Are you ready to have a doctor kill you? Just hankering for a dose of digoxin to relieve the pain?

Well, I have a deal for you! Coming to a state near you will be expanded opportunities to get offed by somebody in a white coat, no trip to the South Side of Chicago to insult a gang member is needed.

Currently, 7 states are considering laws to legalize assisted suicide, and two states are looking to expand the practice and encourage residents of other states to visit, drop a few bucks in a nice hotel, enjoy a meal, maybe take in a show, and get killed at the end of a nice weekend.

Maybe they can run some of those swanky tourism ads in other states.

“Are you dying to come to Oregon?”

“Visit Vermont and spend the rest of your life here!”

I’ve written a lot about the ghoulish promotion of “Medical Assistance in Dying” in Canada, where the practice is so firmly entrenched that people suffering from disabilities or depression are encouraged to off themselves. There’s nothing compassionate about it at all: if you need any help to live a decent life, the state suggests that death is a better alternative.

At least this “medical care” is free! No worries, at least once your corpse is cooled down.

We have come a very long way since the days when “death with dignity” activists were lobbying to allow patients on the cusp of a painful death to choose a more humane path out of this world. Medical “ethicists” now are suggesting death as a “cure” for just about any illness that can’t be cured by chopping off your genitals. That works too, although it is more expensive so expect gender dysphoria cures to soon include a dose of something besides hormones in a needle.

A Yale professor actually suggested that the solution to Japan’s problems with an aging population could be solved with the mass suicide of the elderly.

I was looking up a list of drugs used for medical murder and was struck by the fact that there is no standard formula, and no universally approved cocktail of drugs to accomplish the task. The practice is apparently akin to gender-bending, where they make it up on the fly while assuring everybody that they know what they are doing.

Sometimes, in fact, the process is neither quick nor painless–similar to the trouble that occasionally comes with lethal injections.

A paper published last year looked into the practice and discovered that–lo and behold–drug research focuses on using medication to save people, not kill them, so there is little data on dosage and other variables. And, it turns out, things don’t always go so well for everybody involved.

Not that the doctor gets in trouble. As long as he winds up with a dead body,  who’s to know?

Background

‘Assisted dying’ is practiced in some European countries and US states. Legislation suggests that there exists an easily prescribed drug which consistently brings about death quickly and painlessly. Evidence from jurisdictions where ‘assisted dying’ is practiced, however, reveals that hastening patient death is not so simple.

Sources of data

This report is a collation of assisted suicide and euthanasia drug protocols published by the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers and the Royal Dutch Medical Association, annual data reports from the USA and Canada and relevant academic publications pertaining to methods of ‘assisted dying’ in the USA, Belgium, Canada and Switzerland.

Areas of agreement

A wide variety of lethal drug combinations are used for people who want their life ended, and the prevalence of complications and failures in intentionally ending life suggest that ‘assisted dying’ applicants are at risk of distressing deaths.

Areas of controversy

The efficacy and safety of ‘assisted dying’ drugs are currently difficult to assess, as clinician reporting is often very low.

Growing points

The findings from this report reveal that little attention has been given to the problem of unmonitored prescribing and administering of lethal drug combinations, whose mode of action is unclear.

I wonder if patients are informed of the basic facts: killing people isn’t that hard. Doing it humanely in a medical setting is apparently another matter entirely. It turns out that it can be a very unpleasant process for everybody involved, except, perhaps, the doctor whose solution to a large caseload is reducing the number of patients.

Assisted dying’ legislation often refers to the lethal drugs as ‘medicine’ or ‘medicines’. For example, The Assisted Dying Bill,2 a Private Members Bill currently before the UK Parliament, would require patients to confirm: ‘Having considered all this information, I have a clear and settled intention to end my own life and, in order to assist me to do so, I have asked my attending doctor to prescribe medicines for me for that purpose.’ From the use of the term ‘medicines’ it is inferred that there exists an easily prescribed drug that consistently brings about death quickly and painlessly. Evidence from jurisdictions where ‘assisted dying’ is practiced, however, reveals that hastening patient death is not so simple.

No single or combination of drugs is agreed to be most effective for ending a human life. Drugs used for medical purposes are required to undergo a stringent approval process in order to assess efficacy and safety. But the drugs being used for ‘assisted dying’ have not undergone such process; the safety and effectiveness of previous and current combinations of lethal drugs is largely unknown. Canada’s MAiD protocol concedes this.3

The pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics listed for the medications below are at typical therapeutic dosing, not MAiD dosing. There has been little to no research into their parameters at such high doses as seen with MAiD … There is no peer-reviewed literature to guide best practice in compounding these medications.

There is also evidence that ‘assisted’ deaths may be distressing for patients and their loves ones.4^,5

Interesting point: these poisons as used are not medicines. Medicines are designed to help people get better, not dead. Drugs that work one way at a proper dosage may not give a linear response and will behave in unexpected ways. It’s not like the FDA tests the drug dosages until people die, measuring the effectiveness by the number of dead bodies that result from each dose.

Getting people dead, in and of itself, is not that difficult. We kill animals and human beings all the time, but MAiD is not supposed to send people to slaughterhouses.

Apparently, that is currently what we are doing, at least with some patients. Far from being assured of a quick and painless death, assisted suicides can be botched in a number of ways. We have no Yelp reviews from people who had either good or bad experiences from the process, of course, and the doctors aren’t exactly dying to share their failures.

