National activists pushing for “death with dignity” practices in Hawaii say they don’t need the state Legislature to allow doctors to prescribe life-ending medication for terminally ill patients.

Hawaii law already permits doctors to help terminal patients die, activist Barbara Coombs Lee told a group of about 25 people at Harris United Methodist Church on Wednesday.

Lee is president of Compassion and Choices, which supported an Oregon law that went into effect in 1997 allowing doctor-assisted suicide for the terminally ill. But Lee said Hawaii is a different case.

“We do not necessarily have to have Oregon-style laws…in order to have aid in dying available to the citizens of a state,” Lee said.

Instead, advocates pointed to a 1909 Hawaii law saying that doctors may not be forbidden from “furnishing any remedial agent” to a patient who is “hopeless and beyond recovery.”

Wednesday’s talk was part of an ongoing conversation in Hawaii about whether terminally ill patients can decide how to die on their own terms. The event, attended by a mature audience, was sponsored by the the Democratic Party of Hawaii’s Kupuna Caucus, the Kokua Council and the Hawaii Death with Dignity Society.

Dr. Robert “Nate” Nathanson, a retired general practitioner, attended and gave brief remarks. Afterwards, he told Civil Beat he interprets the law to mean that if a terminally ill patient asked for life-ending medication, doctors should be able to prescribe it. He said in the past, he was asked by patients to prescribe lethal doses of drugs, but he refused thinking it was illegal. But now that he’s talked with Compassion and Choices, he said he’d act differently.

He believes the “remedial agent” cited in the law doesn’t necessarily have to be a cure.

“How can you cure somebody who you’ve certified is already hopeless and beyond recovery?” he said.

The next step is getting word out to patients and more doctors in Hawaii. Nathanson is one of three doctors who have joined Lee to promote the practice.