Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 21, 1993 TAG: 9302210350
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Sharon Cohen
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
IS THIS MAN A CARING VISIONARY . . .
He has hovered at death's door many times, beginning as a young doctor.He has experimented with transfusions, transferring death's blood from a fresh cadaver to a living volunteer. He has made nightly rounds to peer into the eyes of hospital patients at the moment they succumbed.
Now 64, Jack Kevorkian no longer is a young doctor. He has looked death in the eye again and again and again. Thirteen times, he has helped death along, with lethal drugs or gas. Death no longer is his avocation or even an obsession.
Death is Jack Kevorkian's life.
And he is offended and outraged that anyone should think that what he says and does is unethical or immoral - much less criminal.
"All these silly religious nuts. All these people, they don't care about suffering humanity," says the man known as "Dr. Death."
"[They say] `Well, Kevorkian must be insane.' The incompetent medical examiner, he keeps calling it homicide when the court decision says no such thing. Now they're using name calling . . . `Kevorkian must be a little bit crazy.' They love that. They hate what I'm doing. . . . They don't talk about suffering patients."
Kevorkian says it's time doctors follow his lead.
Lawmakers say it's time to stop Jack Kevorkian.
On March 30, a new measure takes effect in Michigan that bans assisted suicide for 15 months, making it a felony while a commission studies the issue.
Jack Kevorkian's name isn't on the bill, but it should be.
Since Kevorkian's first assisted suicide in 1990, authorities have been furious. One after another, Kevorkian has helped 13 people die in his home state, despite efforts to thwart, punish and jail the retired pathologist.
Kevorkian has defied their threats. His Michigan license has been taken away, but he continues his work, using carbon monoxide instead of drugs, which no longer are available to him.
This month, he has helped four people die.
He vows to assist others, even after the Michigan ban is implemented.
"After that," he says, "I get one shot." Then, he expects a trial.
No doubt, it will be a trial in the limelight, the stuff of headlines, editorials and talk-show debate. At the center will be a doctor who has gone from obscurity to notoriety in 2 1/2 years.
In June 1990, Janet Adkins - a 54-year-old mother, music lover and mountain climber suffering from Alzheimer's disease - traveled from Oregon to die.
Kevorkian obliged with his suicide machine, the Mercitron, a three-bottle contraption he built for $30 after scouring flea markets for parts.
Adkins was hooked up by an intravenous tube; it took Kevorkian five tries to get the needle in her arm properly. She pressed a button, releasing poison into her veins.
"She was very happy to exit," said her husband, Ron. "She believed in Dr. Kevorkian. She looked in Dr. Kevorkian's eyes and said, `Thank you, thank you, thank you.' "
Kevorkian was charged with murder. It didn't stick; nor did it in the next death, or the one after that. No law prohibited assisted suicide.
Authorities stopped filing charges.
But in a sense, Kevorkian has been on trial ever since.
Kevorkian's critics in law and medicine are varied and many. Some oppose the man, some just his methods.
"I see him as a zealot, a dangerous one," said Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Minnesota's Biomedical Ethics Center.
Caplan said Kevorkian's attitude is "I couldn't care less what the rest of these fools think is wrong. My morality is correct and I'm going to follow it come hell or high water."
Even right-to-die supporters say the problem isn't the message - terminally ill people shouldn't have to endure intolerable pain - but the messenger.
"I don't want any doctor making the rules by himself. That's what it comes down to," said Dr. Tom Preston, a Seattle cardiologist who supported an unsuccessful Washington initiative to allow doctor-assisted suicide.
Others say they're troubled that Kevorkian doesn't have a history with his patients, one built on caring for and treating someone before they are dying.
"You want an established relationship, not one based on assisted suicide," said Dr. Timothy Quill, of Rochester, N.Y., who helped a terminally ill leukemia patient commit suicide by prescribing barbiturates.
In one case, a coroner's autopsy found that Kevorkian helped a woman die who suffered no active disease - a woman who had twice been involuntarily admitted to psychiatric hospitals.
