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True Dignity

Citizens Against Assisted Suicide

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Suicide is never death with dignity, and assisted suicide legislation threatens true patient choices at the end of life.

Suicide Has Surpassed Car Accidents as the Most Frequent Cause of Injury Death in the US, and Poisoning Deaths Have Also Risen. Our Doctors Should Not Be Prescribing Poisons for People to Use in Committing Suicide.

September 24, 2012 by Administrators

Here is a link to an analysis from the American Journal of Public Health, showing that suicide is increasing and is now the leading cause of injury death in the United States: http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.2012.300960.

 
More people commit suicide than are killed in car crashes.

 

 

The rate of fatal poisoning thought to be unintentional is also increasing, and the article hypothesized that part of the reason for this was recreational use of opiate drugs. Those who, rather than dying from an overdose, lived to tell their story to researchers told them that they obtained these drugs from friends and relatives. Opioids are unrelated to the barbiturates that are used to cause intentional death by poisoning in assisted suicide, but barbiturates are also used recreationally (http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbiturate#Recreational_use), which means they have the potential to cause unintentional poisoning.

 
When a person is approved for assisted suicide where that is legal, he keeps the lethal dose of barbiturates in his house. Some people in Oregon have kept these drugs much longer than six months, which means not only that the initial prognosis was wrong but that the drugs were possibly available for someone to misuse. There is no supervision of the drugs’ storage after the prescription is filled.

 
If the number of suicides is under-reported, as the articles postulates, while the number of “unintentional” poisoning deaths has risen, it seems reasonable to wonder whether some of these poisoning deaths are in fact suicides.

 

 

At the very least, the number of poisoning deaths from overdoses of prescription drugs shows both that the means of suicide are widely available and that suicide without assistance can be accomplished without the use of violent means like firearms.

 
The article recognizes that suicide is a problem and calls for greater efforts to prevent it. True Dignity agrees.

 
Surely, as part of our society-wide effort to stem the increasing loss of life from suicide, we should avoid giving governmental, medical, or societal approval to suicide as a way to solve any problem at all. Surely we should not provide assistance in suicide to anyone.

Filed Under: Commentary, Suicide Increase, True Dignity, US

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January 16, 2011 By Administrators

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February 28, 2022 By Administrators

ACTION ALERT

January 11, 2022 By carolyn

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abuse Act 39 Another Defeat for Assisted Suicide coercion Letters to the Editor: Pauline Austin Opponents of Assisted Suicide Greatly Outnumber Proponents at Manchester Forum. S.74 safeguards Story of a person with disabilities opposing assisted suicide telehealth

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abuse Act 39 Another Defeat for Assisted Suicide coercion Letters to the Editor: Pauline Austin Opponents of Assisted Suicide Greatly Outnumber Proponents at Manchester Forum. S.74 safeguards Story of a person with disabilities opposing assisted suicide telehealth

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