Dial 911 for suicide assistance?

A dispatcher sends crisis negotiators who, if they follow the suggestions provided at a recent negotiators' training session, could help you consider "all options." If you're eligible, you may be referred to friendly volunteers who will help you find a doctor willing to prescribe a deadly drug overdose.

Just take the prescription to a pharmacy. Have it filled by a pharmacist who hands it to you with instructions to "take this with a light snack and alcohol to cause death."

And what if you're not "qualified" for assisted suicide under Washington's Death with Dignity Act?

No sweat. There's help for you, too. Exit International, an equal opportunity death facilitator, has just established its North American headquarters in Bellingham, WA.

Crisis negotiators aren't the only professionals faced with changing expectations of their role in the assisted-suicide-friendly state. Washington pharmacists are getting a rude awakening as well...

It's true that the assisted-suicide law defines a health care provider as a person who is licensed to administer health care or dispense medication. And it also provides immunity for those who do not participate. This led those who own pharmacies to assume that they would not have to dispense assisted suicide drugs.

In the law, "participation" is very narrowly defined. It only refers to those activities that constitute the duties of the attending physician, the consulting physician or the counselor under the law. It does not include dispensing drugs.

This is the result of a ballot initiative in Washington state last year (57.82% for, 42.18% against):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Initiative_1000
http://www.doh.wa.gov/dwda/

It’s similar to Oregon’s ballot measure, which was passed in the 90s, challenged by the Bush administration in 2006, but upheld in the Supreme Court in Gonzales v. Oregon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Oregon

Oregon won the case with a 6-3 decision. Kennedy, Stevens, O’Connor, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer were for Oregon; Scalia, Roberts, Thomas were for Gonzales.

There’s a similar case before the Montana Supreme Court that hasn’t been decided yet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baxter_v._Montana

I think most libertarians would be in favor of letting states, referenda, and individuals decide these kinds of things, but of course there would have to be no coercion.

People at the National Review were against the Gonzales v. Oregon decision:
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/arkes200601270820.asp

“Our libertarian friends have shown an indecorous enthusiasm for this decision on the case from Oregon. It is not, in many cases, because they welcome the involvement of doctors in suicide, but because of their attachment to federalism. I share the attachment to federalism, but we run the risk there of replicating Justice Kennedy’s mistake. When we talk about the regulation of commerce or anything else, we may easily overlook the fact that the regulation of commerce cannot be detached from a sense of what is rightful or wrongful commerce.”

“... The libertarians are headed on a path of incoherence if they think that federalism offers a way to put aside the moral questions that vex our politics. The scheme offered to us in the Oregon decision asks us, in the name of federalism, to incorporate the view that assisted suicide is just another, tenable view about the proper ends of doctors and medicine.”

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