Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The California Legislature’s determination to lessen the amount of sugary drinks consumed by state residents may never have been greater than now – at least if the metric used is the number of bills introduced. This session, five will be taken up, and more may be on the way.

For the third time, Assemblyman Richard Bloom, D-Santa Monica, has introduce a measure that would tax soda and other beverages sweetened with sugar.

The first two times, Bloom’s measure didn’t get out of committee after it faced intense, well-funded opposition from the American Beverage Association.

But Bloom told his hometown paper, the Santa Monica Daily Press, that the tax was urgently needed to nudge people to stop consuming so many unhealthy drinks.

“Everyone would acknowledge that health care costs are skyrocketing,” he said. “Diabetes and obesity are ongoing health-care crises and we need to get serious about prevention.”

Revenue from the tax – which has not been established yet but which was 2 cents per ounce in Bloom’s previous bills – would pay for programs meant to reduce diabetes and obesity. Bloom said 9 percent of state residents are diabetic and nearly half are at risk of developing diabetes.

Measure would ban Big Gulp-size sodas

Bloom’s bill will have plenty of similar company this year.

Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, proposes a ban on soda servings of larger than 16 ounces in seal-able cups sold at restaurants and grocery stores. A similar ban in New York City was thrown out by New York state courts – but not for a reason that has relevance in California. Judges repeatedly held that the New York City’s health board overstepped its powers in imposing the ban and should have deferred to the New York state Legislature.

Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, hopes to end the common practice of displaying sodas near the checkout stands of food, convenience and other retail stores.

Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel, is for the fourth time proposing that sugary drinks sold in California have labels warning of their health risks. Monning said if tobacco products’ health risks are made plain with warning labels, so should the risks of soda.

Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Alameda, is touting a bill intended to prevent beverage companies from offering stores special deals with lower prices for sugary drinks.

Studies split on effect of Berkeley soda tax

Soda foes got good news on Feb. 21 when the American Journal of Public Health published a study saying that soda consumption plunged 52 percent in Berkeley in the first three years after the city adopted a soda tax. 

But other research into Berkeley’s soda tax is far less encouraging, according to University of Southern California professor Michael Thom. He told the Santa Monica newspaper there was no evidence that residents reduced their caloric or sugar consumption and asserted there is little, if any, proof that soda taxes have a positive effect on human health.

A Harvard Business Review study based on an analysis of millions of transactions at California stores by Duke University professors Bryan Bollinger and Steven Sexton was also skeptical of claims of success in Berkeley. Published in January 2018, it noted that since most residents worked outside of Berkeley, they could readily buy cheaper soda elsewhere. The study also pointed to a factor not mentioned in any recent newspaper coverage of soda taxes:

“We found that much of the cost of the tax is not being passed along to consumers,” Bollinger and Sexton wrote. “Fewer than half of supermarkets changed the price of soda in response to the tax, and prices at chain drug stores did not change at all.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s has called for a first-ever water tax and an added fee on phone bills at a time when the state is enjoying what recently departed state Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor called “extraordinary” budget health. Newsom said last week that experts now forecast a $21.5 billion budget windfall in 2019-20. Until recent years, the optics of asking the public to pay more with an overflowing budget would have seemed impossible to overcome.

Specific details have not yet emerged on Newsom’s plan, but it’s expected to be similar to a rejected 2018 proposal from state Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel, to tax residential customers 95 cents a month to help fund water improvements in rural farming communities in the Central Valley and throughout the state.

It would raise about $110 million to get clean water to what the McClatchy News Service estimated last year to be 360,000 people without such access. Others looking at the problem see it as much worse. Newsom said 1 million residents face health risks from their own water supplies.

Newsom emphasized what a priority the water tax would be for him on Friday by taking his cabinet on a “surprise” tour of affected Central Valley communities.

The dairy industry would also face $30 million in new fees. The $140 million annually that Newsom hopes to get from his plan is dwarfed by money already available from a $7.5 billion 2014 state water bond. While the largest chunk of the bond – $2.7 billion – was reserved for water storage projects, one of its listed priorities for the remaining $4.8 billion was providing access to clean water.

Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association President Jon Coupal saw Newsom’s water tax plan as part of a historical continuum. He told the Sacramento Bee it was only the latest example “of California’s knee-jerk reaction to default to a new tax whenever there’s a new problem.”

