Legalized Physician Assisted Death in Oregon—Eighteen Years’ Experience

Five US states have defined a legal pathway for their residents to choose physician-assisted death (PAD). The Oregon Death with Dignity Act was passed by citizen’s initiative in 1994 and, after a series of legal challenges, enacted in 1997. In 2008, through a voter-initiated referendum, Washingtonians passed an almost identical law. In 2009, the Montana Supreme Court held that a terminally ill, mentally competent patient’s consent to physician aid-in-dying protected the physician against a charge of homicide. In 2013, Vermont legalized PAD, the first to use the traditional legislative process (Vermont Health Department). California’s legislature also passed a PAD law in 2015, which is likely to be enacted in 2016. No other form of PAD – that is physician prescription and patient consumption of medications for the sole purposes of causing death – is legal in the United States at this time, though studies support that in other states physicians rarely prescribe medications to hasten death outside the law.