Dr. Jack Kevorkian once helped other people kill themselves. His actions brought to the table battles over assisted suicide in many states.

Now he is preparing to leave prison on June 1 after serving more than eight years of a 10- to 25-year sentence for the death of a Michigan man. Kevorkian will find that there’s still only one state that has a law allowing physician-assisted suicide — Oregon.

In Oregon the law took effect in 1997. Oppenents have stopped the other states from passing such a law.
Opponents defeated a measure in Vermont this year and are fighting similar efforts in California. Bills have failed in recent years in Hawaii, Wisconsin and Washington state, and ballot measures were defeated earlier by voters in Washington, California, Michigan and Maine.

Kevorkian’s release will create a whole new round of efforts to legalize physician assisted suicide.

Jack Kevorkian’s style was to leave bodies at hospital emergency rooms and motels and he videotaped one death that was broadcast on CBS’ “60 Minutes.” One of the driving forces of the Oregon law was to prevent that kind of suicides from happening, keeping such activities safely in a hospital, according to Kate Davenport, a communications specialist at the Death with Dignity National Center in Portland, Oregon, which defended Oregon’s law against challenges.

Kevorkian fell under criticism for not only performing these heinous acts, but for his unconventional practices.

He used a machine he’d invented to administer fatal drugs and then dropped off the bodies at hospital emergency rooms or coroner’s offices. Sometimes he even left them to be discovered in the motel rooms where he often met those who wanted his help.

Oregon law allows terminal patients who are mentally competent to self-administer the life-ending drugs, and they must make that request once in writing and twice orally.

Since the law took effect in 1997, 292 people have asked their doctors to prescribe the drugs they would need to end their lives. That averages out to about 30 a year. The majority of the people who used the process last year had cancer, and their median age was 74.

Opponents of assisted suicide claim that the solution is not to kill people who are getting inadequate pain management, but to remove barriers to adequate pain management so that they can better tolerate their pain.

Kevorkian has promised he’ll never again advise or counsel anyone about assisted suicide once he’s out of prison. But his attorney, Mayer Morganroth, said Kevorkian isn’t going to stop pushing for more laws allowing it.

“It’s got to be legalized,” Kevorkian said in a phone interview from prison aired by a Detroit TV station on Monday. “I’ll work to have it legalized. But I won’t break any laws doing it.”