DENVER \u2013 Colorado voters in November will decide whether terminally ill people should be allowed to receive prescriptions for drugs to end their own lives.<\/p>\n
The \u201cMedical Aid in Dying\u201d measure was certified Monday as having enough petition signatures to make ballots this fall.<\/p>\n
Five other states have some law allowing the terminally ill to end their lives.<\/p>\n
Oregon passed the first right-to-die law in 1998, followed by Washington, Vermont and, last year, California. Montana\u2019s state Supreme Court ruled in 2009 that doctors could use a patient\u2019s request for life-ending medication as a defense against any criminal charges.<\/p>\n
Colorado\u2019s version would require two physicians to agree that a person is terminally ill and has six months or fewer to live, is at least 18, and is mentally competent.<\/p>\n
Similar measures have twice failed in the Colorado Legislature. Lawmakers from both parties said that the law could facilitate suicide in cases where a diagnosis may be wrong.<\/p>\n
The suicide measure becomes the third citizen petition to make Colorado ballots. Voters will also decide a universal health care measure and a higher minimum wage.<\/p>\n
The secretary of state is reviewing petitions for several more ballot measures, including a higher tobacco tax, a plan to replace presidential caucuses with presidential preference primaries, and two measures to change regulations on oil and gas drilling. Another pending measure would make it harder to put a ballot measure to voters, requiring more geographic diversity in the 98,000 or so signatures to put a proposal before voters.<\/p>\n
Supporters of Colorado\u2019s suicide measure had raised about $4.4 million by Aug. 1, according to state filings. Opponents including the Colorado Catholic Conference had not reported any fundraising by Aug. 1.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Similar measure rejected twice in state<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[255,13,955],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-73629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-death-and-dying","tag-frontpage-lead","tag-suicide"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73629\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73629"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=73629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}