ASSISTED SUICIDE IN STATE? TESTIMONY HEARD ON EMOTIONALLY DIVISIVE BILL MODELED AFTER OREGON LAW.

Byline: Steve Geissinger Sacramento Bureau

After the horrifying suicide of his terminally ill mother, Oakland advertising executive Kevin Smith welcomed - with great relief - his cancer- stricken father's plan for doctor-assisted death.

Smith and others like him say there are powerful arguments for California to follow Oregon in adopting physician-aided suicide.

Assembly members Lloyd Levine, D-Van Nuys, and Patty Berg, D-Eureka, introduced a bill earlier this month that would legalize doctor-assisted suicide. The measure has been criticized by individuals as a bad idea, twice rejected in California, but as yet faces no organized opposition.

During a recent hearing on the issue in Sacramento, Smith said his father, who lived in Oregon, died peacefully before he was able to take the pills prescribed to end his life.

``The fact it was available to him he found to be a huge comfort,'' Smith said. ``And the presence of the medicine was also a wonderful and unexpected comfort to my sister, myself and my family.''

Smith was among a string of people who testified in favor of the bill by Levine and Berg.

But the highly emotional and divisive idea had some detractors during a four-hour informational hearing held by the Assembly committees on aging and the judiciary, which included testimony from medical doctors, psychiatrists, nurses, legal experts and others.

Dr. Kenneth Stevens of the Physicians for Compassionate Care, a Portland-based group that opposes Oregon's law, said doctors there have disagreed about some terminally ill patients' competency to make life-ending decisions.

``It's depression, not pain'' that has led to the suicides of some of the 171 patients in Oregon who have taken lethal doses since implementation of the Death with Dignity Act of 1997, Stevens said.

Oregon's law, which Berg and Levine used as the template for the California bill, does not allow euthanasia, in which a physician or somebody else administers deadly medication. Instead, it allows adults with less than six months to live to receive life-ending drugs from a doctor and to take it themselves.

They must be found to be mentally competent, see two physicians, make written and oral requests for the medicine, be counseled about alternatives, and wait through a cooling-off time. Only the patient can make the decision, not a family member or guardian.

Doctors with moral or personal objections to suicide are not compelled to write such a prescription.

The federal government is still pursuing its legal challenges to Oregon's law. And in current California law, as with most states, it is a felony to help someone end his or her life.

Another foe to any change in that law, Wesley Smith of the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, said an assisted-suicide law in California would further devalue the lives of the elderly and disabled.

Despite the failure of two previous efforts in California, the bill's authors expect to get their majority-vote measure through the Democrat- dominated Legislature. They also figure Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a social moderate, will seriously consider it.

The governor, so far, has made no public statements about the proposal.

During the hearing, Levine told a story about his terminally ill grandmother, who had expressed the wish not to suffer at the end of her life.

``Faced with the choice of providing my grandmother with medication, it helped her to the point she had no idea who we were,'' Levine said. ``She didn't know what was going on around her. ... Or we had the other option of pulling back the medication, in which case she regained a little bit of her coherence but was in such severe pain she would be screaming.

``I decided, 'There's got to be a better way.' And I think this is the better way.''

Steve Geissinger, [phone]

sgeissinger(at)angnewspapers.com