Article By Raimundo Rojas
The numbers coming out of Hawaii should stop every state legislator in America in their tracks. In 2025, fifty-nine people ended their lives by taking lethal drugs prescribed under Hawaii’s deceptively named Our Care, Our Choice Act. Fifty-nine humans whose lives ended not because medicine had nothing left to offer, but because the state authorized doctors to prescribe death as an acceptable response to suffering.
That’s a 55 percent increase since 2024, and a 293 percent increase in deaths since the law took effect in 2019. That translates to nearly four times as many people are now dying every year under a law whose supporters promised safeguards.
What a crock.
The question we must ask is: At what point does the body count become unacceptable? When do legislators acknowledge that the legislation they sold to the public as an extraordinary measure for exceptional circumstances has created a government-sanctioned pathway to suicide that grows more entrenched with every passing year?
In 2025 alone, approximately one out of every 215 deaths in Hawaii has resulted from the ingestion of these drugs. These numbers even exceed what California and Oregon reported in their respective seventh years. This means that Hawaii, with its relatively small population, has reached a level of assisted suicide deaths that should alarm even the most committed defenders of this practice.
And those who helped create and expand this system of death wish for more expansion and claim that it’s an extraordinary accomplishment in health care.
All this, and Hawaii doesn’t even know how many people have actually died from these lethal prescriptions.
The state’s own Department of Health admits that not every death involving these medications makes it into the official records. Doctors do not always learn what happened to their patients. Follow-up reports go missing. Some prescriptions disappear into a bureaucratic void, with no reliable accounting of whether the patient swallowed the drugs, experienced complications, or died. The department acknowledged in its 2025 report that it lacks documentation for some deaths following ingestion.
Its response? Recommend eliminating the requirement to report the number of known assisted suicide deaths per 5,000 deaths statewide.
That is equal parts frightening and astonishing. Hawaii passes a law that permits the prescription of lethal drugs, THEN discovers that its reporting system cannot account for every death and proposes removing a public reporting requirement. What? But how mortifyingly convenient for the lawmakers who would rather celebrate their so-called compassionate legislation than confront its consequences.
The public also deserves to know what happens when the drugs fail to work as their advocates promise. The annual reports do not provide the comprehensive complication data necessary to understand how frequently patients experience vomiting, regurgitation, prolonged dying, or other distressing events.
Earlier Hawaii reports documented a death that took approximately twelve hours after ingestion. Twelve hours. Imagine the suffering that could unfold during such an ordeal, especially when no independent observer is required to remain in the room to document what happened.
Then came the horror in Honolulu.
In October 2024, an 88-year-old woman died in her home after receiving lethal medication. According to investigators, her attending physician allegedly administered the drugs himself, even though the law explicitly requires patients to perform the final act.
The woman reportedly began choking and motioned for the physician to stop. Police reports allege that he nonetheless continued administering the medication.
Yes, you read that right. An elderly woman was choking on a poison concoction, reportedly signaled for the doctor to stop, and the investigation showed that he continued.
And what happened? The medical examiner ruled her death a homicide, and the Honolulu police opened a second-degree murder investigation and executed a search warrant. There has yet to be a final outcome or determination in this case. But the allegations expose a fundamental weakness in these laws.
Who protects a patient when the person entrusted with providing medical care controls access to the lethal medication, and no independent witness must verify what occurs at the moment of death?
How do these legislators who promoted this law respond to that elderly woman’s family? Do they repeat their talking points about autonomy and compassion? Or do they finally admit that a law that lets doctors facilitate suicide creates opportunities for abuse?
Oregon pioneered this deadly experiment in 1997. Washington followed, then Vermont, California, Colorado, and others. Each time, promoters of this killing machine presented assisted suicide as a carefully controlled exception. They assured worried families that strict eligibility requirements would protect vulnerable people and that no one had reason to fear abuse.
How can we ever believe them? Their assurances deserve far less confidence when the government’s own records cannot establish what happens to every patient who receives a lethal prescription.
Supporters will continue to argue that many of the people who died in Hawaii had terminal cancer and were enrolled in hospice. Of course they will. They were sick. They needed skilled medical care, effective pain management, companionship, and the assurance that their lives remained worthy of protection until their natural deaths. You know what, these diagnoses do not make their deaths less tragic, and their suffering does not absolve the state of its responsibility to protect them.
The responsibility for these horrors and the expansion of this practice belongs to the legislators who authorized it and the governors who signed these bills into law. They can no longer claim ignorance of the risks after years of warnings from physicians, disability-rights advocates, hospice professionals, and organizations defending the sanctity of human life.
These pro-euthanasia zealots cannot invoke safeguards while tolerating reporting systems that leave deaths unaccounted for. And they certainly cannot pretend that a homicide investigation involving an elderly woman who allegedly signaled for her doctor to stop is an insignificant footnote in the history of this legislation.
A government that cannot account for the deaths its laws authorize has no business claiming those laws adequately protect the vulnerable.
The lawmakers in states that have already legalized assisted suicide should be demanding comprehensive investigations, independent oversight, public reporting of complications, and a serious reconsideration of laws that have turned the medical profession into an instrument of deliberate death. Instead, advocates continue pressing for fewer restrictions and easier access.
Apparently, the existing death toll has not satisfied their appetite for expansion.
And to the legislators in states now considering assisted suicide bills, especially those who believe they can avoid Hawaii’s failures by writing a few additional safeguards into their legislation, I offer this warning. Look at Hawaii before you cast your vote. Look at the 254 recorded deaths. Look at the more than 285 percent increase in annual deaths since the law began. Look at the missing information, the uncertainty surrounding complications, and the homicide investigation involving an 88-year-old woman who reportedly tried to make her doctor stop.
Then ask yourselves whether you are prepared to accept responsibility for what follows legalization.
Because once you authorize physicians to prescribe death, you cannot bring back the people who swallowed those drugs. You cannot undo the suffering of someone whose death went terribly wrong. You cannot assure frightened elderly patients that no one will ever pressure them, or that every doctor will honor their wishes when they become helpless.
Hawaii has given the rest of America a warning written in human lives. Every state that has legalized assisted suicide should answer for the consequences, and every legislator contemplating a similar law should understand exactly what is at stake.
The question before those legislatures is no longer whether assisted suicide will result in deaths. Hawaii has answered that question hundreds of times. The question is how many more deaths lawmakers are willing to authorize before they recognize that the state should protect vulnerable human beings, not provide the means to end their lives.
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