In California, Nearly 900 People Died by Assisted Suicide Last Year

Nearly 900 people died by assisted suicide in 2023 in California, according to a state department of health report released this month.

Out of 1,281 people who received prescriptions for assisted suicide in the state last year, 884 people obtained a cocktail of opioids and sedatives from their healthcare providers and self-administered the fatal drugs.

“In 2023, 884 individuals died from ingestion of aid-in-dying drugs, a rate of 30.4 per 10,000, or 0.30 percent, based on 290,511 deaths to California residents in 2023,” the report reads.

The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) has documented the assisted suicide deaths of 4,287 people in the state since California’s End of Life Option Act became law on June 9, 2016, the report details. The law allows adults who have a terminal illness and less than six months to live to pursue assisted suicide. 

The 2023 numbers show a continued heightened level of assisted suicide deaths in the state for the second year in a row. The CDPH reported 497 assisted suicide deaths in 2020 and 523 in 2021, followed by a precipitous increase in 2022 to 890 assisted suicide deaths.

California Department of Public Health

Compassion & Choices, a pro-assisted suicide group, attributed the increase in assisted suicide deaths between 2021 and 2022 to the passage of an amendment to the state’s assisted suicide law, which reduced the law’s waiting period between the mandatory two oral requests for “aid-in-dying” medication from 15 days to 48 hours.

In 2023, a total of 1,281 received prescriptions for assisted suicide drugs, while 884 saw the process through and ended their lives. The CDPH reported receiving forms from 1,272 individuals who began the process by making two verbal requests to their physicians at least 48 hours apart. Of the 1,272 who started the process, 1,214 received a prescription, and of those 1,214, 943 individuals waited less than 15 days between the two verbal requests, according to the report.

Of the 1,281 people prescribed assisted suicide drugs, the 276 people have an “unknown ingestion statues.” Of those individuals, 174 have died, but their ingestion status is unknown, and for 102 people, “both death and ingestion status are pending,” according to the report.

Over 90 percent of the 884 people who died by assisted suicide last year were documented as being 60 years of age or older, had health insurance, and received hospice and/or palliative care.

Of those 884 people, 85.4 percent were white, even though white people make up approximately 35 percent of the state’s population. Nearly 77 percent had at least some level of college education, and 80.4 percent had informed their family of their decision to end their lives by assisted suicide, the report states.

Most of the people who died by assisted suicide last year (63.8 percent) had some kind of cancer, while 12.1 percent had cardiovascular disease, and 8.8 percent had a neurological disease.

Of those who died through the state’s assisted suicide program, 776 did so from a private home and 439 had a physician or trained health care professional present at the time of ingestion, according to the report.

In April of 2023, several groups who oppose assisted suicide, including Not Dead Yet and Institute for Patients’ Rights, filed a lawsuit “to stop the Defendant government agencies and officials from running a deadly system that steers people with terminal disabilities away from necessary mental health care, medical care, and disability supports, and towards death by suicide under the guise of ‘mercy’ and ‘dignity’ in dying,” the complaint reads.

“Physician-assisted suicide is not only a revival of old eugenic ideologies, it also violates federal disability rights laws and federal constitutional provisions which protect persons with disabilities from discrimination, exclusion, and life-threatening governmental laws and policies,” the complaint continues.

A federal court dismissed the lawsuit this spring, but the organizations appealed their case to the Ninth Circuit last week.

Ten states and Washington, DC, allow assisted suicide, including, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont and Washington. Oregon was the first state in the nation to pass an assisted suicide law, called Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act, in 1997.