But Newsom depicted his 2019-20 budget as reflecting discipline, touting its emphasis on continuing to add to the state’s rainy day fund and his commitment to prepay some of CalPERS’ and CalSTRS’ unfunded long-term liabilities. Finance officials say every $1 billion prepaid now saves more than $2 billion in the long haul.

Governor cites urgent need to upgrade 911 system

Newsom also confirmed that he wants to add a 20- to 80-cent fee on monthly cellphone and landline bills to upgrade the 911 emergency notification system. That would take a two-thirds vote of the Legislature.

A similar proposal died late in the legislative session amid fears that it was a regressive tax that could cause headaches for incumbents on the November ballot.

But Newsom depicts the fee as a vital part of upgrading a 911 system that has outdated technology and is not up to the challenge of keeping safe a state facing devastating wildfires on a yearly basis.

The 911 fee was part of a larger wildfire-response program Newsom announced last week in the aftermath of last fall’s Camp fire in Butte County that killed at least 86 people and destroyed about 14,000 homes and the Woolsey Fire in Ventura and Los Angeles Counties that caused three deaths and torched 1,500 homes.

The governor wants to add $105 million to the $200 million already earmarked for improved wildfire response efforts in fiscal 2019-20. The extra money would be used to boost forest clearing efforts, to expand emergency fire rescue crews and more.

A proposal to add new fees to water bills to help pay for improvements to water systems in rural areas with tainted supplies is back before the Legislature, and this time it has the support of the Brown administration.

Last year, activists sought to build support for the concept of a new levy on water after reports came out that at least 300 communities in California had water supplies that were at least as unsafe as those in Flint, Michigan – a city that has gotten national attention for years for its lead-tainted water. Most of the communities were in Central Valley farm areas.

State Sen. Bill Monning, D-Monterey, used the “gut-and-amend” approach to rework SB623 from a bill more generally about improving water quality into a measure that added a maximum 95-cent fee to the monthly bills of all but poor water customers, among other provisions. But the amended bill never advanced.

This year, a similar fee proposal was included in Brown’s 2018-19 budget bill. The fee could go higher than 95 cents per month for some residential users, depending on meter size. Businesses would also have to pay fees that could go as high as $10 a month for heavy industrial and commercial users. The task of collecting the fees would be assigned to the State Water Resources Control Board,

Under Brown’s budget, the state Department of Food and Agriculture would also collect fees from companies that produce and use fertilizer and from dairy operations. The Sacramento Bee reported last month the fees were justified by the Brown administration on the grounds that fertilizer and manure runoff were to blame for significant groundwater pollution.

A 2016 study from the UC Davis Agriculture Sustainability Institute found that nitrogen pollution from synthetic fertilizers had already contaminated state aquifers to such an extent that a clean-up effort would take decades – even if use of the fertilizers was immediately banned.

Water agencies say existing revenue sources should be used

The Association of California Water Agencies, which has more than 400 member agencies that deliver about 90 percent of the state’s water, opposes the Brown administration’s proposal, which it calls a “water tax.” Its website argues that the 300 communities with dangerous water supplies can have their infrastructure repaired using existing funding sources.

There is no widely agreed-on estimate of how much money such repairs would cost. A private consulting firm estimated the annual tab would be about $140 million, the Legislative Analyst’s Office reported last month. But the LAO questioned whether the numbers could be trusted. If the estimate is right, that means the repairs would cost a little more than one-tenth of 1 percent of the state’s current $125 billion general fund budget.

Talking points used by Association of California Water Agency members cite this statistic. They also emphasize that new billing mandates would be severe headaches for smaller water districts with tiny staffs.

But the Brown budget proposal has also quickly rounded up supporters who declare that it is unconscionable that the 300 communities – which have an estimated 1 million residents – have to deal with “Third World conditions.”

That was how state Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-Azusa, characterized the matter in an interview last month with the Sacramento Bee. Hernandez visited some of affected communities last year and found that it was common for residents to spend as much as 10 percent of their earnings on buying clean water.

Interrupting Nguyen’s remarks on the late Tom Hayden, state Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, “gave the floor to Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel, who said she was out of order. Nguyen continued to speak for several minutes, even as Lara repeatedly asked her to take a seat, before eventually ordering the sergeants to remove her,” the Sacramento Bee reported. 

