It's rare these days for a daily newspaper to show passion. So it's a real shame that last week's lengthy series of editorials in The Oregonian was such an embarrassment. The daily's support for Measure 51 consisted of heavy doses of melodrama and disinformation, interspersed with awkward mental gyrations and gratuitous generalizations. "Oregon teeters today on the edge of an abyss," an editorial titled "The Vote of Our Lives" began. "You know those pills that were supposed to bring short, sweet Measure 16 deaths? They have a 24 percent failure rate.... Patients can vomit and suffer seizures." These assertions, which provided the underpinnings for the entire series, were presented as undisputed facts. Yet they fly in the face of what's known today about physician-assisted suicide. They even contradict reports appearing elsewhere in The Oregonian. Just a few days before, the paper's own news pages quoted the author of the study cited on the editorial page to buttress the "failure" argument as saying his research had been "distorted." Regarding vomiting and seizures, the news pages of The Oregonian also contradicted the editorials. "[S]tudies on doctor-assisted suicide, in which standard procedures and drug doses are followed," wrote staff reporter Gail Kinsey Hill, "do not support such a claim [that the drugs cause vomiting, convulsions and lingering deaths]." As we reported in September, the 1994 study that has been made so much of in this debate did not exist in written form when The Oregonian discovered it in late 1994. Nor did the Oregon Legislature have a copy when it used it as an excuse to refer Measure 51 to voters ("To Lie For," WW, Sept. 17, 1997). The study, however, was recently translated and made available to the press. Anyone who reads the full document--not just the shortened version provided by the supporters of Measure 51--can see that it was not designed to support either side in the current debate. Instead, it offers an unscientific summary of voluntary, anonymous, anecdotal reports. It deals with methods of delivery of suicide agents, types of drugs to be used, and effective doses--not "failure" rates. Study author Pieter Admiraal did issue a subsequent report, in which he made abundantly clear what any physician will tell you: A dose of 9 grams of barbiturates "ensures a fatal outcome." A more recent study summarizing observations in Washington reached the same conclusion. Over 13 months, a Seattle organization called Compassion in Dying studied terminally ill patients who sought to hasten their deaths by means of orally ingested barbiturates. "All," Dr. Thomas A. Preston and Ralph Mero wrote, "...have fallen deeply asleep within five minutes, and then peacefully died within 25 minutes to 10 hours." The Oregonian's editorials ran the full length of the page for five consecutive days, culminating in the assertion that Measure 51 represents a "license to kill vulnerable human beings who need help...not hemlock." Readers would have been better served if Portland's daily had simply stated the unspoken premise that drove this exercise in faulty facts and tortured logic: a belief that it's morally wrong to tamper with events affecting the end of life. Such an argument would have been far more compelling than the mass of questionable exhortations that appeared last week. |
