A Compassionate Ending:
An Interview with
Dr. Jack Kevorkian

By David Jay Brown

Jack Kevorkian, M.D., is one of the most controversial physicians in the world. He attracted a lot of media attention in the early to mid-nineties due to his outspoken ideas about euthanasia, or “a good death,” and is currently in his eighth year of prison for second degree murder because he assisted with the last wish of his patient, Thomas Youk, who was suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease.

Dr. Kevorkian graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1952 with a specialty in pathology. He became Chief Pathologist at the Detroit Saratoga General Hospital in 1970. In the early 1980s, Dr. Kevorkian published a series of articles in the German journal Medicine and Law, which outlined his ideas on euthanasia and ethics. Then, in 1987, Dr. Kevorkian began advertising in Detroit papers as a physician consultant for “death counseling.” Between 1990 and 1998, Dr. Kevorkian assisted in the suicide of over one hundred terminally ill people.

In each of these cases, Dr. Kevorkian only assisted in the suicide by attaching the person to one of the euthanasia devices that he designed. The first two deaths were assisted by means of a device called a “Thanatron,” which used a needle and delivered deadly drugs mechanically through an I.V. The individual pushed a button which released a series of drugs that would end his or her own life. In 1993, after assisting in these two deaths, Dr. Kevorkian lost his medical license.

When Dr. Kevorkian could no longer obtain euthanizing drugs, some other patients were assisted by a device called a “Mercitron,” which employed a gas mask fed by a canister of carbon monoxide. It’s important to note that all of these cases were of voluntary euthanasia, because the individuals themselves took the final action which resulted in their own deaths. Dr. Kevorkian was tried numerous times during the 1990s for assisting in these suicides, but in every one of these cases the juries acquitted him. One juror was overheard to say the only thing Dr. Kevorkian was guilty of was being ahead of his time.

Court room conditions changed dramatically after Dr. Kevorkian appeared on 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace. The November 22, 1998 broadcast of 60 Minutes featured a videotape that showed a patient in the final stages of ALS receiving a lethal injection from Dr. Kevorkian. Although Thomas Youk had provided his fully-informed consent, and this was a case of voluntary euthanasia, it was viewed differently than his previous cases because Dr. Kevorkian himself administered the lethal injection to relieve his pain and suffering.

Although originally charged with assisted suicide, in the end Dr. Kevorkian went to trial on the charge of first-degree murder and was not allowed any witnesses. Following specific jury instructions for murder, not assisted suicide, the jury convicted him of second-degree murder and the delivery of a controlled substance on March 26, 1999. Dr. Kevorkian remains in prison in Michigan, serving a ten-to-twenty-five year sentence. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his case. State and local courts denied his appeals and he has been repeatedly denied parole until recently. He has made clear that he will no longer help patients end their lives and will now advocate legislation for this fundamental human right. He considers it a civil right of all individuals. Coincidentally, Dr. Kevorkian’s access to the media was also severed the day he went to prison.

Mike Wallace, the anchor from 60 Minutes who aired the video that was used in the trial that ultimately led to Dr. Kevorkian’s imprisonment, said that he was upset with the conviction and perturbed by his lack of access to Dr. Kevorkian. In a letter to The New York Review of Books in 2001, Wallace wrote about the irony of Kevorkian being silenced while mass-murderer Timothy McVeigh was allowed to make all the statements he wanted to the media. In fact, the request for a lethal injection by a healthy, albeit convicted felon, Timothy McVeigh, was granted almost immediately after he declined appeals of his conviction.

Many people believe that Dr. Kevorkian is not only being treated unfairly, but that this courageous man should be honored as a hero. Despite the U.S. government and medical establishment’s opposition to euthanasia, eighty percent of the public support a patient’s right to die and one in five physicians has admitted to practicing euthanasia at some point in his or her career. Many people also point out the irony in that the government rejects euthanasia but maintains the death penalty with lethal injection. Had Michigan had the death penalty, Dr. Kevorkian could have been sentenced to death for assisting someone who made a voluntary choice to end their own suffering.