Kevorkian's reply: He has a checks-and-balances system he completes before helping anyone, including videotaped counseling, family meetings, a review of medical records and consultations with their doctors, if they will cooperate.
And he says regardless of its cause, the woman's pain was very real.
Kevorkian has no patience for doctors who criticize. He chides them for being wimps, for letting patients suffer. He says the only - and the obvious - answer would be to help them die. No law is needed, he says.
"If they did their duty, none of this would happen," he says. "They're sitting on sidelines, scared to death."
"He doesn't argue for a change in the law. That's what baffles me," said Derek Humphry, founder of the Hemlock Society and author of the best-selling suicide manual. "He seems to think that doctors are going to follow his example and they're not."
Kevorkian is a lifelong bachelor. He leads a spartan life in an apartment in Royal Oak, Mich., supporting himself with Social Security checks and book proceeds.
The slender, silver-haired doctor plays the flute and organ, loves Bach, enjoys astrology but doesn't believe it, abhors profanity in movies and reads only non-fiction.
Occasionally his hobbies and profession intersect - years ago, one of his paintings, an allegorical piece depicting genocide, used outdated blood from a blood bank.
Every day, Kevorkian says, people call and write him. They speak of their pain, they write of their loss of dignity. And they ask this man they have never met to deliver them to death.
"Somebody has to do something for suffering humanity," Kevorkian says. "I put myself in my patients' place. This is something I would want."
His latest plan is to create a national network of doctors specializing in death medicine, working in a chain-like setting of suicide centers he would call obitoriums. He has coined a name for doctor-assisted suicide: medicide.
Not that euthanasia is Kevorkian's only cause.
Kevorkian has proposed auctioning organs to rich people, for example, and using the money to help provide them for poor people.
And he says the organs of Death Row prisoners should be harvested before their executions.
"They call me Dr. Death. It shows how stupid they are," he says. It's not death that fascinates me. It's getting life back from death!"
Kevorkian corresponded with Westley Allan Dodd, the Washington state child killer who was hanged in January. Dodd, he said, wanted to donate his organs, but no doctor would perform the operation.
"When Dodd died, six people died with him," Kevorkian says. "Nobody cares, do they?"
The implication is that only Kevorkian cares - that he is a lonely pioneer, suffering the same fate as other visionaries throughout history.
"They said the same thing about Edward Jenner with the smallpox vaccine," he declares. "They said the same about Margaret Sanger and birth control. Of course, you're going to look brash because you're taking rough action."
He says doctors were denounced and even condemned to death in the Middle Ages for alleviating the pain of women in labor or for performing dissections.
"All these are silly things imposed by religious doctrine," he says. "I am against religion imposing its ethics on medicine."
Kevorkian is brusque and unyielding. He is full of ideas, full of anger that he has been so disparaged by so many people, full of certainty that he is right and established medicine is wrong.
"If Hippocrates were here today, do you think he would curse me and pat them on the back?" he asks. "NEVER!"
Still, Kevorkian finds some sympathy and support at a time when many Americans see the medical system as long on sophisticated technology and short on simple compassion.
"He is a phenomenon that you would expect when a situation is so bad that it has to be changed," said Dr. Lawrence Schneiderman, a professor at the University of California-San Diego. "All social change agents tend to be outrageous. . . . I'm not willing to rush in and condemn him."
"If he looked like Rock Hudson," he said, "people would find him more appealing."
Even Caplan, the medical ethicist, says Kevorkian has touched a nerve, though he doesn't condone his actions.
"I consider Kevorkian," he says, "to be a symptom, not a cure, of American medicine's inability to grapple with the reality of death."
And some people who have grappled with that reality - the families of those who have died with Kevorkian's help - are firmly in his corner.
"He's a unique individual providing something that mankind desperately needs," said Ron Adkins, the husband of Kevorkian's first assisted suicide.
"The medical profession leads you to the door of death and then drops you off there. Dr. Kevorkian is willing to help you through the door."
Memo: ***CORRECTION***