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A scientifically-informed polemic on an ethical subject.
At 96 pages, this book is an easy read on a difficult subject and it needs to be. Precisely because there’s nothing false or specious about it to allow one to put it down, a longer volume would be dispiriting and a shorter one perhaps glib and unconvincing. The author also admits, to his credit, to having condensed his arguments in order to keep the sale price low. It is not a fun book to read by any means, but it is satisfying in that it conveys information about the current global trend towards assisted suicide that many readers may have suspected or felt in their bones, but either could not prove or articulate.
The title is very long relative to the length of the text, but the book does what it says on the tin and the author, a retired GP with forty years experience, does explain why the impression given to both Parliament and the public, that there’s a well-trusted drug or drugs which people can take which puts them peacefully and reliably to sleep, is completely false. There is no agreed solution to this problem: in none of the countries where assisted suicide is legal, is there a regulatory body checking that lethal drugs work as planned or any truly reliable advice about what to use. Far from being tested and professional, doctors are improvising their lethal cocktails with crushed barbiturate tablets and traumatic outcomes are widely-reported, but also obscured rather than quantified by official data because a death certificate for assisted suicide means there is no investigation and no autopsy, though in the case of execution by lethal injection an autopsy is a legal requirement and the reports do not make pleasant reading for anyone but a vengeful relative of a murder victim. Do harmless elderly patients deserve to be treated worse than convicted murderers?
The author goes to some lengths to make the point that the setting of a time limit in legislation so that people may only be helped to die if they have X number of months left to live, is hopelessly unscientific because such a prognosis is based on guesswork and only accurate when it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy and the patient expects to die. (Perhaps the whole time-framing exercise is intended to make the entire population accept the concept of everyone having a set date by which they are expected to go tits-up?)
He has also done what other “dissident” doctors have not dared to do, and he makes it clear that the motive in extending assisted dying to young people whose only illness is mental, is quite simply that the only really desirable transplant organs are those taken from a young and physically-healthy persons who die under controlled conditions in a medical facility. The author does not mention that this requirement is already catered for in Communist China by making political detainees into organ donors (no-one wants to buy organs from criminal prisoners who might have used both narcotics and prostitutes; by contrast innocent dissidents whose only “crime” is religious practice are seen as ideal donors) but the underlying principle is identical.
He further sees a self-reinforcing interaction between the rising cost of worsening healthcare and the positive payoff for government in people dying rather than drawing pensions or needing hospice care. He sees that the worsening care might be done on purpose in order to coerce people towards suicide as an alternative, but he either does not see, or had no space for, the strong possibility that the upwards spiral of healthcare costs and the downwards spiral in healthcare standards are both completely avoidable, because there’s a strong regulatory bias against approving innovative uses for cheap drugs and non-drug treatments whose safety has already been proved over years of their original use. This arises mainly because of vested interests (both financial AND reputational) embedded in both regulatory and scientific research bodies. This is why the book gets four stars rather than five: it isn’t flawed but it’s maybe two subjects and two pages away from being better.
This book is available as a low cost paperback and an even cheaper kindle E-book from Amazon in the UK on this link:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0FJW8FNGT/
In the Americas:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0FJW8FNGT/
It was published in the UK by EMJ Books on the 23rd of July 2025.
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