Dr. Kevorkian is the author of Amendment IX: Our Cornucopia of Rights, about how the Ninth Amendment to the Bill of Rights of the Constitution grants us rights that most people are unaware of, and are not being properly exercised. It states “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

Dr. Kevorkian is also the author of a unique diet book entitled Slimmeriks and the Demi-Diet, and a collection of essays, color paintings, poetry, medical research proposals, sheet music, limericks, and cartoons entitled GlimmerIQs. To find out more about Dr. Kevorkian’s books visit: www.glimmeriqs.com. Dr. Kevorkian is also an accomplished artist, whose emotionally-powerful, often surreal, and strikingly well-executed paintings have received critical acclaim. Copies of his paintings are available at Ariana Gallery in Royal Oak, Michigan. His paintings are now part of the collection of the Armenian Library and Museum of America: www.almainc.org.

Dr. Kevorkian was awarded the Gleitsman Citizen Activist of the Year Award in 2000, and he was the subject of the 2001 documentary film Right to Exit: The Mock Trial of Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Many prominent people have spoken out in Dr. Kevorkian’s defense, and in 2002, he was nominated for the Noble Peace Prize. A major motion picture about Dr. Kevorkian’s life, which will be directed by Academy Award winner Barbara Koppel, is currently in production. Kurt Vonnegut even wrote a novel entitled God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian, where he envisions himself as a “reporter on the afterlife,” and bravely allows himself to be strapped to a gurney by Dr. Kevorkian and dispatched—round-trip—to Heaven.

I interviewed Dr. Kevorkian in May of 2006. I was able to do this interview with the generous help of Dr. Kevorkian’s attorney, Mayer Mike Morganroth, and his jury consultant and acting legal assistant, Ruth Holmes, who posed my questions to him in prison and recorded his responses. In the following interview, Dr. Kevorkian discusses his ideas about personal freedom, diet and exercise, why the practice of euthanasia is so important, and how the availability of euthanasia might actually prolong the lives of terminally-ill patients.

Q: What originally inspired your interest in medicine?

Dr. Kevorkian: I was interested in a lot of things when I was young growing up in Pontiac, Michigan, with my two sisters and parents who escaped the Armenian Genocide. I considered being an engineer. I considered being a lawyer. I decided on medicine because it touches all professions. I also loved languages and taught myself to speak many of them.

Q: What do you think are some of the biggest problems with modern medicine and what do you think needs to be done to help correct the situation?

Dr. Kevorkian: The biggest problem with Western medicine is that there is a need for establishing an appropriate system and structure for death with dignity. For those who are facing a terminal illness, who are in irremediable pain and suffering, and wish to exercise their right to die with dignity, a system should be available to them. We also need a more structured and reasonable organ donation and transplant systems. 18,000 people die each year waiting for organs. To help correct this situation there has to be an organized public response and outcry—which I believe is now occurring. The current system has not worked well enough to meet the medical needs.

Q: Why do you think it’s so important for physicians to be able to practice euthanasia without the fear of legal prosecution?

Dr. Kevorkian: Medical art and science are entirely secular and serve a dual purpose: to lengthen life and to preserve or enhance its quality. Theoretically both aims are equally important, but arbitrary (and mainly sectarian) bias fostered an obsession to prolong life, no matter how inimical to its quality. The benefits of medicine permit its practitioners to perform acts that ordinarily are crimes. Thus we condone and even laud surgical mutilation like open heart surgery or organ transplants and tolerate for cancer treatment nearly lethal poisoning with chemotherapy. The resultant quality of life is always subordinate to the chief aim of prolonging it. Why shouldn’t the ranking order sometimes be reversed? Why should we not just as readily praise and support the chief aim of relieving pain and suffering for those with terminal illnesses—humanely, expediently and with certainty—an intolerably low quality of individual life through a medical act ordinarily deemed to be homicide? As a secular profession medicine is relevant to the full spectrum of human existence from conception through death. I think that any arbitrary legal constriction of that relevance is irrational, cruel, and barbaric.

