By Michael Searles
More than a third of suicidal patients who are prescribed lethal drugs under right-to-die laws do not take them, data show.
Just 1,905 of the 2,895 people prescribed assisted dying pills in Oregon, US, between 1998 and 2021 took them, according to the state’s public health data.
The figures are mirrored in the neighbouring state of California, where in 2021, 286 of the 772 people prescribed a fatal dose ultimately decided against using it.
Even in Canada, where medically-assisted deaths are the most pervasive and accepted in the world, around 13,000 people of the 15,500 with lethal drug prescriptions in 2022 used them – and around 300 people changed their mind.
Experts consider the Oregon model, whereby a doctor specialising in end-of-life care prescribes a deadly drug to be taken at home by a patient, as the best option for Britain, should MPs vote for a change in the law.
They said having the autonomy to take a lethal drug to end one’s own life is like an “insurance policy”, if a terminal illness becomes “intolerable”.
Oregon was one of the first places in the world, and the first state in the US, to legalise assisted dying under a Death with Dignity Act in 1997.
Inquiry into assisted dying
It is also where MPs from the cross-party health select committee visited as part of their inquiry into assisted dying and suicide earlier this year in order to understand more about the practice and what it may look like in the UK. A full report is due in the new year.
Calls for a free vote on the issue have intensified this week, with Dame Esther Rantzen revealing she was considering using Dignitas, in Switzerland, following her diagnosis with lung cancer.
Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, voted for a change to the law in a defeated motion in 2015. This week he restated that there were “grounds for changing the law” but it should be through a free vote because of the “divided and strong views”.
An expert working group from the University of Essex, made up of two consultants in palliative medicine, two lawyers, and two philosophy professors, said that nowhere that had legalised the practice had voted to go back on it.
Most notably, a 2011 referendum in Zurich, Switzerland, where assisted dying has been legal since 1941 and the home of “suicide tourism” clinics like Dignitas, voted overwhelming to reject proposals to overturn the law.
Around 85 per cent of 278,000 voters opposed the ban on assisted suicide and 78 per cent rejected a motion to outlaw it for foreigners.
About 200 people travel to Zurich to use its assisted suicide services each year – an estimated 350 Brits have taken their lives there.
Prof Wayne Martin, director of the Autonomy Project and professor of philosophy at the University of Essex, said the law had never been repealed anywhere because “there is no political force sufficiently strong to reverse the tide”.
“If anything the tendency is for access to assisted dying to be progressively expanded over time,” he said.
‘Time and place of their own choosing’
“Public records in Oregon consistently show that many of those prescriptions are never actually used,” he said.
Prof Martin added that the system used in Oregon was preferred because it lets people take the lethal dose at a “time and place of their own choosing”.
“Public records in Oregon consistently show that many of those prescriptions are never actually used,” he said. “Many Oregonians who apply for assistance in dying do not actually want assistance in dying. What they seek from that prescription is an insurance policy that will protect them from being trapped in a life they find intolerable. What they want is autonomy.”
Around 200 million people have access to assisted dying around the world, and this number is only growing.
It is an option for the terminally ill in nine US states, Canada, eight European countries, and all Australian territories except the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory.
It has in the last couple of years been legalised to some extent in Spain, Portugal, Germany and New Zealand, and is being considered in France.
The drug prescribed is usually a short-acting barbiturate, which is a type of sedative taken at a high dose so that it completely suppresses the central nervous system, inducing death.
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