It is a great step towards creating a help to die: this Tuesday, May 27, the deputies adopted at first reading the two bills at the end of life. One strengthens palliative care, the other opens the way to an assisted suicide system, if the Senate approves the text next September.
But there are several questions about the concrete implementation of this new possibility, requested for a long time. One of them: What product will be used to finish the days of interested people?
Article 18 of the bill measures two health agencies to establish the protocol, on the one hand, the high health authority, on the other, the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products.
These two bodies are responsible for “evaluating lethal substances that will be used for the implementation of the help to die.” He will have to “establish recommendations for good practices, including a list of products of good practices recommendations, including a list of probabilities, in isolation or combined, to be used in the context of helping to die,” specifies the article.
“At this stage, we must wait to know the disposition adopted definitively and the derivation to begin our work,” said the BFMTV agency this Wednesday, May 28.
Examples in Switzerland or Belgium
If the case of France is not, at this time, not decide, other of our neighboring countries allow them to imagine a potentially usable list of molecules. In Belgium, since 2002, euthanasia is already legal.
As the Association of former students of the Free University of Brussels is in a publication, several kinds of drugs are used for this purpose. “The drugs that will be used in the first intention are barbiturates (tiopental, desecobarbital, pentobarbital), curarisantes and anxiolytic, mainly benzodiazepines,” they explain.
The Belgian Center for Pharmacotherapeutic Information is tiopental that is used in this practice, or propofol in case of scarcity of the first product.
In Switzerland, regulations allow assisted suicide but not euthanasia that involves the direct action of a caregiver. Doctors can prescribe people in Pentobarbital, as recalled by an article on the regulatory framework published by the University of Lausana.
This medication, pentobarbital, was also used in France in euthanasia or suicides assisted by clandestine. In 2019, a thread directed by the General Directorate of the National Gendarmerie had led to the seizure of 130 bottles of this product throughout France. These were remarkably supported by clandestine euthanasia associations.
Source: BFM TV
