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It is not as if this risk is negligible or a minor one. Assisted suicide has been legal in the Netherlands for two decades, as we know. There, fully a third of those dying in this way experience effects such as pain, restlessness, shortage of breath, secretions, nausea and vomiting. Their deaths, therefore, are far from painless. In Oregon, between 2012 and 2022, there was a rate of side-effects of 11%, including very serious complications such as regurgitation, seizures and survival of the supposedly lethal drugs. Those choosing assisted suicide are likely to expect that death reached in this way will also be swift, but in many cases that is not so, and they would be wrong to think so. Half of all the deaths in Oregon took over 53 minutes. Similarly, in Canada the incomplete statistics suggest that there is a 50% chance of an assisted death taking more than an hour. Occasionally, the working of the drugs can be much slower still: an assisted patient in Oregon took over five days to die.