Need safeguards against suicide drugs

I agree with Linda Peterson (“Elders need vaccine first,” Letters, Jan. 20) that elders should get priority for the COVID vaccine. Hubert H. Humphrey once said that the moral test of government is how it treats those at the dawn of life, at the twilight of life and the sick and frail in the shadows of life. Greater vulnerability demands greater care, not less.

Last April, Bill O’Reilly received a public backlash – and deserved it – when he sniffed that many people dying from COVID “were on their last legs anyway.”

So I am troubled by what our state legislators are doing. On Jan. 20 the state House of Representatives Health Care and Wellness Committee approved two bills. HB 1074 says “the mortality rate in Washington state due to overdose and suicide is unacceptably high,” and authorizes increased prevention efforts. The same day the committee approved HB 1141, rescinding “safeguards” against abuse in the state law authorizing doctors to help sick residents obtain a drug overdose to kill themselves. Four-fifths of those residents are aged 65 and over.

The idea of preventing suicide for some but promoting it for others is based on the idea that the latter may die “anyway” in six months, but such predictions are unreliable, and some patients who do not take the drugs live for years.

With HB 1141, the initial diagnosis does not have to be by a physician, and the (optional) psychological evaluation to exclude cases of treatable depression no longer must be done by a medical professional. Current law also says the lethal overdose must be obtained in person by the patient or his/her agent. (If passed) the drugs, with instructions on how to cause death, can be delivered by mail or parcel post, signed for by whoever happens to answer the door.

Dozens of patients annually decide not to take the overdose, and we do not know where those drugs end up. Now they would be put out into the general population by mail, endangering the depressed people the legislators still want to protect.

Young and old alike, we may rise or fall together.

Richard Doerflinger

La Conner