One of the primary purposes of introducing ‘assisted dying’ legislation is to provide a ‘safe and comfortable’ death to patients who believe they will otherwise have to endure unbearable suffering at the end of life.6 Fear of future suffering and the desire to control one’s death are among the most prevalent reasons for patients requesting an ‘assisted’ death.21^,22 Given these aims, the drugs used should have a high level of efficacy, bringing about death quickly, as well as a high degree of safety, bringing about death without distressing adverse effects.

The efficacy and safety of ‘assisted dying’ drugs are currently difficult to assess. One reason for this is that, in jurisdictions where ‘assisted dying’ is practiced, clinician reporting is often very low. In Belgium, it is estimated that 52% of euthanasia cases are reported to the Federal Euthanasia Control and Evaluation Committee.23 In Oregon, patients often ingest the lethal drugs without a healthcare professional present to record complications; a health care professional is reported as present in only one in five such deaths and assisted suicide complications are ‘unknown’ in 71% of cases.9 Additionally, data regarding the nature of ‘assisted’ deaths are significantly limited as the reporting mechanisms rely on simple forms filled out only by the prescribing clinician, who may also be reluctant to reveal errors or complications.24 Despite limitations in data collection, statistics published in annual reports do reveal that ‘assisted’ deaths are not always accomplished quickly and without complication.

Hmmm. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? One common practice apparently is to administer drugs that paralyze the “patient” to avoid the appearance of struggling that may “distress the family.” This of course means that patients may be experiencing tremendous distress without anybody knowing.

Nice.

Even more troubling is that in many cases drugs are prescribed to patients to self-administer in another setting. There is little to no reporting on the experiences of those patients, no way to monitor what happened, and plenty of reasons to believe that there is a huge variation in the experiences of the various people using the drugs.

What little we do know about these self-administered cocktails is that the effects are highly variable. The data we do have is very troubling:

There is also evidence that the drugs used for assisted suicide do not consistently bring about death quickly. Time to death after ingesting the lethal drugs seems highly unpredictable. Of cases with available data in Oregon since 2001, time from drug ingestion to death has ranged from 1 min (too short for the cause to have been oral drugs) to 108 h. Thirty-three percent of the total deaths with recorded data have taken over an hour, and 7.6% over 6 h. Time to death has become longer since the introduction of experimental drug cocktails ‘DDMA’ and ‘DDMP’. The median time to death after ingestion has doubled since 2015. Fifty-five percent of patients given ‘DDMP2’ (containing 15 g of morphine sulfate) and 45% of those given ‘DDMA’ have experienced a prolonged dying that lasted over 1 h.9

We are rushing headlong into a world where the powers-that-be and the medical establishment are encouraging people to leave this world for a better one, or at least a painless one, without actually letting people know what that means.

We are telling people they are worthless, unloved, unwanted, and a burden. Not only are they better off dead, but so are the rest of us.

That is awful enough. Now add on top of that the fact that we could easily be torturing them on the way out.

In 2017, The Denver Post published an article about a man in Colorado who sought assisted suicide after being diagnosed with cancer. Although his wife thought he would die quickly and peacefully, after ingesting the lethal drugs he experienced distressing complications and took over 9 h to die5:

On the day of Kurt’s death, Susan mixed the liquids prescribed as directed and Kurt began drinking the compound. ‘But with every sip,’ Susan says, ‘he’s choking and coughing, choking and coughing.’ It went on for nearly 20 min… Although he never regained consciousness, the gasping, uneven breathing continued. Two hours passed. Then 4 h. ‘At 4:15,’ Susan says, ‘I started to majorly panic.’ As she tried without success to reach a doctor, a couple more disturbing thoughts crossed her mind: She feared that Kurt, despite his unconsciousness, could hear everything—the calls, the desperation in her voice. And she wondered if his choking when he first took the medication meant that he had aspirated enough to delay its effect. Around 7 p.m., she asked hospice to send a nurse. Shortly after the nurse arrived, a doctor called and suggested some additional measures. Soon after, Susan saw her husband sit up slightly and appear to retch three times. She ran to his bedside. Then he slid back into his pillows and stopped breathing.

The unpredictable efficacy of assisted suicide drugs is acknowledged by the Royal Dutch Medical and Pharmaceutical Societies and the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers, who both recommend that clinicians obtain consent from patients to convert to euthanasia prior to ingestion of the lethal drugs in case the patient takes too long to die.8^,25 In 2018, of the MAiD cases in Canada with available data, 50% were unsuccessful by 60 min and the clinician transitioned to euthanasia to complete the ‘assisted’ death.25

It takes a heart much harder than mine to ignore the pain and suffering of people facing an inevitable death accompanied by disability and pain. I get why people want an option that avoids the worst aspects of fatal illness. I even get why doctors might feel compelled to end suffering in such cases. I’m not sure why hospice care is not considered a better solution for these patients.

And, of course, you wouldn’t put a depressed person in hospice, but these ghouls want to kill them too. Mental illness runs in my family and touches most of us at some point in our lives; imagine encouraging a loved one going through clinical depression to kill themselves. That is what is happening right now in Canada.

As with treating gender dysphoria, lots of people are being sold a bill of goods. MAiD may be becoming a common procedure around the world and in the near future in the United States, but the “experts” are overselling their expertise. Some, perhaps many, of these patients will not get a quick and painless death, but a long and distressing one instead.

Still, as is demonstrated by how common it has become to consider and pass these euthanasia laws, our society is rushing headlong into a future where we encourage doctors to perform medical experiments on patients while purporting to provide expert “care.”

It’s disturbing. It’s ghoulish. And it certainly isn’t anything we would call “informed consent.”