Prolonged painful assisted suicide deaths and human experiments with new lethal drugs cocktails

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

An article published in the Spring Hill Insider yesterday looks at experiments being done on people to find an effective lethal drug cocktail for assisted suicide. 

The current drug cocktails have caused painful assisted suicide deaths that may take many hours to die.

The article states that assisted suicide researchers are promoting their third generation of lethal drug cocktails. The results of the first two lethal drug cocktails were:

The (first) turned out to be too harsh, burning patients’ mouths and throats, causing some to scream in pain. The second drug mix, used 67 times, has led to deaths that stretched out hours in some patients — and up to 31 hours in one case.

The first two lethal drug cocktail experiments failed to provide a painless, fast death. Remember, these experiments are being done on people.

In February I published the article - assisted dying can cause inhumane deaths based on research by Professor Jaideep Pandit that was published in the British Medical Journal. Pandit researched complications with assisted suicide and capital punishment deaths. The same lethal drugs are used for assisted suicide and capital punishment.

Pandit reports that the complications include:

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

It is shocking that New Jersey legalized assisted suicide in March and other states are considering assisted suicide, when people in Oregon are dying long and painful assisted suicide deaths.

The assisted suicide promoters and practitioners developed the lethal drug cocktail by doing human trials rather than animal trials. The team appeared concerned with the lethal efficacy and cost of the lethal drugs as opposed to the possible negative consequences. 

The negative outcomes associated with the lethal drug cocktails and the ethics of human experimentation related to the development of these drugs should cause US government, under the controlled substances act, to stop assisted suicide and prevent human experimentation with these lethal drug cocktails.

The euthanasia lobby is not concerned with a "good" death but rather the cost of the drugs. So much for dying with compassion and dignity.

More articles on this topic:

• What's cruel for incarceration is cruel for the terminally ill. The connection between lethal injection and capital punishment (Link).
• Complications with lethal drugs used for assisted suicide (Link).
• Many assisted suicide deaths are slow and painful (Link).
• Is lethal injection inhumane. Euthanasia execution drug controversy (Link).