In December of last year, Aging with Dignity’s Assisted Suicide Watch released a shocking 12-minute video exposé, “The Tragedy of Eileen Mihich.”  It tells the story of a 31-year-old mentally ill Oregon woman who was able to fraudulently obtain and self-administer assisted suicide drugs to end her life, circumventing all the supposed Washington legal safeguards in place to prevent non-eligible people from accessing the deadly drugs.  Mihich had none of the conditions that would legally qualify her for assisted suicide drugs, and to date the State of Washington has done nothing to hold anyone to account.

Elizabeth Bruenig of The Atlantic, a national publication, follows up on the story with “It Was Too Easy for Eileen Mihich to Kill Herself.”  Bruenig points out that “Mihich’s method of suicide was clearly illegal in Oregon, Washington, and elsewhere in the United States, where medical assistance in death is available only to adult patients who are terminally ill, have six months or less to live, and are mentally capable of making their own health-care decisions. But her ability to access fatal drugs is concerning, as the spread of laws allowing medical assistance in dying makes it likely that incidents like this will happen again.”