TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/110491/1104620.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.4 KB | 116 lines

                                                                                ETHICS, Page 78

Dr. Death Strikes Again


While lawmakers agonize over euthanasia, Jack Kevorkian keeps
taking matters into his own hands

By NANCY GIBBS -- Reported by Sophfronia Scott Gregory/New York


    If you are dying, you may view Dr. Jack Kevorkian as a
courageous crusader for your rights. If you are a doctor, he may
seem more like a cheap purveyor of easy death. Either way, he
has become the lightning rod of the right-to-die movement and
a gifted promoter of a cause he desperately believes in -- and
shockingly abets. Last week the doctor who has made his name by
hastening death rather than forestalling it helped two more
women kill themselves in Michigan. Lawmakers and doctors may
debate the ethics of euthanasia endlessly; but while that
argument unfolds, the activists have again decided to take
life-and-death matters into their own hands.

    In the vanguard is Kevorkian, a retired Michigan pathologist
who appeared on every television talk show and news program in
the country last year in the 24 hours after he helped Alzheimer's
patient Janet Adkins commit suicide. He hooked her up to a
homemade contraption that allowed her to push a button and send
lethal potassium chloride into her veins. A Michigan judge chose
not to prosecute Kevorkian for murder, since the state has no
 laws against assisted suicide, but forbade him touse the machine
again. By last week, Dr. Death had found a way around that
injunction.

    The two most recent recipients of his care were likewise
from Michigan: Sherry Miller, 43, had multiple sclerosis, and
Marjorie Wantz, 58, suffered from a painful pelvic disease.
While her husband watched, Wantz received a lethal injection
from a device similar to the one Adkins used. Miller, attended
by her best friend, suffocated on carbon monoxide breathed
through a mask. Neither one was a patient of Kevorkian's, and
neither was terminally ill. The doctor was present throughout,
said his lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger. "He provided the expertise.
He provided the equipment."

    Public parks remain Kevorkian's preferred treatment
centers. Adkins' suicide occurred in a rusting van parked in a
campground; this time the two women were found dead in a cabin
in the Bald Mountain recreation area, about 40 miles north of
Detroit. Kevorkian himself called the police to report the
fatalities. "The people were still hooked up to the machines
when the sheriffs got there," said county sheriff sergeant Dale
Romeo.

    In the months since Kevorkian last detonated the
euthanasia debate, the public's craving for information has
grown. The strangest best seller in memory still hovers at the
top of the charts: Final Exit, by Derek Humphry, founder of the
Hemlock Society, instructs people on how to die, or to kill.
Last summer, Wantz said, she tried to follow the directions in
the book. When she failed, she turned to Kevorkian.

    Humphry, like Kevorkian, has urged physicians to assist in
patient suicides. But much of the medical community remains
deeply divided over this issue. Doctors see firsthand the agony
that confronts the terminally ill and the resources spent
prolonging some lives that might be diverted to improving the
lives of others. Many thus favor laws that make it easier for
patients to reject aggressive medical care, and urge the
stricken to make out living wills so that their wishes are met.

    Some jurisdictions are prepared to go even further. Next
month Washington state will vote on an initiative that would
legalize physician-assisted suicide for patients with six months
or less to live. If the proposal passes, Washington would become
the first state to legalize active euthanasia. No Western
country has yet done so. Earlier this year, Dr. Timothy Quill
of Rochester, N.Y., wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine
about helping a patient with acute leukemia kill herself with
barbiturates. A state panel of physicians found his actions
medically and legally appropriate, and a local grand jury
cleared him of any criminal charges. Yet Quill, like many
doctors, rejects Kevorkian's macabre approach. "He certainly
doesn't stand for the mainstream," Quill says. "This will again
muddy the water."

    Defenders of the right to die point to the need for
careful safeguards around the process: Kevorkian ignored them
all. There were no second opinions, no consent forms, no
examinations to make sure that Kevorkian's "patients" were of
sound mind as they made their decision. As a pathologist more
accustomed to dealing with people after they have died,
Kevorkian was in no position to confirm the diagnosis of any of
the women he helped kill themselves. And his defiant pursuit of
publicity suggests a man more obsessed with the justice of his
cause than with the interests of his patients.

    Death in a rusting van or a remote cabin is hardly a death
with dignity. But, as the numbers of people who came to
Kevorkian's defense yet again last week indicates, many among
the general public have a profound fear that one day they too
might lose control of their life and be left at technology's
mercy. Until the medical profession and state legislatures
address the issue systematically, a retired doctor with a bagful
of poisons and an obsession will be viewed as a savior by
frightened people in search of final peace.