Q: How has euthanasia been viewed throughout history?

Dr. Kevorkian: Medical euthanasia was honorable and widely practiced in ancient Hippocratic Greece but later criminalized by the Church. The Renaissance Philosopher-Scientist Francis Bacon advocated that “the medical profession should be permitted to ease and quicken death where the end would be otherwise only delayed for a few days and at the cost of great pain.”

In seventeenth-century England, Sir Edward Coke, a distinguished lawyer and judge, dismissed charges against a physician who openly performed euthanasia. It was Coke's dictum that “how long soever it hath continued, if it be against reason, it is of no force in law.” Accordingly, the long-continued criminalization of euthanasia is of no force because it is flagrantly against reason.

Almost two centuries later Thomas Jefferson advocated the use of a drug to end the terminal suffering from “the inveterate cancer.” In 1910, Mark Twain asked his physician to end his suffering from heart disease. Dr. Sigmund Freud’s terminal agony, and also in 1936 that of England’s King George V, ended with injections by their personal physicians, both vociferous advocates of the practice. The late distinguished American physician and author Dr. Walter Alvarez several decades ago published his strong endorsement of medical euthanasia.

Today more than half of all American physicians and an overwhelming majority of the public favor decriminalization of the practice, and a significant number of physicians admit to performing it furtively. The British will no longer prosecute doctors. The state of Oregon has permitted a limited form of aid in dying through ill-advised, overly restrictive legislation. It appears that the state of Maine may soon do the same. These state laws prohibit the most humane and preferable method of ending pain and suffering with a lethal injection.

The Constitutional Court in the predominantly Catholic nation Colombia in 1997 declared simply and correctly that access to medical euthanasia is a right of the people. The Netherlands has now formally decriminalized euthanasia after two or more decades of having permitted the practice within carefully set guidelines. It is also allowed in Switzerland, Germany, and Uruguay, and may soon be legalized in Catholic Belgium and France, and in Japan. One must wonder why the English-speaking countries lag in this humanitarian trend.

Q: Why do you think that the U.S. government and medical establishment are so opposed to euthanasia—despite the fact that eighty percent of the public support a patient’s right to die?

Dr. Kevorkian: I think that the U.S. government, medical establishment, and pharmaceutical companies are opposed to euthanasia for monetary or financial reasons. And, also, this view against PAD (physician assistance in dying) is supported by many churches and religious extremists.

Q: What are your thoughts about how the availability of euthanasia might prolong the lives of terminally-ill patients?

Dr. Kevorkian: The mere availability of the euthanasia option often improves the quality of, and even prolongs, the lives of many terminal and incurably suffering patients. Having such a choice seems to dissipate the panic and helplessness by assuring a modicum of personal control. Consequently the vast majority of patients went on to die “naturally” and with few complaints despite continued excruciating suffering. This was the case with most patients who contacted me.

Q: How do you envision euthanasia being put into practice by physicians?

Dr: Kevorkian: Not all physicians will want or, by temperament, be able to perform euthanasia. For them, and for patients alike, it’s a matter of free choice based on personal belief, faith, or philosophy of life. The service should be a kind of medical specialty staffed by experienced and competent practitioners to whom reticent colleagues may refer inquiries. Because medical guidelines change frequently as a result of research and clinical experience, such procedural details cannot be dictated by law.

Q: What do you personally think happens to consciousness after death?

Dr: Kevorkian: No living being in this world knows exactly and certainly—indeed even faintly—what absolute physical death is. One can only know that it occurred. Despite impressive philosophical and religious mythologizing, as well as the anecdotal buncombe called near-death experiences, nobody has ever survived absolute death. At present that survival would offer the only (but now inaccessible) means of gaining reliable and certain knowledge about it.

