Myth # 1. Hawaii needs a “death with dignity” law to protect patient choice at the end of life.
This is a complete untruth, peddled to a naïve society by a richly-funded marketing/lobbying group (Compassion and Choices, hereafter C&C) that has been trying for 20 years to sell the same story in every US state.
Everybody supports protecting patient choice. However, this bill is not about patient choice. C&C employs classic misdirection to gather support for a bill that seems to be about choice, and is actually about power – power allowing doctors to be involved in killing their patients with little investigation or followup.
Patients can already choose their end-of-life course without this law. When suffering is an issue, palliative care and specialized hospice care are widely available to everyone. A patient who wants to end his or her own life is free to do so. Suicide is completely legal in Hawaii and every other US state.
A doctor’s prescription is not necessary for suicide, and in fact represents a less-effective approach to suicide. Derek Humphry, founder of the Hemlock Society, C&C’s forerunner, tells how to arrange one’s death in his book “Final Exit,” still available on Amazon.
He favors inhalation of inert gas (helium, argon, or nitrogen – available over the counter everywhere) as the most effective and painless approach. He lists problems with the medical prescription approach.
SB1129 allows doctors to make decisions about who will die, to provide a Lethal Weapon in the form of a massive overdose of prescription medication, to cover up any details of the death that may seem unsavory, and to report as little as they choose to the state. Moreover, this bill will require that doctors lie about the cause of death on the official death certificate, even though these certificates become the basis for national medical planning and disease surveillance, in order to cover up an assisted suicide death.
Myth #2. Medication for suicide is easily available in the form of a pill that doctors can prescribe.
This is also completely untrue. No prescription medication produces death with a single pill, or even a few pills. No such medication would ever be allowed by the FDA to reach the market because of its risks. Death from prescription medications requires a massive overdose, up to 100 times the FDA-recommended therapeutic dose. At this point, the substance is no longer a medication but a Lethal Weapon.
There is no “best” Lethal Weapon drug. Manufacturers remove or restrict medications that are being used for killing, whether by legal lethal injection to serve a death penalty, or in a perversion of prescription use to commit suicide. Pentothal, for example, is no longer available anywhere because manufacturers did not want to support lethal injection. Darvon (propoxyphene) is no longer available as a pain medication because it was being used for suicide. Pentobarbital, once the recommended medication for C&C, has become unavailable because it is also used in lethal injection. Secobarbital is the only remaining sleep medication/barbiturate recommended by C&C. Death requires at least a 100-fold overdose (100 bitter capsules emptied into a bowl and mixed to become a slurry, taken quickly so the person intending to die does not fall asleep before a lethal dose is taken in.)
Barbiturates sometimes produce nausea or vomiting, raising the risk of breathing stomach contents into the windpipe and choking to death, or losing medication in the vomit so that death no longer occurs. Death from barbiturates overdose is not always swift. Patients in Oregon have lived as long as 4 days before dying; six patients have failed to die at all.
Doctors in Washington, and now in Colorado, are experimenting with other drugs. None have been used to produce death previously in this way, so every use is an experiment. Some patients have died very badly, some screaming in pain with burning throats or other misery. There is no FDA-approved Lethal Weapon dose of any medication. All use is untested, completely up to the prescribing doctors. The most frequent prescribers, those who work with C&C, do not publicly report their results.
Myth #3. Oregon has had an assisted suicide law for almost 20 years with neither fraud nor abuse. This proves it’s OK.
According to Neil Gorsuch in his book “The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia,” Oregon’s law was deliberately crafted in 1993 to appear to have safeguards and reporting requirements. C&C has done a skillful job of having people believe that safeguards and reporting are effective, and they have skillfully resisted any attempt to change or improve this law in the face of criticism. This applies to every state. C&C brings the law, sells it to legislators, appoints themselves guardians of the law, and finds that most of the patients seeking death come to physicians affiliated with the group, who are not required to share their information. States that adopt this law adopt a law with sham safeguards and reporting, and find it impossible to change thereafter.
Episodes of difficulty with the Oregon law have surfaced, but the lack of valid information at the state level prevents followup or effective statistical statements. Most deaths are unattended, so the events are unreported. Did the patient take the drug? Voluntarily? Struggling and fighting? Did somebody else “help out” by giving extra drug IV or rectally, or even by using a pillow or a plastic bag? Oregon has no such information, and no state conducts an anonymous survey as in Holland, depending instead entirely on individuals to self-report their own problems and face scrutiny.
Patients have no further protection after the prescription is issued. No further scrutiny or meaningful reports are required.
Lethal doses that are unused because the patient changes his or her mind, or dies too soon to use the medication, remain in the community, with no requirement for disposal or return.
Death certificates are falsified, with no way to track patients who have died of barbiturate overdose. Falsification of death certificates robs the CDC of accurate information about actual causes of death in the US, and prevents effective response to problems.
Before C&C’s lobbyists made false death certificates the law in cases of assisted suicide, false death certificates were used only by totalitarian regimes involved in actions that the regime did not want discovered. All “euthanasia” patients killed in Germany between 1939 and 1941 had false death certificates listing a plausible cause of death. All “final solution” victims who were killed during the holocaust also had false death certificates indicating plausible causes of death.
Myth #4. Hawaiians overwhelmingly want physician-assisted suicide. C&C’s surveys prove that as many as 80% support it.
It is true that Hawaiians overwhelmingly indicate an interest in retaining control at the end of life, in having freedom from suffering, and in dying with dignity. It is not true that Hawaiians want physician assisted suicide – this is a classical misdirection by C&C.
No survey has ever shown that Hawaiians want their physicians to be agents of death in order to meet those interests. There is no evidence that people answering these surveys have any idea at all what is actually involved in giving doctors the freedom to decide who will die.
C&C never discloses that its national agenda is to have doctors be agents of death in every state, and that it is prepared to move directly from “more palatable” assisted suicide to “more resisted” euthanasia, as is now happening in Oregon, where a “death by advance directive” bill is being considered. C&C equally does not disclose that it actually opposes any scrutiny of prescription requests or suicide deaths, and has attached the sham safeguards and reporting requirements only in order to reduce resistance to initial passage of a bill.