Last March, 31-year-old Eileen Mihich was found dead in a room at the Hotel Deluxe in Portland, Ore. Near her body was an empty bottle of the poison pills prescribed specifically for physician-assisted suicide.
Mihich had obtained this concoction from a pharmacy in Mill Creek, Wash., despite not meeting any of the legal criteria to obtain it. She was not terminally ill. She had not seen even one practitioner. She also had serious mental illness that rendered her capacity questionable, and she was not a resident of Washington state.
One year after lodging a formal complaint with the Washington Department of Health, her family has still received no word on how their loved one could have received these deadly drugs.
The incident helps illustrate the classic bait-and-switch nature of the modern assisted suicide movement and the effort to make suicide-affirmation a form of medical care.
The first U.S. state to legalize the practice, Oregon, promised that cases like that of Mihich wouldn’t happen. In the subsequent decades, the assisted suicide lobby has continuously protested too much that no documented case of abuse exists. This nonsense has long been discredited. In fact, the very first woman to die from Oregon’s original suicide law was pushed through the doctor-shopping process despite her likely ineligibility. A litany of other cases of abuse has followed.
Outside the U.S., it is almost satirical how ravenous the system has become for new victims of abusive practices. Recently, multiple outlets have documented how an 81-year-old woman in Canada was offered to be put to death by the state on account of her back pain.
Mihich’s tragic case ought to bring renewed scrutiny to how this flimsy, dangerous system operates in the U.S. Bills to legalize the practice are active in 13 states, and two other states are looking at removing their existing safeguards.
Eileen’s workaround was disturbingly simple and works in all 13 states where suicide-affirming care is legal. She knew she did not meet her native Oregon’s eligibility requirements. So she found a random doctor’s publicly available National Provider Identifier, which she used to forge a prescription. She spoofed that doctor’s email address and submitted the fraudulent application by email to a pharmacy, which signed the prescription.
Eileen picked up the fatal dose shortly thereafter.
Hellbound and Down 