Lawmakers appeared to have expected a more placid event remembering Hayden, a storied and controversial former state senator who famously objected to the Vietnam War. “Nguyen, who was brought to the United States as a Vietnamese refugee when she was a child, said she wanted to offer ‘a different historical perspective’ on what Hayden and his opposition to the war had meant to her and other refugees,” the Los Angeles Times observed.

Dan Reeves, chief of staff for Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, explained the dust-up by warning that Lara was merely following parliamentary procedure. “Nguyen was told that she could not make her remarks when she did because Hayden had never impugned her, but that she would be allowed to speak on condition of the file at the end of session,” as the Bee noted.

Sharp comparison

Nevertheless, Republicans did not hesitate to cast the brusque treatment of Nguyen as a more galling and unjustifiable example of the recent action taken on the floor of the U.S. Senate to cut short the remarks of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. “Outraged, the Senate GOP Caucus began circulating video footage and repurposing the popular hashtag #shepersisted — created after U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren was silenced while trying to read a letter from Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow, on the Senate floor,” according to the San Jose Mercury News. 

California Republicans have worked to reverse trends over the past decade showing a growing demographic disadvantage among nonwhite residents, with Nguyen’s constituency a relative bright spot. “Vietnamese voters in Orange County have been consistently Republican, and this is true for foreign-born Vietnamese who are 13-points more Republican,” Capitol Weekly noted. “But among U.S.-born Vietnamese, this flips to a 20-point Democratic advantage. The data also shows that racially polarized voting among these populations is strongest among first-generation voters, and dissipates as voters get into third and fourth generations where the factors of ethnicity and national heritage are more diluted.”

A lingering story

The fallout from the ordeal was set to continue into the remainder of the month. The California Senate Republican Caucus has demanded an investigation, with de León adopting a cautiously defensive position. “He said the senator violated parliamentary procedure and that she ignored requests by the presiding officer to follow the rules,” the Mercury News noted, promising “he would speak with Nguyen and Fuller to find out what went wrong” in the incident.

Several twists and turns in the sequence of events may have led to a swift escalation. “Nguyen stood and began her speech in Vietnamese before switching to English,” the Associated Press detailed. “Majority Leader Bill Monning of Carmel she was speaking out of order. Her microphone was shut off, but she continued speaking.” 

Nguyen recently made Sacramento news for invoking her life experience in a different way, abstaining from a vote on the state Senate’s recent resolution condemning the White House’s travel ban applicable to individuals from several predominantly Muslim countries. Nguyen, the Mercury News reported, “said she sympathized with refugees. ‘But in the end,’ she said, ‘the debate is about national security.'” 

The right-to-die law fight lives on

Welcome back from Labor Day weekend. Campaigns are racing to the November finish line, which means if you haven’t had enough politics in your life up to this point, you’re in luck. And if you feel like you’ve had more than enough — then it’ll be a long few months.

And some campaigns never seem to end, as is the case with the right-to-die law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown last year. The law’s passage triggered elation among the state groups which had fought for years to allow doctors to give people with terminal illnesses lethal doses of drugs to end their lives.

A key sponsor — Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel — said the law’s enactment “marks a historic day in California.” The law took effect in June and will remain in place for 10 years.

But attempts to block the law have never stopped. Backers of a lawsuit seeking to scrap the measure may have lost the battle last week in a Riverside County courtroom, but they appear to still have a chance to win the war.

CalWatchdog has more.

In other news:

• “In the latest sign that the seat of termed-out state Sen. Bob Huff is up for grabs, Democrats have gained a slight voter-registration edge in the tri-county district, which includes Anaheim, Fullerton and Yorba Linda.” But it’s been a wild race for more than a year now. The Orange County Register has more.
• “It was the most successful year yet for the amateur lobbyists of the Student Senate for California Community Colleges, owing largely to the sacrifices and sheer stamina of its recent leaders. … What makes that track record so remarkable is the size of the Student Senate’s legislative affairs operating budget: $0.” The San Jose Mercury News has more.  
• “Home builders, school construction companies and others, bypassing the Capitol, spent millions to gather signatures to qualify a $9 billion school bond for the ballot. Eleventh-hour Capitol negotiations to craft a smaller substitute bond in June went nowhere, securing Proposition 51’s fall placement,” writes The Sacramento Bee. 
• “Counting on the growing public outrage over the soaring costs of prescription drugs — and bolstered by the recent fury generated by huge price hikes for lifesaving EpiPens — Proposition 61 proponents are gearing up for one of the most highly anticipated ballot measure showdowns this election season,” writes The San Jose Mercury News.

