• Government
• Profession
• Business
• Opinion
• Health

• Health reform
• H1N1
• P4P
• EMRs
• Medicare
• Liability
• AMA House
• » More

• Book Excerpt
• Business Pitch
• Meetings
• » More

• Contract Language
• Ethics Forum
• In the Courts
• Practice Management
• Technically Speaking
• » More

• Bby date
• Regions
• Health plans
• Sections
• News briefs
• Columns
• Editorials
• Letters
• Writers
• Other years

• Search tips
• E-mail alert
• Radio
• RSS
• Mobile
• Subscribe
• Institutions
• Staff directory
• Advertising
• Permissions
• Reprints
• News media
• Site guide
• Useful links
• About
• Premium
• Contact

A doctor chooses when to die

Oregon physician-surgeon Allison B. Willeford, MD, has long supported physician-assisted suicide. Now he's ready to use the law -- as a patient.

By Andis Robeznieks, amednews staff. July 14, 2003.

• PRINT|
• E-MAIL|
• RESPOND|
• REPRINTS|
• SHARE

For 30 years, Allison B. Willeford, MD, secretly kept a bottle of pills on hand, just in case he decided he'd had enough of personal struggles that included a divorce, three bouts with cancer, and the stress and exhaustion of a general medicine and surgery practice in rural Molalla, Ore.

Dr. Willeford says he never seriously considered opening that bottle of pills. But he wanted the right to end his life when and how he saw fit.

The personal also was political; well before Oregon made physician-assisted suicide legal in 1997, he spoke out for it. Now Dr. Willeford, 78, in an assisted-living facility and on his fourth bout of cancer, is speaking out louder than ever, knowing that with his kidney cancer diagnosed as terminal, his voice might not be around for long.

He's going through the state-prescribed process of getting a prescription for a fatal dose of secobarbital that, if he swallows it, will kill him.

Dr. Willeford is not the first physician to seek a colleague's help in ending his life. But he is the most vocal about it. Seeing still-massive opposition to the Oregon law, including a continuing court fight initiated when U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft threatened to pull the DEA license of any physician who prescribed a lethal dose of barbiturates, Dr. Willeford wants to make himself a public example for physician-assisted suicide.

"Not for me, but if I can get any publicity for the cause, I'd like it to come out," Dr. Willeford said. "Right at this present time, I have no intention of killing myself, but I can see somewhere down the line, I might. And, if I don't go through this rigmarole now, I might not be able to later."