“The option to end one’s life remains, irrespective of MAiD, readily available in Canada. Furthermore, there are painless options readily available. One example being illicit narcotics like fentanyl. To my dismay it is arguably easier for my teenage sons to access fentanyl in my hometown of Thunder Bay than it is for me (a doctor) to renew my Lipitor prescription (a cholesterol medication).“
So, Powlowski wants to save me and others like me……..
But at the same time he’s telling me that if I really want to die that I just gotta go get me some fenty and OD.
What I find particularly troubling about Powlowski’s argument is that he appears to treat the availability of suicide as relevant to whether the government should provide access to medically assisted dying.
Those are two fundamentally different propositions.
And coming from a physician, the characterization of illicit fentanyl as a painless option is especially concerning. There is no guarantee that a fentanyl overdose would be painless, peaceful, or even fatal. A fentanyl overdose can cause severe injury and permanent disability. I see the damage on an almost daily basis.
And that’s exactly what I don’t want, brain damage and to be hospitalized until I die.
There’s also a rather glaring contradiction worth examining: If preventing suicide is one of the government’s justifications for excluding people with mental illness from MAID, pointing out that they can still die by suicide does very little to strengthen that justification.
And unlike some inflammatory remark made during a heated parliamentary debate, he put this argument in writing, in a formal supplementary opinion to a parliamentary report.
That’s a deliberate, publicly documented position for which he can reasonably be held accountable.
If you take the total number of officially recorded suicides in Canada from 2000 through 2023 and divide by those 24 years, the average works out to roughly 3,950 deaths per year. More recent years have generally been somewhat higher, often around 4,000–4,700 deaths annually, depending on the year and on how deaths are classified and finalized by provincial coroners and medical examiners.
To put that figure into perspective:
- 3,950 deaths per year is about 10.8 deaths every day.
- Over the entire 2000–2023 period, that’s approximately 95,000 Canadians who died by suicide.
- Suicide has consistently ranked among the leading causes of death for younger and middle-aged Canadians, even though it is a much smaller cause of death overall than cancer or heart disease.
One thing that often surprises people is that the annual numbers have remained relatively stable over decades. Canada’s overall suicide rate declined somewhat from its peaks in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but since around the 2000s it has tended to fluctuate within a fairly narrow range rather than showing a dramatic long-term decrease.
Another sobering comparison is that, in many recent years, the number of Canadians dying by suicide has been several times higher than the number of homicide victims, yet suicide generally receives far less public discussion and media coverage. For example, in 2024, Statistics Canada recorded 3,852 suicide deaths compared with 454 homicides.
And the really remarkable thing about Marcus Powlowski recommending that suicidal people simply avail themselves to fenty is that this completely bypasses any safeguards that a rash suicidal person would have encountered during the two assessments. Instead what he’s done now is made that avenue completely unavailable.
Again Powlowski is looking at long term psychiatric issues as being brief, fleeting, not serious, and something that can be cured with enough happy thoughts.
Powlowski’s line of thinking is very paternalistic, very “father knows best”.
And his line of thinking is very common in the field of psychiatry.
The problem is that just shy of 11 people die by suicide each and every day.
And that number is low, the real number of suicide deaths is probably far higher. But short of a suicide note, most suicides by overdose are simply written off as a misadventure.
We have evidence that there are massive mental health issues in this country and that not everyone’s brain acts in the same manner as other brains. Some people can be treated for CPTSD, some people can’t be treated for CPTSD. Some people can be treated for PTSD, some people can’t be treated for PTSD.
We scream at people and tell ’em that drugs are BAD! But then we hook ’em on ketamine, LSD, mood stabilizers, and other drugs in the hopes that they will no longer upset society and no longer drag society down with their sadness and other issues.
Not everyone wants to be drugged or numbed.
Okay, fine, sure, let’s say that they give me mind altering drugs to make me happier and help me hide my issues from society so that I no longer upset people.
Is that going to magically erase the very vivid memories that I have of CFB Namao from 1978 until 1980?
Is that going to magically erase the very frustrating memories that I have from my dealings with Canadian Armed Forces officer Captain Terry Totzke from 1980 until 1983 when the name of the game was to keep me from receiving mental health treatment to deal with the sexual abuse from CFB Namao from 1978 to 1980 so the that true scope and size of the abuse wouldn’t become public knowledge?
Are the mind altering drugs going to magically erase the memories of the beatings that I took from my father from 1980 until 1986 for having fucked with his military career when I got abused on CFB Namao and for “allowing” the babysitter to molest my younger brother?
No, the mind altering drugs will not erase this.
The mind altering drugs will not alter the fact that so many opportunities in my life were stolen from me. The mind altering drugs will not zip me in a time machine back to 1978 where I could explain to my piss tank alcoholic grandmother that she shouldn’t hire the babysitter.
No, all the mind altering drugs will do is allow the psychiatrists and anti-M.A.i.D. parliamentarians to high-five each other, pat each other on the back, and congratulate themselves for “saving” my life so that I can live another 10 to 15 years dreading daily existence, but feeling “happy” about it.
I did send off an email to the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Ontario.
This was the response that I received.
Let’s see what if anything comes of this.
I ain’t holding my breath.
