A police commissioner suffering from a terminal illness has called for the law on assisted dying to be changed to allow him to end his own life.

Ron Hogg, 67, the elected police, crime and victims commissioner of Durham, was diagnosed in August with motor neurone disease, an incurable condition that leads to muscle wasting and death. He told the Guardian he already needs help to breathe.

He is challenging the law banning assisted dying and wants the right to end his suffering at a time chosen by him and his family.

Hogg said: “I think the law should allow assisted dying. Clearly you need to have safeguards. But there ought to be a clear path outlined where individuals who would want to choose that route can do so, and can do so legally within the UK.

“Those end-of-life decisions are something I’ll be considering in the next two or three weeks.”

Hogg, previously a police officer for 30 years who retired as deputy chief constable of the Cleveland force in 2008, said he was considering going to the Dignitas suicide clinic in Switzerland to shorten the intense suffering that motor neurone disease inflicts.

He said he would want to be helped to die in Scotland, where he was born. But the ban on assisted dying means he will have to go overseas.

It may also mean ending his life earlier than he would want, for fear he could be too ill to travel.

Hogg uses a ventilator to help with his breathing and explained the effects of his diagnosis. “Thirty years as a cop, 30 years playing rugby, now I find it difficult to walk across the room. I’ve got limited use of my right arm. I’ve lost three stone in body weight, I’ve lost five inches off my chest … simple things become so so difficult.”

His understanding is that death will come two to five years from the onset of the disease.

He said the diagnosis was “like walking into a brick wall”, with the time and date he was given the news stuck in his memory. He said he had been thinking about assisted dying soon after the diagnosis given to him at 9 o’clock on 23 August. “It’s about your quality of life, your ability to enjoy life.

“I look at myself now and certainly become very depressed in many regards with my condition, and I can see that as things deteriorate, the life that you have, is it the life you really want, the life you think you should be leading?”

He said a ban on assisted dying in the UK meant humans were exposed to suffering that would not be inflicted on an animal, and the law should change. “We would not extend the life of an animal. It is to reduce unnecessary suffering, not only to the individual, but to the families.”

Hogg said he was keen to maintain a positive attitude and still had his sense of humour: “You’ve got to get out and live each day as it comes and get the best benefit that you can.”

He said he wanted “dignity in death” but anyone who helped him would face prosecution for helping him end his suffering.

“I think it is morally justifiable. I think morally it is the right way forward … We do make that moral decision in the prenatal world if we have children with severe disabilities identified early on in pregnancy.”

Hogg was elected Labour police commissioner for Durham in 2012. The force he oversaw became the best in Britain, he said, because it was the best at innovating, looking at the truth of challenges, and making hard decisions.

Now, Hogg said, he is prepared to do that when it comes to his own life and death. “I was born in Scotland and that is where I would rather go but I can’t do it because of the laws of the country at the moment. That’s where I was born, that’s where my heart is.”

This month Mavis Eccleston, 80, was cleared by a jury of murdering her terminally ill husband, Dennis, after they formed a pact to end their lives together. Hogg condemned her treatment.

Objections to allowing assisted dying include fears some people would be pressured into ending their life.

Sarah Wootton of the campaign group Dignity in Dying said up to 2,000 terminally ill people a year in England and Wales would choose to end their life to curtail their suffering.

The group said: “What we urgently need is a robustly safeguarded assisted dying law that provides choice and control to dying people who want it, takes agonising decisions out of the hands of their loved ones and protects the rest of society.

“Not only is this a law that 84% of the British public want to see, it’s a choice that terminally ill people in ten jurisdictions in the US, Victoria in Australia and across Canada are already allowed to make.”

On Thursday it was announced an acting police commissioner for Durham had been appointed because of Hogg’s illness.