Q: Many people are unaware that you wrote a diet book in 1978, which you later revised and included in your book GlimmerIQs. What sort of suggestions would you make for improving one’s diet?

Dr: Kevorkian: It is well known that animals generally take their daily food quota by many small feedings, in contrast to a limited number of large meals for most civilized humans. Extensive research on animals has shown that the ingestion of their daily food in five separate portions had a salutary effect on blood cholesterol levels and the development of arterial atherosclerosis. Even though the single feeders (one large meal a day) ate thirty percent less, their bodies were slightly larger and had a higher percentage of fat when compared to the slightly smaller bodies of multiple feeders (nibblers) having gained relatively heavier muscle mass. It has been estimated that fifty to seventy-five percent of daily human food intake is at the single meal called supper, which alone may account for our tendency to be fatter and flabbier.

Q: What sort of recommendations would you make regarding exercise?

Dr: Kevorkian: Your chosen exercise should fit in well with your own lifestyle, one that you can do throughout life, and that is independent of weather conditions. An indoor activity of some kind would be preferable, perhaps your own individual routine not involving anyone else or any group, institution, or club. Some forms of exercise are considered to be especially beneficial to health by enhancing cardio-respiratory reserve. Exercise involving the legs is said to be more effective in that regard than is exercising the arms or trunk. Jogging, tennis, bicycling, and jumping rope are excellent ways to build up that reserve, but not all of them can be continued uninterruptedly year round without inconvenience.

Q: What are your thoughts on personal freedom, and why do you think that Amendment IX to the Constitution is so important?

Dr. Kevorkian: I think that every human being is born with the lifelong, powerful, unalterable, essentially instinctual will or drive to absolute personal freedom. Of course, for a smoothly functioning, civilized community that absolute drive must be tempered through the judicious modulating effect of so-called relative rights essentially consisting of commonsense rules elaborated for the optimization of harmonious communal existence, and codified by means of wide-ranging, if not universal, public consensus. The full power of natural rights is latent in Amendment IX of the Bill of Rights. Much of the bitter controversy and often bloody violence fostered by highly controversial issues throughout history could have been ameliorated or averted if responsible authorities had done their duty by tapping the trove that the Ninth offers. The point is well exemplified by the passionate battles over medical abortion (or the choice not to bear life) and medical euthanasia (or the choice not to live intolerably suffering).

Q: What are your thoughts about the future of Western medicine?

Dr. Kevorkian: I’m optimistic that Western medicine will advance and start accepting newer and more progressive ideas, as well as, of course, the importance of choice on end of life issues such as death with dignity. I’m also hopeful that we’ll develop more appropriate organ transplant strategies. And this is coming—slowly but surely, both medical services with proper oversights will be available in the future. The Europeans are already leading the way.

David Jay Brown is the author of four volumes of interviews with leading-edge thinkers, Mavericks of the Mind, Voices from the Edge, Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse, and Mavericks of Medicine. (Mavericks of Medicine will be published by Smart Publications as a book in late 2006.) He is also the author of two science fiction novels, Brainchild and Virus. David holds a master’s degree in psychobiology from New York University, and was responsible for the California-based research in two of British biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s bestselling books on unexplained phenomena in science: Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and The Sense of Being Stared At. To find out more about David’s work visit his award-winning web site: www.mavericksofthemind.com

Subscribe
to Smart Publications
E-newsletter
and receive weekly e-alerts from the world of nutritional medicine.

Just type your email address below and click on submit (unsubscribe anytime.)

Subscribe...to
Smart Publications Health & Wellness Update
the 16-page monthly newsletter.

and receive the latest information from the world of nutritional medicine.
>> subscribe for free!

Advertisement
FREE Catalog
from
Health Freedom Nutrition

A convenient way to shop and save!
>> request a calatog

A Compassionate Ending: An Interview with Dr. Jack Kevorkian