X-Message-Number: 24130 From: Date: Sat, 22 May 2004 14:32:40 EDT Subject: Oregon Assisted Suicide Hi all: Thanks for all the feedback on my letter posting. Everyone agrees the "torches and pitchforks" reference is a little over the top, so I'll remove it of course. In a private email a person who works professionally in cryobiology has urged me not to send the letter, as it may rile up the legislature to ban both cryonics and assisted suicide, and generally stir up anti-cryo publicity. (The same person made many corrections and also rewrote it in medical terms felt better for approaching doctors. Thanks.) And they suggested approaching Oregon doctors through doctors involved in cryonics. Should that be possible it might be both effective and discrete, so I am leaning that way if it can be arranged. Both this person and the head of Oregon End of Life Choices (the current name of Hemlock) feel that public sentiment is against us and anything we do can touch off the mob. I would hope that most publicity stemming from *us* would carry true arguments to many people (in contrast to the stuff written by the ex-Alcor employee) and contribute to their education. So I am not persuaded that publicity from the letter is a bad idea. Also, medical societies must discuss controversial topics all the time. The fact that we never hear about these discussions speaks to their discretion. So the letter should be safe with them. But since the purpose of the letter is to find physicians to talk with, and not to stir hornet's nests, then if there is another way to contact Oregon physicians I'll try that first. Alan Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=24130