SACRAMENTO >> One hundred and eleven.
That’s the number of California residents who died in the second half of 2016 with the help of doctor-prescribed drugs under the state’s new aid-in-dying law, according to a first-of-its-kind report released Tuesday. Nearly 200 received the drugs under the law, the report said.
The law allowing assisted suicide in the Golden State, called the End of Life Option Act, went into effect on June 9, 2016, ending years of passionate debate over the whether the state should allow any mentally competent California adult, diagnosed with less than six months, to end their life with a lethal drug prescription from their doctor.
The law also mandated the California Department of Public Health to publish an annual report that provides specific details about anyone who requested and may have ingested the drugs.
Some report highlights:
Nearly 60 percent of those who asked their doctor for the end-of-life remedy were suffering from cancer;
Eighteen percent had been diagnosed with a neuromuscular disorder like ALS or Parkinson’s disease, while many suffered from heart and respiratory diseases;
The median age of people who used the new law was 73;
Forty-two percent of those who used it were age 80 and over;
Most of the people who used a prescription — 102 out of the 111 — were white, while Asians made up six of the total; the number included three blacks and three Hispanics.
The data did not surprise Dr. Lonny Shavelson, a Berkeley-based primary care doctor now specializes in helping patients access the law.
“California kind of looks like every other state in that respect — none of the information about the diseases or types of patients is any surprise,” Shavelson said.
If anything, he said, the numbers seemed quite low.
“You would think that more than 111 people across the whole state would have availed themselves of this law,” Shavelson said, which leads him to conclude that patient access to doctors is still very difficult.
“It means that there are so many people who cannot get a doctor to work with them,” said Shavelson, who travels to meet patients residing everywhere from Northern California to the Central Valley.
The report further breaks down the types of illnesses reported by the people seeking assistance in ending their lives. Among those with malignant cancer as the underlying terminal disease, which constituted the largest group of individuals asking for help, lung cancer accounted for 20 percent, while breast cancer made up 18.5 percent, pancreatic cancer comprised 12.3 percent, and 10.8 percent had prostate cancer.
The report analyzes statistics only through Dec. 31 of 2016, so its numbers understate use of the law to date. In late May of this year, the group Compassion & Choice pointed to anecdotal evidence from its Doc2Doc program — which puts California doctors in touch with their counterparts in states where right-to-die laws have been in place for a long time — that suggested at least 504 terminally ill adults in California received prescriptions since last June.
It had no information on how many used the drugs, but the group had initially predicted that about 1,500 lethal prescriptions would be written in California during the law’s first year — and about two-thirds of the medications would actually be ingested.
But the state report notes that not everyone who asked for the prescription to kill themselves actually went through with it. While 191 prescriptions were written, 111 people actually took the medicine and died. The report says 21 of those who received a prescription died from other causes. It was unclear what had happened with the other 59 patients who had requested but not used the drug.
