Colorado gave over 500 people assisted suicide drugs solely for eating disorders in 2024

The lawsuit says Colorado’s assisted suicide law violates federal protections by allowing physicians to prescribe lethal drugs to some disabled patients under circumstances where others would be directed to mental health care

Doctors in Colorado are pushing assisted suicide on hundreds of patients solely because they suffer from eating disorders, according to a patients’ advocate sharing the harrowing story of one such case.

Writing in the Denver Post, Patient Rights Action Fund and Institute for Patient Rights executive director Matt Vallière tells the story of his friend Jane Allen, who battled anorexia “most of her life,” who in 2018 was diagnosed with “terminal anorexia,” a relatively recent diagnosis which has been criticized as overly broad and dangerous.

Her eating disorder doctor, Jane wrote, “would ‘make an exception’ for me and ‘allow’ me to die, if that was my choice. It didn’t feel like my choice – I felt coerced and spent an incredibly agonizing months in an assisted living facility.” She eventually received the suicide drugs, but was saved by her father winning a guardianship order and having the drugs destroyed.

“I ate just enough to not die right away. And then I ate more,” Jane wrote. “I weaned off the morphine and all the other hospice drugs that kept me in such a fog. I was getting better, and then I was told that I was too much of a liability and dropped from the clinic. I moved from Colorado to Oregon. I have a job that I love, a new puppy, and a great group of friends. I’m able to fuel my body to hike and do the things I love. I’m repairing my relationship with my family, and I have a great therapist who is helping me process all of this. Things obviously aren’t perfect, and I still have hard days. But I also have balance, and flexibility, and a life that is so much more than I was told would ever be possible for me.”

Jane ultimately passed away due to complications from her years of anorexia, which Vallière wonders could have been prevented by not detouring her down the terminal anorexia route. Regardless, her story details how easily similar cases can end in suicide for people without people willing to fight to give them hope. Live Action notes that last year, Colorado saw a record number of people, 510, prescribed suicide drugs solely for dietary disorders.

“What we do know is that these laws are not so rosy as the propaganda would have you believe,” Vallière writes, adding “there has been and will be more collateral damage in people like Jane or Coloradan Mary Gossman, who was told by a nationally renowned Denver eating disorder treatment facility, ‘there’s nothing we can do for you,’ which qualified her for lethal drugs under the law. She’s in a better place now and has joined as a plaintiff in a lawsuit to overturn the law. So, I ask: how many collateral deaths are acceptable to you?”

That lawsuit says that Colorado’s so-called “medical aid-in-dying” or assisted suicide law violates federal protections by allowing physicians to prescribe lethal drugs to some disabled patients under circumstances where others would be directed to mental health care, by “assum[ing] that a request for assisted suicide is not an indication of a mental disorder, when other Colorado laws make precisely the opposite assumption for virtually everyone else.”

Twelve U.S. states plus the District of Columbia allow assisted suicide. In April, however, a bill to legalize euthanasia failed in Maryland.

As Vallière has previously argued elsewhere, current euthanasia programs in the United States constitute discrimination against patients with life-threatening conditions in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, as when a state will “will pay for every instance of assisted suicide” but not palliative care, “I don’t call that autonomy, I call that eugenics.”

Support is available to talk to those struggling with thoughts of ending their lives. The Suicide & Crisis Lifeline can be reached by calling or texting 988.

Related Topics:#CalvinFreiburger #LifeSiteNews AssistedSuicideForEatingDisorders EuthanasiaVSMentalHealthCare

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Bill Gates Gets Mugged By Reality

Published on November 7, 2025

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Stephen Moore

You’ve probably heard by now the blockbuster news that Microsoft founder Bill Gates, one of the richest people to ever walk the planet, has had a change of heart on climate change.

For several decades Gates poured billions of dollars into the climate industrial complex.

Some conservatives have sniffed that Bill Gates has shifted his position on climate change because he and Microsoft have invested heavily in energy intensive data centers.

AI and robotics will triple our electric power needs over the next 15 years. And you can’t get that from windmills.

What Bill Gates has done is courageous and praiseworthy. It’s not many people of his stature that will admit that they were wrong. Al Gore certainly hasn’t. My wife says I never do.

