The chilling truth about the city where they pay people to die

By Tom Rawstorne
10th August 2009

If all had gone to plan, David would have quickly and peacefully passed away, his breathing becoming more laboured until it eventually stopped altogether.

But it did not happen like that. Instead, after three days in a deep coma, David suddenly woke up. 'Honey?' he said to his wife. 'What the hell happened? Why am I not dead?'

For another 13 days, coherent but racked with pain, David survived before finally succumbing to the disease and dying naturally in his home near Portland, Oregon's most populous city.

In that time he would be transformed from just another death to be recorded under Oregon's policy of assisted suicide into a figurehead for opponents of the U.S. state's deeply controversial Death With Dignity Act.

'He took five times the amount of barbiturates that should kill somebody and he still didn't die,' his older brother Steve told the Daily Mail this week.

'If anything, he should have been brain-dead. But he told us that, while unconscious, he had found himself before God and been told: "Not this way, David." God chose David as his spokesman, absolutely.' the rest