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New Jersey’s Aid in Dying for the Terminally Ill Act might be a component to our healthcare system that is desperately needed.  As a licensed health care practitioner of over 25 years, I have witnessed firsthand the horrors that a long, crippling terminal illness can have on both the patient and their family.  During school and throughout my career we were always taught the importance of patient dignity, right to choice, pain control and patient rights. Score one for the terminally ill.

What about those who do not have a terminal illness, yet are plagued with many of the same horrors?  Weakness, crippling pain, depression, anxiety, loss of dignity, loss of quality of life.  They are the same significant issues, but handled completely differently in the age of the “opioid crisis,” “War on Drugs” and Big Pharma lawsuits.

We are missing the boat on “Living With Dignity” due to misdirected energies to protect people.  In fact, the argument can easily be made that we are doing more harm than good, as suicide rates are soaring to record numbers. Not coincidentally, suicides are rising as patients who live every day in excruciating pain are turned away from physician offices with no help in sight. Why? Because in a massive over-correction to the “opioid crisis,” we have turned legitimate patients living a depressing life into “criminals,” “junkies,” or worse, “addicts” who are just “looking for a fix.”


A Don't Punish Pain rally outside the Oregon Health Authority in Salem on Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2019. Anna Reed, Statesman Journal

In 2019, where it is taboo (in some places criminal) to accidentally misidentify one's gender, it somehow has been perfectly acceptable to our governor, the state attorney general and other lawmakers to mislabel an entire (and sizable) population of New Jersey, as “drug abusers” or at least treat them as such.  Because of the stigma attached to every opiate and opioid medication, medications that have safely been used for decades, legitimate pain patients are rapidly running out of options to have any sort of quality of life.

Imagine this scenario:  You must get a root canal on four teeth, but you can’t have numbing agents; now imagine having to awake each morning and endure that kind of excruciating pain each day, every day, for the rest of your life. How long would it be before “suicide” became a very real alternative to living, knowing your life will be filled with the most horrific pain imaginable and no one will listen to you.

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This is life for chronic pain patients. Some are extremely lucky to find physicians that have upstanding practices, ethics and the training to handle these patients.  But many other physicians who have the abilities to treat pain patients are either afraid of being targeted by the government or have decided it’s just not worth the hassle.

I’ve read the opinion section of the APP for years, and have seen many chime in on how chronic pain patients should use “bio-feedback therapy,” “lavender scented oils,” “music therapy,” “pet therapy,” or some other adjunctive therapy as the main option.  Each of the aforementioned has a place in the pain treatment modalities plan, but none is a substitute for actual medications that can adequately and safely stop the pain.

I could spend several more paragraphs explaining why the CDC data on the “opioid epidemic” is flat-out wrong. The short answer is the CDC lumps in cocaine, methamphetamines and other non-opioids into the opioid overdose sections. But even if the data were correct, that does not negate the obligations of the health care team to listen to patients, assess their pain — because, after all, for the last 20 years or so, “pain” has been considered the sixth vital sign — and then treat it!  

Today, we are now allowing a patient to actively kill themselves with physician support. We are allowing the use of a Schedule I agent, marijuana, to be used freely with physician support, and we allow the termination of life of a infant during the eighth or ninth month of pregnancy — even after it’s been born) with physician support.  But somehow, treating pain patients in a safe and dignified manner is unforseeable by the officials in New Jersey.

Explain to the millions living in chronic pain how this is deemed an acceptable practice. My hunch: It may take a while, but eventually someone in “power” will end up living in chronic pain, and the very laws and directives they have issued over the past few years will come back full-circle, and they will not have any physicians willing or able to help them with their pain.

They might be offered the option to simply commit suicide however.  This is how insane it has become.

Gary S. Latimer lives in Lakehurst.

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