Dearth on TV reveals a Swiss haven for suicides
California Poppy
By FRANK JORDANS, Associated Press Writer Frank Jordans, Associated
Press Writer – Sun Dec 14, 10:46 am ET AP –
SCHWERZENBACH, Switzerland – Twice a week, on average, in a
nondescript building by the railroad tracks, a foreigner comes to die.
Most are terminally ill. Some are young and physically healthy except
for a permanent disability or severe, debilitating mental disorder.
Drawn by Switzerland's reputation as a trouble-free place for
foreigners to end their lives, more than 100 Germans, Britons, French,
Americans and others come to this small commuter town just east of
Zurich each year to lie down on a bed in an industrial park building
and drink a lethal dose of barbiturates.
Now the country's suicide practices are under the spotlight after
British TV last week showed Craig Ewert, a 59-year-old Chicago man
with a severe form of motor neuron disease, killing himself in
Switzerland two years ago.
Other countries, including the Netherlands, Belgium, and Oregon and
Washington in the U.S., have recently passed laws allowing the
incurably sick to seek out a doctor who — under tightly regulated
circumstances — can hasten their death.
But only Switzerland, in a law dating back to 1942, permits foreigners
to come and kill themselves, placing few restrictions on the how, when
and why. Doctors have relative freedom to prescribe a veterinary drug
for that very purpose
Five minutes after drinking a glass of water laced with sodium
pentobarbital, they fall asleep.
Death follows about half an hour later.
Like Ewert, most foreigners turn to Dignitas, one of several Swiss
organizations dedicated to the cause. Dignitas' founder, Ludwig A.
Minelli, has built the group into a thriving nonprofit operation.
Critics accuse it of turning Switzerland into a magnet for so-called
"suicide tourism," and of operating on the fringes of medical ethics
and public opinion.
Dr. Bertrand Kiefer, editor-in-chief of the Revue Medicale Suisse, a
medical journal, fears some people are killing themselves not to
escape intolerable suffering but to relieve family or society of a
burden.
Dignitas says its members' right to self-determination is paramount.
The only criteria for assisting a suicide are that the person "suffers
from an illness that inevitably leads to death, or from an
unacceptable disability, and wants to end their life and suffering
voluntarily."
Kiefer also says assisted-groups lack financial transparency.
Dignitas says it charges 10,000 Swiss francs ($8,300) for its
services, which include taking care of legal formalities and arranging
consultations with a doctor willing to prescribe the deadly medicine.
The group says it pays its staff salaries and invests any profit in
its advocacy and counseling work, which includes suicide prevention
efforts.
Other such organizations in Switzerland say they are cheaper and do
not charge the patient directly, relying instead on membership fees
and donations.
"We need to ensure that there's no economic incentive for these
organizations to encourage people to commit suicide," says Kiefer.
A small religious party is campaigning to ban groups from charging for
their services — an idea which the pugnacious Minelli calls the
product of "sick brains."
Officials in the canton of Zurich threatened to restrict their
activities by making doctors see each patient more than once, and by
limiting the supply of sodium pentobarbital. So some groups hoarded
the drug and Dignitas turned to alternative methods, coming under
scrutiny this spring after it was reported they were suffocating
people with plastic bags and helium.
The bag is placed over the head of a person who then opens a flow of
helium, falls into a coma and dies "in 99.9 percent of cases,"
according to Derek Humphry, a British author whose suicide manual
"Final Exit" has sold at least a million copies.
The canton of Zurich examined the practice and found in May that the
group had done nothing illegal. But the use of helium smacked to many
Swiss of Nazi gas chambers, and made Minelli a tabloid hate figure — a
sentiment widely shared in Schwerzenbach.
Like most Swiss, the townspeople support the principle of assisted
suicide, but "the helium was the last straw," says Manfred Milz, who
is evicting Dignitas from his building.
It has to leave by June — its third move in two years. Dignitas
previously used a private home, hotel rooms, even mobile homes.
But demand continues to grow, Dignitas says, and its membership has
reached nearly 6,000 over the past decade. Some are merely supporters
of its work, others intend to die with its help when the time comes.
The government is weighing rules that could spell the end for "suicide
tourism," which James Harris of London-based Dignity in Dying, would
only mean more agonizing suicides, often botched.
Bernard Sutter, a spokesman for Exit, Switzerland's largest assisted-
suicide group, which only helps Swiss residents, says other countries
should change their laws.
"We can't solve all the problems of Germany, England, France and
Italy," he said.
Hawaii Mahal
"California Poppy" <GoldenSt...@aol.com> wrote
StarvinMarv
> Does anyone know about any agency in OR that can charge less?
Happy to report the "Family Dollar Die Store" is alive and well. For
$1.79 they will sell you a sharp pointed knife capable of doing the
job.