Legislature: 

• Gone ’til December.

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced. 

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New followers: @Kevhef175

Gov. Jerry Brown’s decision

But attempts to block the law have never stopped. Backers of a lawsuit seeking to scrap the measure may have lost the battle last week in a Riverside County courtroom, but they appear to still have a chance to win the war.

In refusing a request for an injunction to put the law on hold, Superior Court Judge Daniel A. Ottolia cited the safeguards touted by its advocates: the requirement that the patient establish his or her mental competence; that the patient have statements from two medical doctors that he or she will die within six months; and that the patient and only the patient can administer the lethal drugs.

Nevertheless, Ottolia let the lawsuit — technically against Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin as the local symbol of the state’s legal system — proceed. The judge concluded that the lawsuit raised enough serious issues that it should not be dismissed.

Is psychiatric evaluation needed, not competency check?

Plaintiffs include the American Academy of Medical Ethics, the Christian Medical and Dental Society, and six Riverside-area doctors. The argument they made that appeared to resonate the most with Ottolia is that the End of Life Option Act is at odds with the clear intent and plain meaning of another state law meant to provide emergency help to people who are a physical danger to themselves. That law specifies that people with suicidal impulses get professional treatment. A mental competence check-up does not meet this test, according to the plaintiffs’ attorney, Alexandra Snyder, who belongs to  the Life Legal Defense Foundation, which is based in Napa.

The plaintiffs’ brief in the case noted that California law holds that helping in or encouraging a suicide is a felony and questions how a doctor can legally counsel someone — even if they are dying — to consider suicide. 

The brief also contends the End of Life Option Act does an end run around laws meant to protect ailing older people from elder abuse.

Defenders of the law expressed disappointment that the lawsuit was not thrown out and said that Oregon’s history of allowing “death with dignity” since 1997 had been marked by none of the “hypothetical” abuses warned of by the plaintiffs.

California is the fifth state with such a law.

Besides Monning, the law was also co-sponsored by Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, and Assemblywoman Susan Eggman, D-Stockton. Their legislation was modeled on the Oregon law.

While farmworkers do get overtime, there is a much higher threshold than other professions — this bill would bring the over-time thresholds more in-line.

Supporters argue it’s a matter of fairness — that farmworkers should have the same overtime and break protections as everyone else. Opponents say farmers can’t afford it and that an industry dependent on weather, perishable goods and external price-setting can’t be regulated the same as other professions.

“This vote boils down to a moral argument,” said Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel, who, like many of his colleagues, added that the doomsday economic arguments that workers will lose hours or jobs were either overblown or untrue.

Of course, opponents disagreed. Sen. Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber, said that increased labor costs would force farmers to reduce those costs, especially as the minimum wage hikes begin to kick in.

“What’s been accomplished? Maybe a noble goal where we can pat ourselves on our back,” Nielsen said, adding that “the victory would be hollow.”

Gut and amend

What made this bill particularly interesting is that the last iteration died a few months ago and so Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, inserted the language into another bill — a process called gut and amend.

By gutting and amending, the San Diego Democrat’s proposal will circumvent some of the normal steps in the legislative process. However, that alone won’t change members’ minds and it’s unclear if Gonzalez or other supporters have secured enough votes in the Assembly for final passage.

A reticent judge

“San Diego Superior Court Judge Gregory Pollack said his court is not unsympathetic to their plight but lawmakers — not a judge — would need to change the law barring such prescriptions,” according to the Associated Press. “Pollack said in his written ruling that the current law that makes it a felony to assist a suicide in any way is constitutional and so he does not have the power to suspend its enforcement.”

