Assisted suicide deaths are not what you think they are.

Alex Schadenberg

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, 

Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

I had the opportunity on Monday, February 24, to speak at the British Parliament (Westminster) about the reality of assisted suicide America. I focused on the experience with assisted suicide in Oregon and California. 

The UK assisted suicide bill, that is sponsored by Kim Leadbeater, is similar to American style assisted suicide laws.

Members of Parliament or their staff came to my presentation based on having time between meetings. Several MP's or their staff attended the event and asked excellent questions.

One MP, who attended, supported the Leadbeater assisted suicide bill. He is a new MP who told me that he only had 10 minutes for me between meetings.

I shared some basic data concerning assisted suicide in America including the bills that the assisted suicide lobby are promoting to expand assisted suicide in states where it is legal. I made it very clear that the strategy of the assisted suicide lobby is to first get a bill passed and then to amend the bill later.

Article: Once legal, assisted suicide laws inevitably expand (Article Link).

I then stated:

The assisted suicide lobby doesn't want to talk about how assisted suicide is done. They want you to think that the person is given a few pills and then quickly and peacefully dies. This is not the case.

I explained that in 2023, in Oregon one person who died by assisted suicide took 137 hours to die.

I then talked about how the assisted suicide lobby have been experimenting with lethal poison drug cocktails, for years, to find a cheaper way to cause death.

An article by JoNel Aleccia published by Kaiser Health News on March 5, 2017 examined the experiments by assisted suicide activists to find a cheaper alternative drug cocktail for assisted suicide. The article states:

The first Seconal alternative 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 poison drug cocktail experiments were done with humans, not animals. Even though people suffered greatly the poison cocktail experiments were done on at least 67 people.

Link to a video by Dr William Toffler of Oregon on this topic (Link).

An article by Jennie Dear published on January 22, 2019 in the Atlantic reported on the development of the poison drug cocktails. The Atlantic article stated:

In Washington, an advocacy organization called End of Life Washington briefly advised prescribing a drug mixture with the sedative chloral hydrate to about 70 patients. “We know this is going to put you to sleep, and we’re pretty sure it’s going to kill you,” Robert Wood, a medical director at the organization, says they told the patients. It worked, but with a tragic catch: In a few cases, the chloral hydrate burned people’s throats, causing severe pain just at the time they expected relief.

The Atlantic article explains how the assisted suicide lobby did human experiments with a lethal poison cocktail known as DMP. The article continues:

Next, the group had to test the drug. But they still didn’t have a way to follow standard procedure: There would be no government-approved clinical drug trial, and no Institutional Review Board oversight when they prescribed the concoction to patients. The doctors took what precautions they could. Patients could opt in or out, and for the first 10 deaths, either Parrot or Law would stay by the bedside and record patients’ and families’ responses.

The first two deaths went smoothly. But the third patient, an 81-year-old with prostate cancer, took 18 hours to die.The article explains that the group stopped DMP testing, met by conference call and decided to try a new lethal cocktail called DDMP.

The Atlantic article explained how the assisted suicide lobby developed the lethal drug cocktail DDMP, and later DDMP2 that is referred to in the 2018 Oregon DWD report.

An article by Lisa Krieger published by the Medical Xpress on September 8, 2020 also reported on the lethal drug experiments. Krieger wrote:

A little-known secret, not publicized by advocates of aid-in-dying, was that while most deaths were speedy, others were very slow. Some patients lingered for six or nine hours; a few, more than three days. No one knew why, or what needed to change.

"The public thinks that you take a pill and you're done," said Dr. Gary Pasternak, chief medical officer of Mission Hospice in San Mateo. "But it's more complicated than that."

The assisted suicide lobby developed lethal poison cocktails with human trials rather than animal trials. The "developers" appeared concerned with the lethal efficacy and cost of the poison cocktail as opposed to the possible negative consequences associated with the use of the cocktail.

Before legalizing assisted suicide, legislators need to know how assisted suicide is done. 

The assisted suicide lobby doesn't want you to know how assisted suicide is done because assisted suicide deaths are not what you think they are.