Author: Jamie Towey, Opinion Contributor to The Hill
Original date: April 28, 2026
Last March, 31-year-old Eileen Mihich was found dead in a room at the Hotel Deluxe in Portland, Ore. Near her body was an empty bottle of the poison pills prescribed specifically for physician-assisted suicide.
Mihich had obtained this concoction from a pharmacy in Mill Creek, Wash., despite not meeting any of the legal criteria to obtain it. She was not terminally ill. She had not seen even one practitioner. She also had serious mental illness that rendered her capacity questionable, and she was not a resident of Washington state.
One year after lodging a formal complaint with the Washington Department of Health, her family has still received no word on how their loved one could have received these deadly drugs.
The incident helps illustrate the classic bait-and-switch nature of the modern assisted suicide movement and the effort to make suicide-affirmation a form of medical care. …
Jamie Towey is president of Aging with Dignity.