I think the Canadian euthanasia policy is catastrophically awful but you have an unhealthy obsession with hating Canada, and yes the US Health Insurance system is very very bad compared to the Canadian one.
Every time I reflect on that I reconsider but then people like Benjamin Frank post excellent takes about why a good way to further improve their system would be to make more opoids.
Sorry, but this is a strawman. There are plenty of valid medical uses for opioid painkillers, treating the kind of pain people might otherwise kill themselves over not least of them, when they aren't being shilled to everyone under the sun by the glorified Pablo Escobars of this country's pharmaceutical industry.
Disagree. Opioids are too addictive for there to be any valid use for them.
There are valid uses for almost everything under the sun, even if the only valid use for something is prescribing it to people who'd otherwise commit suicide.
Tbf, I am perfectly fine with people opting to use assisted suicide. The issue here is the whole "have you considered killing yourself" from mental health hotline workers, for instance.
Similarly, opioids are perfectly fine in many cases. However, suggesting that we as a society need more of them is somewhat misguided.
I have not responded previously due to not getting home from work until about 4 PM and then watching the World Cup games. This reply does considerably change my understanding.
The 'have you considered killing yourself' is illegal in Canada. There is a criminal investigation and I assume the issue is whether the worker(s) had a simple misunderstanding, in which case there is no intent, or whether this was deliberate criminal activity.
I think many Canadians are uncomfortable with the idea of expanding access to MAID to 'mature minors' and the mentally ill, however, the actual proposed regulations on all of this won't be released until March, 2023, and I don't think, although a different topic, anybody needs a discussion here similar to the many predictions in the U.S election board of things like "after the Republicans win 250+ seats in the House of Representatives and take back the Senate will Joe Biden resign as President on election night?"
I don't see the harm of treating the issue with the proper respect and waiting until after the proposed regulations have been released in March, 2023 rather than engaging in wild and pointless speculation.
Since I did have a response prepared and I do want to make a couple points and get some basic facts out:
1.On non prescription opioid addicts dying from opioids. This is a tragedy. However, since legal prescription opioids were first subject to greater regulation in 2014 and were all but defacto banned in 2016, deaths from illicit synthetic opioids have increased.
According to provisional CDC data, the number of opioid-related overdose deaths shot up in 2020 to around seventy thousand and again in 2021 to eighty thousand.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-opioid-epidemicThe only 'expert' cited in that article attempting to attribute this to the previously overprescribed legal prescription opioids is Bridget Brennan, the New York Special Narcotics Prosecutor:
“We didn’t develop an opioid epidemic until there was a huge surplus of opioids, which started with pharmaceutical drugs distributed legally,” New York Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget G. Brennan told CFR.
However, far more likely is simple supply and demand, simply that synthetic fentanyl is cheap to produce: Because fentanyl is strong and cheap to produce, people who manufacture illegal drugs use fentanyl to make their drugs more powerful and less expensive to manufacture.
https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov So, there is no evidence whatsoever that providing legal pain killing opioids to people who need them will impact the supply of illicit synthetic opioids whatsoever. I go a step further and argue that it's the illegality itself of these drugs that make them so deadly as they are completely unregulated, but that's a different subject.
So, I am not some Canadian patriot reflexively defending my country, I'm a person who has looked into this issue and happens to support MAID in principle, and beyond that, since the proposed regulations on expanding MAID into these contentious areas won't be released until March 2023, have nothing specific to disagree with the government over.
So, what are the actual alternatives to MAID?
2.Alternative pain treatments are not real world actual alternatives except for very wealthy people in expensive care homes.
This was a study published October 2017 for the U.S Veterans Administration:
Barriers to nonpharmacologic pain management were distinguished by two a priori codes: availability and access. Access was then divided by five a priori codes representing the Fortney et al. access dimensions. The temporal dimension of access includes the time required to receive services and time delay between when services are needed and when the patient receives the service. Geographic dimensions represent the ease of traveling to provider locations. Financial dimensions of access include health care system eligibility and the cost of services. Cultural dimensions represent the service acceptability to patients and providers. Digital dimensions describe connectivity with health care systems and providers.
https://academic.oup.com/painmedicine/article/19/7/1357/4560119?login=falseI assume 'cultural dimensions' is a refernce to the use of CBDs (marijuana) for pain relief. So, essentially what I said initially: expanding alternative treatment requires trained people with knowledge of these treatments with requires money and people, which, outside of the very wealthy care homes, does not presently exist.
One criticism of politics in Canada and of special interest groups is that their proposed solutions always involve 'more': 'spend more money', 'train more people'...
I'm not a big fan of economist Thomas Sowell, but he does have a number of pithy sayings that I like and my favorite of his is: "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."
3.Suicide. As I said previously, the number of suicides in the U.S is likely a large undercount given the stigma of suicide and the difficulty of determining whether the death was a suicide or an accident. For instance, and I obviously don't know if these involved suicide or not either:
From the CFR article:
U.S. military veterans, many of whom suffer from chronic pain as a result of their service, account for a disproportionately high number of opioid-related deaths. Veterans are twice as likely as the general population to die from an opioid overdose, according to a study commissioned by the National Institutes of Health.
Of course, at some level it doesn't really matter if they were accidential overdoses or suicide. When the supply of legal medically prescribed pain killers was defacto shut off, what did the big brains at the CDC think would happen?
So, in comparison of suicide to MAID. The comments have already been made here. With suicide you have a person by legal necessity dying alone in a horrible way by drug overdose, jumping or gunshot, all of which might leave the person physically incapacitated rather than dead. With MAID, you have a much more comfortable death with the dying person surrounded by friends and family. MAID is far more humane. Humans recognize this with pets and other animals, but then some want to treat humans as worse than animals.
So, when you come out with glib moral posturing statements against first MAID and then against prescription opioid pain killers that are the only practical alternative to a person in constant pain with zero quality of life (by their own account) I think you should expect angry insulting comments in return.
