Creepy assisted suicide advocate and practitioner Jack Kevorkian has been released from prison after serving an eight-year term.

Kevorkian earned the nickname “Dr. Death” back in the 1950s, well before he became known for his willingness to help non-terminally ill but suffering patients end their lives. It comes as no real surprise that his medical specialty was pathology, and indications are that he evinced a deep and unusual a fascination with death even for pathologists. His interest in prison predates his own sojourn there, as well; he was asked to leave his medical residency at the University of Michigan back in 1958 for wanting to experiment (consensually) on convicts as they were being executed.

It’s a poorly-kept secret that many doctors help terminal patients along on the road to death by treating their pain and discomfort aggressively with narcotics, drugs that help to fatally suppress lung function in a person whose health is already ultra-fragile. It’s difficult (although not impossible) to argue with this practice, which seems to me to be a benign one. But it differs greatly from what Kevorkian advocated, which appeared, as time went on, to partake of more and more of the ghoulish and less and less of the objective disinterested doctor—if in fact his ministrations could ever have been described in the latter terms.

The controversial area Kevorkian staked out was to help the suicides of patients who were extremely miserable but not necessarily dying. Initially he devised a machine to help those who had physical handicaps do it themselves, but then he got more and more cocky—and perhaps more interested in hands-on experience. The death for which he was convicted was of a man with ALS whose suicide Kevorkian performed himself, making it a clear homicide, and which Kevorkian had the hubris to videotape and sent to “60 Minutes,” after which he challenged the previously reluctant prosecutor to take him to court.

Back when Kevorkian was active, it was abundantly clear that many of his patients were suffering from the depression that so often comes with the burden of serious illness and/or chronic pain. Follow the link and you will find some of the shocking details about the undertreatment of their conditions, as well as Kevorkian’s singular lack of interest in finding alternative help for them before he administered his “assistance.”

I am not making light of the pain and misery that even non-terminal patients can be visited with; in fact, for many, living with that kind of open-ended suffering can be worse than knowing death is imminent. The health care system often fails such patients, exacerbating their hopelessness. But one way in which it sometimes fails them is to fail to properly treat their sometimes-undiagnosed depression, or to give them the more powerful drugs that could successfully combat their pain.

The undertreatment of chronic pain is a sad fact of modern medicine; fear of prosecution causes many practitioners to underprescribe the panoply of drugs that can help the situation. Kevorkian often stepped in way too quickly to remedy affairs with a more permanent solution: that of death. And he did so with a grisly eagerness and an arrogance that was utterly repellent, and for which he’s paid the price of eight years behind bars.

Speaking of price, he is apparently about to go on the lecture circuit, to the tune of up to fifty or a hundred thousand dollars an engagement. Not bad for an ex-con whose achievements as a doctor seem to have been modest. But he’s a raging a success as a publicity hound.