Hawaii’s new medically-assisted suicide law has gone into effect, but few doctors and pharmacies are willing to prescribe and dispense the life-ending medications.
Hawaii Pacific Health and The Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu said their pharmacies will not fill the prescriptions and hospitalized patients will not be able to take the lethal drugs on their campuses, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported Tuesday. . . [Full text]
That few Hawaiian physicians and pharmacists are willing to be invoved in assisted suicide is not surprising. In 2016, 17 years after Oregon legalized physician assisted suicide , only about 0.5% of all physicians in the state wrote lethal prescriptions for the service.