The plaintiffs in the case, expected to appeal, became the latest terminally ill patients to rise to prominence as Californians grapple with the propriety of induced death. “Christy O’Donnell, 47, a cancer patient and the lead plaintiff in the case, had sought to obtain the legal right to end her life because, in part, many common painkillers, including morphine, have not worked for her,” the International Business Times reported. “Another plaintiff, Elizabeth Wallner, 51, was afflicted with Stage IV colon cancer that has metastasized and reached her liver and her lungs.” Pollack insisted “new law” must be made “by the Legislature or by a ballot measure.”

Wallner, for her part, conveyed her steady determination to keep the case going. “This is certainly frustrating, but it’s a temporary setback,” she said, according to KQED. “I am optimistic that we’ll prevail in the end. It’s too big of an issue to leave uncovered.”

No legislation

The frustration of Pollack, O’Donnell and sympathetic activists has been fueled by a successful effort to sink a bill in Sacramento that would have wiped out the state’s ban through the legislative process. As the AP reported, earlier this month, Senate Bill 128 — modeled after neighboring Oregon’s law — cleared the state Senate but ran aground in the Assembly Health Committee, “a panel that includes multiple Democratic lawmakers from heavily Catholic districts in the Los Angeles area, where the archdiocese actively opposed the legislation.”

Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez targeted fellow Latino Catholics Jimmy Gomez, D-Los Angeles, Roger Hernandez, D-West Covina, and Freddie Rodriguez, D-Chino, urging in a strongly worded letter that SB128 be rejected. After the assemblymen turned against the bill, cosponsors Sens. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, and Bill Monning, D-Monterey, had to pull it — leaving observers to wonder whether it might be introduced in altered form at a later date.

The ordeal counted as something of a win for Gov. Jerry Brown, who had not indicated whether he would sign a right-to-die bill, and likely wished to avoid the divisive controversy either way.

A broader trend

For activists nationwide, what had seemed like a possible tipping point in California has led to disappointments around the country. “Some advocates say they thought the nationally publicized case of Brittany Maynard, the 29-year-old California woman with brain cancer who moved to Oregon to legally end her life last fall, might usher in a wave of state laws allowing doctors to prescribe life-ending medications,” the New York Times noted, “but that hasn’t happened.”

Critics of legalizing the practice have viewed the shift from a legislative to a judicial strategy as evidence that the push for change has almost run its course. “Tim Rosales, a spokesman for California Coalition Against Assisted Suicide, said the lawsuits show right-to-die advocates are getting desperate after the setbacks,” according to the Times.

Nevertheless, the issue showed little sign of fading completely into the political background. Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont and Washington have all passed laws permitting assisted suicide, and 70 percent of Californians voiced their approval for a similar approach in a poll conducted at the beginning of the year.

Senate Bill 128, the so-called “End of Life Option Act,” was introduced earlier this year by state Sens. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, and Bill Monning, D-Carmel. Modeled on an Oregon law governing physician-assisted suicide, SB128 set out a series of conditions that would legalize but limit the practice.

Retooled after it initially stalled, the bill has now passed through the state Senate appropriations committee. “Backers of the assisted suicide proposal made some changes to the bill to gain more support after it initially met with strong opposition from hospitals, doctors, anti-abortion organizations and disability rights groups,” Reuters reported. “As currently written, it allows hospitals and medical providers to refuse to comply with a patient’s wish for assisted suicide, and also makes it illegal to pressure or manipulate people into ending their lives.”

The bill’s final language required that medication be self-administered by a mentally competent patient diagnosed by two physicians with six months or less to live, according to California Healthline.

Deepening controversy

One key to the bill’s committee clearance, Reuters noted, was the California Medical Association, which “still opposes the concept of assisted suicide” but “removed its formal opposition to the bill.”

Yet this attempt at a compromise position has left many palliative doctors unsatisfied. Among those supportive of assisted suicide, some have argued that all patients should have a right to avoid discomfort at the end of life — an objective even diligent palliative care cannot always meet.

Others, arguing against the practice, insisted that affirmatively ending patients’ lives was an unnecessary and crude response to the discomfort of death and dying. Newport Beach doctor Vincent Nguyen told Southern California Public Radio that patients’ typical fears — “about pain, losing control or being a burden on family — can be managed with spiritual and emotional counseling and pain medications, all of which are part of the palliative care toolkit.”

