https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Am_VKQiOBtI
How do you feel about MAID made expanding into mental illness and the consequences it’ll bring to our society? Okay. So I was pretty sick the last few years. And I was in a lot of pain. It took me usually for about two and a half years. It took me about four hours before I could stand up. And then once I stood up, I couldn’t sit down. I was walking, you know, nine to twelve miles a day. And then by ten o’clock at night, I was feeling something approximating the worst I’d ever felt previously in my life, but way better than I had in the morning. And then I knew perfectly well that as soon as I went to sleep, it was going to start again. And I put up with that for about two and a half years. Two and a half years and got to the point where, especially because I was seeing the pain I was in reflected in the eyes of the people that I loved. And I didn’t want to have that happen anymore, you know. And so I talked to my family about going to Switzerland. I thought, I just can’t do this for the next twenty years. It didn’t look like it was going to get better. And then, you know, I tried a variety of relatively extreme treatments and possibly one of them worked and I started to recover. And I’ve been recovering now for about 16 months, probably. And it’s been slow, but linear. And things are pretty good again. In fact, they’re remarkably good. And, you know, tonight was a highlight for me because my son was here playing and that went very well. And so that was very gratifying. You know, but I’d be a liar if I said that there weren’t times where if there would have been a button that would have just shut me off, I would have pushed it. Okay, so now on to medically assisted dying. We had a dog, Seiko, and near the end of his life, it was getting pretty hard for him to breathe. Every breath became an effort. And so we made the collective decision to have him put down. And we liked that dog quite a lot. He was a great relief to my daughter when she was sick. And so it was a pretty rough day when we had him put down, but it was the right thing to do. But he’s a dog, you know. He wasn’t grandma. And Nietzsche said, you know, you haven’t lived long if you haven’t seen that the compassionate hand sometimes kills. And, you know, there’s something to that. You got to ask yourself how much agony you would be willing to watch someone go through before you might give them a hand. But that doesn’t mean that that responsibility should be taken up by the government. So, you know, I’m I’m opposed to capital punishment. And it’s not because I don’t think that there are crimes worthy of death. In fact, I know perfectly well that are crimes. There are crimes so egregious that the people who commit them beg for death. That’s not an uncommon outcome at sentencing trials for people like the serial sexual slayers of children who’ve descended far enough down into hell so that death would be a relief. And so and I think you have to be a fool if you think that. People that there are not some crimes that are so brutal that virtually no punishment would be too severe. You just don’t know anything about those crimes, if that’s what you think. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to give the state that power. Because as untrustworthy as the criminal might be, allowing the state to make decisions about what to do. Allowing the state to make decisions about who should live and who should die. You don’t know what kind of monster you’re likely to conjure up doing that. So I don’t know how many of you know this and you can go look it up for yourself. But before the Nazis started their extermination program. Before they started the Holocaust. They started it with the public health campaign. Right. The Nazis came to power partly promising to clean up the country on the disease side. And they did. They produced universal treatments for tuberculosis. They upped the standards of hygiene in German hospitals. Then they went to the factories and started cleaning them up. And they used Zyklon B. If I remember, there’s two variants of Zyklon, which is a toxic gas. And they used them in factories to get rid of the insects and the rats. And they had the factory owners clean up the factories and plant flowers. And you know, just sort of beautify the place. And Zyklon B was a pretty effective means of eliminating parasites and insects. Then they went into the mental hospitals. And you know, there is not much more that’s more brutal than a backward in a mental hospital. Before psychiatric drugs. I worked at the Douglas Hospital in Montreal after deinstitutionalization. But before some of the long term backwards, backwards patients had passed away. And I remember taking my younger brother down into the tunnels that connected the hospital buildings on the Douglas Hospital campus, which was kind of like a university. And it was like Dante’s Inferno down there, man. You can’t imagine how damaged those people were. 30 years on a backward in a locked psychiatric clinic. Jesus, imagine being manic or schizophrenic under those conditions. Locked in a straight jacket, maybe for 20 years, maybe in agony. You just can’t imagine what that would be like for decades. And the Nazis basically said that they said, Jesus, you know, if you guys went into those backwards, you’d think death is preferable. And plus, you know, it’s not like it’s cheap to keep those people alive in their desperate suffering. And we could spend that money on the typical thing that, you know, implicitly psychopathic murderers pretend to spend money on like education. And so way the Germans went and cleaned up the asylums and then well, then the disabled were sort of next on the list because turned out they were kind of expensive to an inconvenient. You’re going to be expensive and inconvenient at some point. You’re probably that already. And, you know, you’ll probably be expensive, inconvenient and desperate at some point, too. Highly probable. Most people have many, many people have at least one episode of severe depression in their life. You know, and severe depression will make you suicidal. That’s one of its cardinal symptoms. And so they were kind of expensive. And sometimes it is, you know, that’s usually accompanied by kind of delusional notions about how sad and hurt everyone will be at the funeral and how sorry they’ll be for picking on you. And that’s not depression. That’s not depression. That’s not depression. That’s not depression. That’s not depression. That’s not depression. That’s not depression. That’s not depression. That’s not depression. Depression is accompanied by the genuine belief that you’re pretty damn useless and everyone around you would be better off without you and I’m sure many of you have thought that at some point in your life already. And are you so sure that you wouldn’t have called up the friendly Trudeau government and had them give you a hand just at that point? Give you a hand just at that point. I think it’s 30,000 people We’ve already managed to dispense with in this country as I said already, you know Canada’s international reputation is in tatters And we’re just getting going so It’s complicated, you know now you might ask yourself. Well, how did we handle this before? medically assisted death and answer is Physicians and family members bore the burden on their own conscience You know and it wasn’t uncommon but it wasn’t Publicly discussed let’s say that You know at some point you decide to take grandpa off his heart medication or maybe You know great-grandma’s got Alzheimer’s and she’s in excruciating pain and the physician provides a little more opiate than Is strictly necessary and you know everybody just Takes that burden on themselves very very carefully and Cautiously and and It’s the family To the degree that anybody has the right to make that decision. It’s the family that has the right and the responsibility You know now I’m not arguing for the propriety of You know your personal physician aided opiate overdose The devil’s in the details all the time, but it I Don’t trust the people who can’t get you a passport in two weeks to decide whether or not grandma gets to live