Alzheimer treatment and the False Compassion of Assisted Suicide

This article was published by National Review online on June 9, 2021

Wesley Smith

By Wesley J Smith

Great news. The FDA has just approved a new drug that appears to slow the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer’s disease by 28 percent as compared to a cadre of subjects receiving placebo. The help with everyday tasks was most significant.

The approval is controversial because — well, Big Pharma! It is also based on one study, and the drug does not provide dramatic improvement. But I think a Wall Street Journal editorial has the right POV:

As for complaints about insufficient evidence, Congress amended federal law in 1997 to let the FDA approve novel drugs based on a single study in order to accelerate breakthroughs for hard-to-treat diseases. The FDA has appropriately exercised its discretion, and Biogen plans to conduct additional studies following drug approval.

I want to focus on a different point. Alzheimer’s and other dementia patients are now in the cross hairs of the euthanasia movement. In the Netherlands, Belgium, and soon in Canada, people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s can order themselves killed once they become incompetent. Or they can receive euthanasia before that time.

Meanwhile, our domestic assisted-suicide zealots teach elderly people how to commit suicide by self-starvation, with the agony of such a course palliated by a doctor — known in euthanasia parlance as VSED (voluntary stop eating and drinking). There are even legal moves afoot to allow advance directives to be written legally ordering caregivers to starve dementia patients death — even if they willingly eat! Nevada has passed such a law.

If new treatments do materialize, how many dementia patients will have died by their own or others’ hands who might have lived if they had continued on until new treatments came on line? I shudder to think.

Don’t scoff. It has happened before with AIDS.

I lived in San Francisco at the worst of the crisis. It was the most tragic circumstance I have ever witnessed: Young men who looked as if they were 80 were so weak they had to be held up by friends just to walk down the street. An underground assisted-suicide cabal of MDs serving the gay community and AIDS patients surreptitiously provided overdoses to dying patients. The supposedly empowering motto was: “You can’t tell us who to love and you can’t tell us how to die.”

Then, the new drugs suddenly came on line. Patients literally on the brink of death were brought back to vigorous life, and AIDS was suddenly redefined from a terminal to a chronic condition.

There is no doubt in my mind that the number of AIDS patients died by assisted suicide — but would have lived without being encouraged into hastened death — is considerable. Yet I never heard any of the assisted-suicide-for-AIDS pushers acknowledge their complicity in these unnecessary deaths.

I think the same may one day — soon or far — become true with Alzheimer’s patients if we follow the current course and allow their hastened deaths. Pushing killing instead of caring for our most serious diseases masks itself as compassion but is actually cruel abandonment.