Although I’ve only once met Bill Gates, I’ve read his latest statements on global warming. He still endorses the need for communal action (which won’t work), but he has sensibly disassociated himself from the increasingly radical and economically destructive dictates from the green movement. For that, the left has tossed him out of their tent as a “traitor.”

I wish to highlight several critical insights that should be the starting point for constructive debate that every clear-minded thinker on either side of the issue should embrace.

(1) It’s time to put human welfare at the center of our climate policies. This includes improving agriculture and health in poor countries.

(2) Countries should be encouraged to grow their economies even if that means a reliance on fossil fuels like natural gas. Economic growth is essential to human progress.

(3) Although climate change will hurt poor people, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare. The biggest problems are poverty and disease.

I would add to these wise declarations two inconvenient truths: First: the solution to changing temperatures and weather patterns is technological progress. A far fewer percentage of people die of severe weather events today than 50 or 100 or 1,000 years ago.

Second, energy is the master resource and to deny people reliable and affordable energy is to keep them poor and vulnerable – and this is inhumane.

If Bill Gates were to start directing even a small fraction of his foundation funds to ensuring everyone on the planet has access to electric power and safe drinking water, it would do more for humanity than all of the hundreds of billions that governments and foundations have devoted to climate programs that have failed to change the globe’s temperature.

Stephen Moore is a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity and a former Trump senior economic advisor.

Alberta

Alberta government’s plan will improve access to MRIs and CT scans

Published on November 4, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Nadeem Esmail and Tegan Hill

The Smith government may soon allow Albertans to privately purchase diagnostic screening and testing services, prompting familiar cries from defenders of the status quo. But in reality, this change, which the government plans to propose in the legislature in the coming months, would simply give Albertans an option already available to patients in every other developed country with universal health care.

It’s important for Albertans and indeed all Canadians to understand the unique nature of our health-care system. In every one of the 30 other developed countries with universal health care, patients are free to seek care on their own terms with their own resources when the universal system is unwilling or unable to satisfy their needs. Whether to access care with shorter wait times and a more rapid return to full health, to access more personalized services or meet a personal health need, or to access new advances in medical technology. But not in Canada.

That prohibition has not served Albertans well. Despite being one of the highest-spending provinces in one of the most expensive universal health-care systems in the developed world, Albertans endure some of the longest wait times for health care and some of the worst availability of advanced diagnostic and medical technologies including MRI machines and CT scanners.

Introducing new medical technologies is a costly endeavour, which requires money and the actual equipment, but also the proficiency, knowledge and expertise to use it properly. By allowing Albertans to privately purchase diagnostic screening and testing services, the Smith government would encourage private providers to make these technologies available and develop the requisite knowledge.

Obviously, these new providers would improve access to these services for all Alberta patients—first for those willing to pay for them, and then for patients in the public system. In other words, adding providers to the health-care system expands the supply of these services, which will reduce wait times for everyone, not just those using private clinics. And relief can’t come soon enough. In Alberta, in 2024 the median wait time for a CT scan was 12 weeks and 24 weeks for an MRI.

Greater access and shorter wait times will also benefit Albertans concerned about their future health or preventative care. When these Albertans can quickly access a private provider, their appointments may lead to the early discovery of medical problems. Early detection can improve health outcomes and reduce the amount of public health-care resources these Albertans may ultimately use in the future. And that means more resources available for all other patients, to the benefit of all Albertans including those unable to access the private option.

Opponents of this approach argue that it’s a move towards two-tier health care, which will drain resources from the public system, or that this is “American-style” health care. But these arguments ignore that private alternatives benefit all patients in universal health-care systems in the rest of the developed world. For example, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands and Australia all have higher-performing universal systems that provide more timely care because of—not despite—the private options available to patients.

In reality, the Smith government’s plan to allow Albertans to privately purchase diagnostic screening and testing services is a small step in the right direction to reduce wait times and improve health-care access in the province. In fact, the proposal doesn’t go far enough—the government should allow Albertans to purchase physician appointments and surgeries privately, too. Hopefully the Smith government continues to reform the province’s health-care system, despite ill-informed objections, with all patients in mind.