Campaigned hard for this one… “Death with Dignity Act. On October 27, 1997, Oregon enacted the Death with Dignity Act which allows terminally-ill Oregonians to end their lives through the voluntary self-administration of lethal medications, expressly prescribed by a physician for that purpose.”

I'd support it strategically if I were living in Washington but my guess is it likely doesn't go far enough. The law in Oregon for example insists you must have a death sentence from a doctor (in fact, IIRC, 2 different ones) that give you 6 months or less to live. Then you have to find a doctor willing to provide or administer the drugs, and I think there's some psych evaluation to insure you're not under duress, and by then I suspect 6 months are up and you're dead anyway, even assuming you had the strength and the funds and the doctors weren't booked months in advance and so forth. The law strikes me as completely insensitive to the practical realities of people who are that seriously ill.

Either that or you have intractable pain or something else that isn't actually fatal and the law is no help at all.

These laws don't constitute proper, meaningful reforms unless they are far less intrusive and restrictive of self-determination. But ... they are better than nothing. Kind of.

Why is even such a half-measure taboo to discuss? Sour grapes, if you want to condense it to a couple of words. People don't understand the distinction between rational and irrational suicide, and paint it all as irrational, or have various irrational slippery-slope concerns.

While the Abrahamic religions are behind a lot of the resistance here, even unbelievers are influenced by what has become a very strong taboo in much of the western world. It is partly dogma, but also general fear and loathing around facing and dealing with our own mortality. There are multiple reasons for the unhealthy mentality around death and dying.

The almost primal anti-suicide taboo in Christianity evolved mostly to keep Christianity from becoming a suicide cult. After all if this world is just a vale of tears and we're all heaven-bound, and all our dead loved ones are waiting for us, absent some strong taboo, why wouldn't you just off yourself as an act of faith? Might as well get on with an eternity of bliss and bypass all this earthly bullshit, right?

I definitely agree with what you posted.
If it's considered suicide, isn't that also an issue with insurances? Might major insurance companies try and block it?