To pop the poison pill or not - that is the question. Life sometimes sucks under the best of circumstances, but what if you spend your days in a hospital bed slowly suffocating to death as cancer eats away at your lungs? You're frightened, your quality of life is zilch, and maybe you just don't see any point in delaying the inevitable. Like the English Patient, you want a little help to end your suffering. Should it be legal for a physician to provide you with such help? As always, we take you along both sides of a seemingly unbridgeable divide - and bring you out alive. (Or dead, if that's your preference.)

1. LEARN SOME BACKGROUND ON THE ISSUE

There have been times and places in history when taking your own life was considered honorable, but the practice of suicide has been generally opposed in America. One should pity Kurt Cobain and encourage him to seek treatment - of course - rather than help him to load the shotgun. Many insist that the desire to commit suicide is an indication of mental illness. Others believe that to take your own life is a violation of God's law. Suicide is wrong. Period.

But there have been dissenting voices who say that there are times when the prolongation of your own life is absurd and unethical, and that the individual, sovereign over his own body, ought to be allowed to make the determination for himself. Hemingway, for example, sincerely considered that splattering his brains all over the house was the brave and moral thing for him to do, even though his wife had to clean up the mess.

Suicide is not illegal in the United States. Law-abiding citizens who want off the merry-go-round of life will suffer no crises of conscience here. What if, however, it strikes you as somewhat unnecessarily barbaric to shoot yourself, or hang yourself? Or maybe you're not exactly certain as to the correct dosage of Drano. Surely a considerate doctor, a man or woman of the world, would be willing to help you find a more humane solution. Well, no. To do so would make the physician a murderer in every state except Oregon, even if you were a terminally ill patient, suffering terribly, with no hope of recovery. Advocates of physician-assisted suicide are hoping, and opponents are dreading, that Oregon represents the thin end of the wedge.

In 1994 Oregonians approved Measure 16, the Death with Dignity Act by a margin of 51% to 49%, which allows terminally ill patients to obtain a lethal prescription. In the years following the passage of this measure there were repeated legal attempts to prevent it from becoming law; legislators even went to the extraordinary length of asking the voters to repeal the Act. Measure 51, as the motion to repeal was called, was defeated. Voters chose to retain the Act by a margin of 60% to 40% and in 1997 the Act finally went into effect. In 1998 there were 15 physician-assisted suicides in Oregon, and in 1999 there were 27.

Similar measures have been proposed and scrapped in California and Washington. Oregon is currently the only state where physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is legal. But is it only a matter of time before other states follow Oregon's example?

In 1999 the poster-boy of PAS, Dr. Kevorkian, was finally convicted of second-degree murder for assisting in the death of Thomas Youk (notoriously broadcast on 60 Minutes) after a decade of flouting the laws against doctor-assisted suicide and winning over sympathetic juries. Kevorkian lost what Oregon won.

It would seem the conflict is far from over. In fact, the two sides may just be getting warmed up.

(For a full chronology go to http://web.lwc.edu/administrative/library/death.htm)