Assisted dying can cause inhumane deaths.

Alex Schadenberg

Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

An article in the Daily Mail by Vanessa Chalmers titled - Assisted Dying can cause inhumane deaths examines the article, by Professor Jaideep Pandit, as reported in the British Medical Journal.

The article explains how death by assisted suicide is often inhumane. Chalmers reports:

Patients are usually given barbiturates – strong sedatives – which knock them out and eventually cause the lungs and heart to stop. 

But the report found complications including difficulty in swallowing the prescribed dose (up to nine per cent) and vomiting in 10 per cent, both of which can prevent proper dosing. 

Re-emergence from a coma occurred in two per cent of cases, with a small number of patients even sitting up during the dying process, the authors said. 

'This raises a concern that some deaths may be inhumane,' the researchers reported in the journal Anaesthesia. 

After oral sedative ingestion, patients usually lose consciousness within five minutes. However, death takes considerably longer.

Death occurs within 90 min in two thirds of cases. 

But in a third of cases, death can take up to 30 hours, and some deaths took as many as seven days to occur (four per cent).

Another concern is that there is no single technique for doing assisted suicide.

'We expected that, since a common humane aim is to achieve unconsciousness at the point of death, which then occurs rapidly without pain or distress, there might be a single technique being used.

'However, the considerable [differences] in methods suggests that an optimum method of achieving unconsciousness remains undefined,' the review said.

'It is striking,' the authors said, 'that the incidence of "failure of unconsciousness" is approximately 190 times higher when it is intended that the patient is unconscious at the time of death, as when it is intended they later awaken and recover after surgery', which occurs approximately one in every 19,000.

We have always known that there are problems with assisted death techniques but the laws are designed to cover-up problems with the law. In every assisted death law the doctor who approves the death, is the same person who participates in the death, is the same person who reports the death. Problems with the law are covered-up by the self-reporting system.

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