Assisted suicide should be legalized

Thank you Mikel for that touching story about your grandmother. May she rest in peace. Now I want to tell you about three other stories about assisted suicide. These are the stories of Barbara Wagner, Kate Cheney, and Randy Stroup and they all live in Oregon, a state since 1998 that has allowed assisted suicide to be a treatment for patients. Let's tell the story of Barbara first, then move to Kate and finally to Stroup's story. Barbara was a 64 year old suffering from lung cancer in the state of Oregon. She was on Medicare and she asked the state for to lowered the cost for medicine that she thought she was going to get. Instead of the $4,000 a mouth drug plan her doctor prescribed to her, she was given drugs for assisted suicide that costs around $50. Wagner went on ABCNews and told her story saying that "I got a letter in the mail that basically said if you want to take the pills, we will help you get that from a doctor and we will stand there and watch you die" (her words, not mine). Wagner got the medicine she wanted from the state and lived for another year around people she cared about. Kate was a 85 year old women also from Oregon that according to a professional psychiatrist, Kate was cognitively impaired and that means that she could not remember recent events or people and was not mentally stable to ask if her life can be taken away. Sadly this doctor was moved away Kate and the second physician found that she was depressed and that it was treatable. Instead of being treated for her depression, she got in touch with Dr. Peter Goodwin, a medical doctor at the pro-euthanasia organization "Compassion in Dying". After battling cancer for 22 years, she died by assisted suicide on March 1998 death. One of the first assisted suicides in the state of Oregon after the passing of the new bill allowing euthanasia could have been preventable with any kind of Antidepressant and a better handling of her mental state. Finally we get to Randy Stroup more happier story. Randy like Wagner applied and asked the State of Oregon to help him provide for the medicine he needed to combat that cancer he had. Like Wagner he was on Medicare and like Wagner was denied treatment. According to Stroup "(How could they) not pay for medication that would help my life, and yet offer to pay to end my life". After his story hit the media, the state gave him the medicine he asked for and should be provided for. All three of these people live in the same state, all three had some kind of cancer, all three needed medicine to combat their cancers and yet all three were denied from the start to the right to get health care and all three where instead given the right to die. To me, these stories tell me that the State of Oregon was using something that advocates say will help people die peacefully to really using it so they could not pay for their medicine all three of these cancer patients want. It sounds to me like the State of Oregon is using the Right to Die as a way of avoiding the right health care and medicine. Oregon is also a very rich state and has a small population within the US and if this kind of pro-euthanasia law like this were put in into action in states like New York and California then we could see state saving millions of dollars for health care but killing people that don't really want to die and just want to get to there medicine and treatment. Also studies have shown that 93-94% of people wanting to commit suicide suffer from a mental disorder and that most patients wanting to commit suicide have under gone extreme emotional and physical pain leading them into depression and of those patients many want to seek help to deal with their depression and they use the reason for suicide as way of crying for help. Most disorders for depression are treatable and after the patient gets that treatment they usually never talk or rarely think of suicide again. If patients deal with extreme pain and ask to commit suicide then that pain is very much treatable. According to the a February 1993 in the Anesthesiology, 70-80% to all cases of widespread cancer is manageable by oral administration and that many treatments of pain reduction are blocked or not understood by the medical staff. In 1969, psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross outline 5 stages of the dying process, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Since that time Dr. Kubler-Ross has stated that suicide is wrong for terminal ill patients because she states that "(But assisting a Suicide is) cheating them of those lessons like taking a student out of school before final exams. That's not love, it projecting your own unfinished business". So that means when a patient is depressed then suicide is not the right answer and leading them to acceptance of that fact that they are going to die is better for that person. My final point will be the legal and moral troubles around assisted suicide. Like in the cases of Wagner, Cheney, and Stroup, states can use the euthanasia laws to not allow people medicine and override the patients right to life and health care. Because of this example, the right to death may conflict to the right of health care or to life leading to a lot of legal and ethnic troubles. Also if we allow assisted suicide to happen, the views on suicide may change from from "We respect your wishes" to "we don't care if you live or die" allowing suicide outside assisted suicide to be lawful and socially allowed. Personally I think if someone wants to die whether healthy or ill, there is a bigger issue or issues underneath the surface of the plea for death, so instead of allowing that person life we just kill them off instead of helping them through the issues they have. That seems to me that assisted suicide is just a easy way to avid the real problems with someone ill or healthy that want to die. Sources are http://www.nrlc.org... http://www.nrlc.org... http://www.nrlc.org... http://www.nrlc.org... http://www.telegraph.co.uk... http://www.herpeculiarlife.blogspot.ca... http://abcnews.go.com... http://www.deathasalesman.com...