usually raised by opponents of assisted suicide: "It can give people the means to act on impulsiveness," she said.

She told the Oregonian that "Humphry's brand of assisted suicide is 'self-help' while Compassion in Dying (her group) works on a ' medical model' that provides advice on how to use Oregon's only- one-in-the-nation law allowing physician-assisted suicide.

Anti-euthanasia forces blasted Humphry. Dr. Gregory Hamilton, president of Physicians for Compassionate Care, said television promotion of suicide techniques "serves a suggestive function which says: suicide is okay and here's how you do it."

Through the "power of suggestion," Humphry is "promoting suicide as a solution to life's problems to anyone viewing, whether they be an abused teenager, a depressed adult, or an impressionable child," Dr. Hamilton said.

Hamilton, like others, pointed out that most first attempts at suicide fail--something far less likely to happen if Humphry's video is widely shown. Hamilton also noted that suicides in Oregon are already "skyrocketing"--that the state already has a suicide rate 43% higher than the nation's.

None of which seems to be making much of an impression on Cindy Noblitt, co-producer of Cascadia Theatre of Action which is airing Final Exit: The Video on public access cable channel 97, which is operated by the nonprofit Community Television of Lane County. The station will air a warning about the contents, she said.

Besides, this is furtherance of "the tenet of individual liberty to have this right [to assisted suicide] and to have the information to carry this out," she told reporters. Noblitt is upset by action in Congress to complete passage of the Pain Relief Promotion Act. (See back cover.)

All of the 15 officially reported physician-assisted suicide deaths in Oregon in 1998 (the only year for which statistics are now available) were caused by prescriptions for federally controlled substances.

Enter the Pain Relief Promotion Act, passed by a bipartisan majority in the House of Representatives 271 to 156 on October 27.

The law would foster appropriate pain relief and palliative care as a positive alternative to assisting suicide and euthanasia at the same time it ensures that narcotics and other dangerous drugs that are regulated as "federally controlled substances" are not used to kill patients. This would be true even in a state such as Oregon where its use for that purpose is permitted by state law.

Naturally, many people are worried that children, especially depressed teenagers, might act on the methods show in the video. Not Humphry.

"Children will find [the video] extremely boring," he told the Oregonian. "We aim to present it as responsibly as possible."