Prescription: Medicide: The Goodness of Planned Death

Kevorkian gained notoriety last year when he performed the first publicly acknowledged ``physician-assisted suicide'' by helping Janet Adkins, a victim of Alzheimer's disease, take her own life. The method of death was the Mercitron, the ``suicide machine'' Kevorkian invented, which enables a person to self-administer a lethal injection. In this self-dramatizing, often strident manifesto he argues that ``medicide,'' his term for doctor-assisted suicide, is an ethical option that should be extended not only to the infirm or terminally ill, but also to inmates on death row. Condemned prisoners, he maintains, should, if they choose, be executed via general anesthesia, with the option of donating organs or having their intact bodies used for medical experimentation. Kevorkian's contention that the existence of his machine renders moral questions about euthanasia obsolete is simplistic. His book is likely to stir a hornet's nest of controversy. Photos. 50,000 first printing; $50,000 ad/promo; author tour. (Sept.)