Assisted suicide bills do not specify which lethal drugs are used.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Raga Justin has brought up an important point in her article that was published on May 15 in the Times Union, that being, the New York assisted suicide bill does not stipulate what drugs would be used in the lethal poison cocktail, if the assisted suicide bill passes.

Article: Assisted suicide is neither painles or dignified (Link).

Justin wrote in the Times article that:

The controversial legislation dubbed “Medical Aid in Dying” would enable New York residents suffering from a terminal illness to end their own lives using a series of medications administered under a physician’s care after thorough review of their situation. The “drug cocktail” that patients would need to be administered to die was frequently questioned by opponents, with many lawmakers also worrying out loud about the possibility of those drugs being diverted for nefarious purposes.

“That medication is as dangerous as a loaded gun but precautions for its safekeeping are absent from this legislation,” said Assemblywoman Mary Beth Walsh, a Saratoga County Republican.

Yet the legislation contains nothing about which substances, exactly, New York would choose to legalize for the purpose of ending a person’s life. Instead, lawmakers have appeared to relinquish control of determining what life-ending mixtures of medications would be used to the state Department of Health, individual health care providers and participating pharmacies.

Justin further noted that “The time it takes a patient to die is not certain.”

Oregon’s data, culled from 261 deaths during 2024, showed that patients died in a range from seven minutes to 26 hours from ingestion of life-ending drugs. The New York bill language includes a consent form that patients would need to sign to authorize their participation in the procedure; it includes an acknowledgement that “although most deaths occur within three hours, my death may take longer.”

It’s an approach that has angered other physicians, who argue the process of choosing which drugs to administer has not undergone exhaustive, controlled scientific study.

“From my perspective, the widely varying, seemingly experimental nature of the cocktails that they use raise huge concerns and red flags,” said Dr. Joseph Marine, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University who has lobbied against Maryland’s adoption of similar legislation. “Virtually anything in the pharmacopeia is fair game for them to effectively experiment on, without any of the usual safeguards that we take for granted in academic medical settings.”

The longest reported length of death by assisted suicide was 137 hours in Oregon in 2023. Let me state that again, one person took 5 days and 17 hours to die by assisted suicide in 2023, after ingesting the lethal poison cocktail.

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 during the experimental assisted suicide deaths.

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 continued:

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."

Justin asked more questions in his article about research concerning the efficacy of the lethal poison cocktail.

But significant concerns persist among some researchers about those fatal drug combinations. A 2022 study published in the British Medical Bulletin by United Kingdom researchers reviewed data reported from jurisdictions where medically assisted death was legal and concluded that many patients were at risk of “distressing” death. It called for further research into the methods of assisted suicide and the prescribed drugs in order to adequately inform patients of the risk involved with consuming life-ending medications.

“Drugs used for medical purposes are required to undergo a stringent approval process in order to assess efficacy and safety,” researchers concluded. “But the drugs being used for ‘assisted dying’ have not undergone such process; the safety and effectiveness of previous and current combinations of lethal drugs is largely unknown.”

Some assisted suicide doctors claim that the drug cocktails are effective for use, based on many years of trial and error.

The assisted suicide lobby developed the lethal poison cocktails through human trials. The "developers" seemed 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.

The concerns raised by Justin in his article are fundamental to the issue. If the law approves the killing of people, then what kind of oversight will exist within the law?

Links to more articles on this topic:

• Death by assisted suicide is not what you think it is (Link). 
• Assisted suicide: Proceed with caution (Link). 
• Assisted suicide is the wrong prescription (Link). 
• Assisted suicide. It's not that simple (Link). 
• Assisted suicide deaths are not what you think they are (Link). 
• Assisted suicide is neither painless nor dignified (Link).