Dr. Ira Byock, a palliative care physician in Torrance, went further. Contrary to their wishes, he warned, the chronically ill often “spend their last weeks in intensive care units, hooked up to life support,” according to SCPR. “To address this problem, he says that all doctors — from medical students to veteran practitioners — should be required to have training in end of life conversations.”

A moral shift

As SB128 came one step closer to becoming law, analysts began a closer look at how much popular support the bill might attract. As has long been the case on high-profile and hot-button issues, California has been seen as a bellwether in the struggle over how the law treats those who want to die.

Despite gathering momentum to legalize assisted suicide, public opinion has remained split. But in-state and nationwide, data suggested an ongoing shift in mores that benefits how SB128 is perceived. “Nearly seven in 10 Americans (68 percent) say doctors should be legally allowed to assist terminally ill patients in committing suicide, up 10 percentage points from last year,” Gallup reported. “More broadly, support for euthanasia has risen nearly 20 points in the last two years and stands at the highest level in more than a decade.”

The shift has left opponents pivoting to warn that even relatively narrow authorizations of the practice would lead to ever-broader accommodations down the road. “In the Netherlands, after many years, legal assisted suicide for the dying has evolved into death on demand, with six out of 10 doctors admitting to killing a patient who was simply ‘tired of   living,'” wrote  Jacqueline Harvey of Euthanasia Prevention International at National Review. “California is approaching that slippery slope.”

Changing mores among MDs

For disability-rights advocates like Marilyn Golden, senior policy analyst at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, “the marriage of a profit-driven healthcare system and legalized aid in dying sets up dangerous possibilities,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “She warned of a scenario in which insurers might deny or delay life-sustaining treatments and a patient ‘is steered toward assisted suicide.'”

But views among doctors have moved strongly toward accepting illness-driven suicide. A recent nationwide poll conducted by the Medscape Ethics Center showed that 54 percent of respondents agreed that medically-assisted suicide should be permitted — an 8 percent increase in support among American doctors over the past five years.

The numbers showed how sharply and deeply the divide among physicians has become. “Historically, doctors have been some of the most vocal critics of assisted suicide,” The Atlantic recently noted.

“The American Medical Association still says that ‘physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer.’ Similarly, the California Medical Association takes the view that helping patients die conflicts with doctors’ commitment to do no harm. ‘It is the physicians’ job to take care of the patient and that is amplified when that patient is most sick,’ said a spokeswoman, Molly Weedn.”

A legislative push

With the shift in medical opinion, political support has also increased. While the doctors’ lawsuit makes its way through the courts, Sacramento Democrats have begun to advance legislation that would go even further. In a letter to state Sens. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, and Bill Monning, D-Carmel, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., gave her stamp of approval to Senate Bill 128, the so-called California End of Life Option Act:

“The right to die with dignity is an option that should be available for every chronically suffering terminally ill consenting adult in California. I share your concern that terminally ill California residents currently do not have the option to obtain end-of-life medication if their suffering becomes unbearable. As a result they may well experience terrible pain until their illness has taken their life naturally.”

The bill “would allow mentally competent California residents with less than six months to live obtain physician-prescribed lethal drugs that they’d administer themselves,” according to the Los Angeles Times. “A patient would need two doctors to confirm the illness was terminal. Also required: two oral requests 15 days apart and a written version witnessed by two people. Physicians, pharmacists and healthcare facilities could opt out. Those participating would be protected against lawsuits. Coercing a patient would be a felony.”

SB128 recently passed through the Senate Health Committee, which viewed a video message prepared by the activist Brittany Maynard, who moved to Oregon from California last year in order to end her life in accordance with that state’s assisted-suicide law.

“Before she died, Maynard recorded testimony in favor of passing such a law in California,” Reuters reported. “I am heartbroken that I had to leave behind my home, my community, and my friends in California, but I am dying and I refuse to lose my dignity,” Maynard said in the video. “I refuse to subject myself and my family to purposeless, prolonged pain and suffering at the hands of an incurable disease.”

A bellwether in the making

The assisted-suicide movement has positioned itself well to exploit a potential success in California. In addition to Oregon, Washington and Vermont also legally permit the practice. “Courts in New Mexico and Montana also have ruled that aid in dying is legal, and a suit was also recently filed in New York,” according to The Atlantic.