Report: Most assisted deaths in Canada are acts of euthanasia, not assisted suicide

A report on Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) has revealed that the overwhelming majority of physician-assisted death cases in the nation since 2019 have been acts of euthanasia, not assisted suicide.

In October, the Fourth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada was published, stating that there had been 13,241 reported cases of euthanasia and assisted suicide in the nation in 2022. Health Canada reports that this represents 4.1% of all deaths. The total number of MAiD deaths in Canada since it was first legalized stands at 44,958, with the number of cases each year more than quadrupling.

In 2017 — the first full year of legislation — there were 2,838 MAiD deaths. In 2018, there was an increase of 57.8%, followed by an increase of 26.4% in 2019, an increase of 34.2% in 2020, an increase of 32.4% in 2021, and an increase of 31.2% in 2022.

However, “fewer than seven” of those deaths in 2022 were carried out by actual assisted suicide — in which the patient himself or herself takes the lethal cocktail prescribed by a doctor — “a trend consistent with previous years.” The rest were all acts of euthanasia — in which the doctor was the one administering the drugs that killed the person.

The 2019 report revealed that “providers are less comfortable with self-administration [assisted suicide] due to concerns around the ability of the patient to effectively self-administer the series of medications, and the complications that may ensue.”

In the last few years, there have been disturbing revelations made about assisted suicide that support the disclosure that doctors prefer to do the killing themselves. Dr. Joel Zivot, an associate professor of anesthesiology and surgery at the Emory School of Medicine, explained that the peaceful appearance of assisted suicide can be misleading. He noted, “People who want to die [by assisted suicide] deserve to know that they may end up drowning, not just falling asleep.”

In addition, a study in the medical journal Anaesthesia revealed that a third of assisted suicide patients took 30 hours to die, while four percent took seven days to die. Additional research found that one drug cocktail taken by those undergoing assisted suicide was “burning patients’ mouths and throats, causing some to scream in pain.”

READ: Shock report: Assisted death rates skyrocket in Canada in 2022

Furthermore, one study, “Efficacy and safety of drugs used for ‘assisted dying,'” concluded “that the prevalence of complications and failures in intentionally ending life suggest that ‘assisted dying’ applicants are at risk of distressing deaths.” The study revealed:

In Oregon, patients often ingest the lethal drugs without a healthcare professional present to record complications; a health care professional is reported as present in only one in five such deaths and assisted suicide complications are ‘unknown’ in 71% of cases. … Despite limitations in data collection, statistics published in annual reports do reveal that ‘assisted’ deaths are not always accomplished quickly and without complications.

The study also noted that evidence shows some assisted suicide patients who ingest the prescribed lethal drugs experience distressing complications that have been acknowledged by the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers, including burning, nausea, vomiting, and regurgitation. Nausea, dehydration, and GI issues can interfere with the absorption of the drugs and patients have regained consciousness after taking the supposedly lethal cocktail.

In addition, some patients have difficulty ingesting the drugs at all. One woman explained about her aunt’s assisted suicide:

The full ‘cocktail’ included two anti-nausea pills, an anti-seizure pill and 100 capsules of Secobarbital. It all had to be ingested within an hour… My attention turned to the kitchen table, where my husband and sister, wearing latex gloves, frantically scraped the powder from 100 capsules with toothpicks, trying to beat the clock… The mountain of powder we poured into more sugar syrup created a half-cup of sludge so bitter it literally burned my tongue. And my aunt, who could barely swallow water, had to drink all of it in <5 min to ‘ensure success.’…

When we sat back down at the kitchen table, white powder everywhere, we all had to wonder, ‘Who the hell wrote this law?’ We had been forced to assist in the most bizarre fashion, jumping through seemingly random legal hoops and meeting arbitrary deadlines while my aunt suffered, and finally emptying capsules, making an elixir so vile I cried when I knew she had to drink it. This was death with dignity?

A woman reported that it took her husband more than nine hours to die, “choking and coughing, choking and coughing.” Before he stopped breathing, he sat up and appeared “to retch three times” before sliding back down and dying.

This is presumably why doctors would rather kill their patients with a lethal injection than have them self-administer oral drugs.

The Royal Dutch Medical and Pharmaceutical Societies and the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers both recommend that physicians who partake in assisted death obtain consent from their patients to convert to euthanasia prior to ingesting the drugs in case the patient takes too long to die.

Research found that in 2018, 50% of people attempting assisted suicide in Canada (of those in which data was available) did not die within 60 minutes and the doctor had to switch to euthanasia to complete the person’s killing.