Date: Mon, 23 Jan 1995 16:46:38 -0500 From: David B. O'Donnell To: Multiple recipients of list GLB-NEWS Subject: Doctors, AIDS and dying [ Send all responses to chagin@MINDSPRING.COM only. Any responses to the list or list-owners will be returned to you. ] Date: Sun, 22 Jan 1995 16:34:42 -0500 COMPILED FROM WIRE SERVICE REPORTS Doctor Breaks Silence on Helping AIDS Victims Die SAN FRANCISCO -- A prominent doctor has broken the silence on a sensitive legal and ethical issue -- many physicians are helping AIDS victims die, even though assisted suicide is against the law in California. Dr. John Stansell, head of the AIDS Clinic at San Francisco General Hospital, told the San Francisco Examiner for Sunday editions he has given prescriptions for opiates and barbiturates to patients near death. Mixed with alcohol the drugs put the patients to sleep. Respiratory cardiac arrest followed. ``It's a very moral thing that physicians choose to provide release from pain at the end of natural life,'' said Stansell, 46, who calls it ``aid in dying.'' Gay men in San Francisco and AIDS service providers say such suicides are common, and it is widely known which doctors will help procure prescriptions. Stansell, a pulmonary specialist, knows the suffering of AIDS victims not only from his work, but from his own life. He spent time as a youth in Washington with a close-knit group of 12 gay men -- all now dead of the disease. His longtime companion died of the AIDS in 1992. ``The simple fact is that there are some patients for who we cannot make death a tolerable process,'' Stansell said. Not all doctors applaud the willingness of Stansell and others to hasten death. ``If Dr. Stansell wants to do it, I just hope he takes his white coat off when he does it,'' said William Andereck, a San Francisco internist and member of the ethics committee of the California Medical Association. Doctors in white coats should be perceived as healers, not someone who brings death, he said. Although many doctors quietly support Stansell, they fret that a crusade to legalize physician-assisted suicide could do more harm than good, said Dr. Kate Christensen of Kaiser-Permanent in Oakland. ``One of the arguments against legalizing it is that it would take a practice which is now conducted in the privacy of a patient-doctor relationship and subject it to an entire bureaucracy,'' she said. One reason there have been no prosecutions is that proving a doctor aided a suicide is difficult, said Dr. Boyd Stephens, the San Francisco medical examiner. In recent years, it has become medically acceptable to prescribe relatively high levels of drugs to relieve pain even though it may risk death, a concept called ``double effect.'' Stephens said he has never found sufficient evidence to refer such a case to the district attorney's office for possible prosecution. S. CHRISTOPHER HAGIN | The Pledge of Allegance says: Atlanta 1996 | "With liberty and justice for ALL" chagin@mindspring.com | What part of ALL do you not understand? HATE IS NOT A FAMILY VALUE