Thirty-eight in Oregon killed themselves through physician-assisted suicide in 2002, the highest number in the five full years since a state law allowed the procedure

Christian Century, April 5, 2003

* Thirty-eight in Oregon killed themselves through physician-assisted suicide in 2002, the highest number in the five full years since a state law allowed the procedure. A state report in the March 6 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine revealed that 38 people committed suicide in a year when doctors wrote 58 prescriptions for terminally ill patients who qualified under the law, the Associated Press reported.

The number of suicides is more than twice the number of patients who took their own lives in 1998, the first full year the law was in effect. That year, 16 patients committed suicide when doctors wrote 24 lethal prescriptions. Assisted suicides accounted for 0.1 percent of deaths, much less than the 2 percent to 5 percent predicted by experts when the law was being drafted in the early 1990s, said Dr. Steve Miles, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Minnesota Medical School. "People say they want the option, but very few people are really interested in availing themselves of this option," Miles said.