Coroner calls for clampdown on Google and Amazon selling suicide substances.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Chloe Macdermott

The Assistant Coroner in West London (UK), Paul Rogers, is urging tighter restriction be put on online suicide websites, suicide chatrooms as well as Google and Amazon.

Rogers wrote to Home Secretary James Cleverley, Health Secretary Victoria Atkins, and Culture Secretary Lucy Fraser to call for action to prevent more deaths after investigating the suicide death of Chloe Macdermott, 43, who died by suicide after forming an online suicide pact.

An article by Tristan Kirk that was published in The Standard on January 1, 2024 concerning Macdermott, stated:

She had bought a substance usually used as a food preservative from the US through Amazon, and both she and an online contact ingested the substance on the same night in May 2021. 

Ms Macdermott, who ran her own jewellery making business Kitty Clobber, died in the early hours of May 23, 2021, on her bed at the home she shared with her husband in Maida Vale.

According to Kirk, Rogers wrote in a report that was also sent to bosses at Google and Amazon that:

“Chloe was able to purchase the product used over the internet and have it delivered to her home in the UK.  

“Enquiries showed the product was purchased using Amazon in the United States.” 

Further to that, in the report Rogers:

identified a website and chatrooms which “encourage suicide, assist it by provision of information about suicide methods, counsel suicide by providing information about it and thereby potentially facilitate the commission of a criminal offence in the United Kingdom.” 

Kirk concluded the article by stating:

Recording the death as suicide at the conclusion of the inquest, Mr Rogers said Ms Macdermott had struggled for years with her mental health, and in her final weeks “became increasingly suicidal and researched ways to end her life using the internet, and internet chat rooms”. 

In December 2023, Kenneth Law, a Canadian man who had been charged on May 9, 2023 with two counts of aiding and abetting suicide in the Peel Region, allegedly through the online sales of a legal substance that is lethal in high doses, was officially charged with 14 counts of second-degree murder.

The Dutch News reported that a Netherlands man (Alex S) was convicted on July 18, 2023 for selling a suicide powder, with instructions, to as many as 1600 people and was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for the suicide deaths of at least 10 people.