SALEM — The number of Eastern Oregonians diagnosed with terminal illnesses who ended their lives by taking a doctor-prescribed combination of lethal drugs rose by three cases in 2023, up 50% from the year prior.

The regional totals pails in comparison to the rest of the state, where 367 Oregon residents died in 2023 by medical aid in dying, which was known as “physician-assisted suicide” when Oregon voters passed the Death with Dignity Act in 1997 — the first law of its kind in the nation.

According to the annual report issued March 20 by the Oregon Health Authority, there were 6 medication-assisted deaths involving Eastern Oregon residents — a statistical area in the report composed of Baker, Grant, Harney, Malheur, Morrow, Umatilla, Union and Wallowa counties.

Across Oregon, the number of medically assisted deaths rose to 367 in 2023, up 63 from the year before and the highest since the voter-passed law went into effect in 1998, the report states. Statewide, those deaths involved 337 who ingested the lethal medication prescribed to them by a doctor that year, and another 30 people who ended their lives with life-ending prescriptions written in previous years, according to the Health Authority.

The law limits medication aid in dying to patients 18 and older, who are capable of making and communicating their own health care decisions and are diagnosed by a doctor to have a terminal illness that will lead to their death within six months, according to the OHA’s website about the law. 

The law differs from euthanasia — which remains illegal in Oregon — because the doctor does not directly administer the lethal medication to the patient. Instead, a doctor prescribes the lethal cocktail of medications for the patient to decide to consume.

Doctors are not required to provide a prescription to a patient, and a terminal patient’s participation in Death with Dignity is entirely voluntary.

There were 167 doctors who wrote lethal prescriptions in 2023: 26 in Southern Oregon, 85 in the Portland metropolitan area (Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington counties), 42 in northwest Oregon outside the Portland metro area, eight in Central Oregon and the Columbia Gorge area and six in Eastern Oregon.

Doctors wrote 560 prescriptions in 2023. According to the state report, 82 who were prescribed it never took the medication and subsequently died from other causes. Another 141 patients’ ingestion status is unknown — 41 of them dead with an ingestion status unknown, another 100 patients whose death and ingestion status were still pending as of Jan. 26 of this year.

The report states that 82% of Death with Dignity patients were seniors 65 or older. The most common terminal diagnoses, according to the report, include cancer at 66%, neurological disease at 11%, heart disease at 10% and respiratory diseases such as COPD at 7%.

The report states that 322 of the 367 deaths last year occurred at the patient’s home. Another 21 occurred at an assisted living or foster care facility, seven occurred in a hospice facility, three occurred at a hospital and two occurred at a skilled nursing home. Another 12 deaths occurred in a location classified as “other.”

From 1998 through 2023, there have been 2,847 medically assisted deaths across Oregon.