The dystopian horror of the Sarco suicide pod

This article was published by Spiked on August 13, 2024

Kevin Yuill

By Kevin Yuill

Yuill is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Sunderland and CEO of Humanists Against Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia (HAASE).

This creepy death capsule reveals the dark heart of ‘assisted dying’.

Introducing the Sarco suicide pod, a gleaming and futuristic-looking death machine. The Sarco, short for ‘sarcophagus’, is the real-life, 21st-century version of critic William Archer’s fictional street-corner slot machines, ‘by which a man could kill himself for a penny’.

The Sarco, a 3D-printed death capsule, was developed a few years ago by Dr Philip Nitschke, founder of assisted-suicide advocacy organisation Exit International, and engineer Alexander Bannink. First unveiled in 2019, the Sarco works by filling its chamber with nitrogen and reducing oxygen levels rapidly once a button is activated from inside. The process would allow a person to lose consciousness and die in approximately 10 minutes. It’s cheap, at just $20 a pop. It’s disability-friendly, in that it can also be activated by voice, a blink or a gesture. It’s also environmentally friendly, serving as a coffin as well as a suicide pod.

Nitschke sees the Sarco as empowering. He claims it will make assisted suicide as unassisted as possible – or as he put it in 2022, ‘You really don’t need a doctor to die’.

Last month, the Sarco was about to serve its first customer, a terminally ill Australian man, in Valais, Switzerland. But after the news broke, a precautionary ban was issued on the Sarco’s use.

The precautionary ban is not a surprise. Very few support the use of the Sarco, even among those who generally campaign for the ‘right to die’. This is a little perplexing at first glance. After all, you would think champions of assisted dying would be all over the Sarco pod (if not actually in it). But they’re not. Even in Switzerland, a nation with some of the most lax assisted-dying laws in the world, established right-to-die organisations have opposed it. As a spokesperson for life-ending clinic Lifecircle said in 2021, ‘there is no human warmth with this method’.

It’s the same story in the UK. Dignity in Dying, the well-funded campaign group for legalising assisted dying, may claim to share Nitschke’s dream of making assisted dying as unassisted as possible – ‘Dying people not doctors in control’, states Dignity in Dying on its website. But it has also come out in opposition to the Sarco. As Professor Stephen Duckworth, a campaigner closely associated with Dignity in Dying, stated in 2021, he could not support the Sarco. ‘Nor am I aware of any credible assisted-dying campaigner who does’, he sniffed. Apparently it ‘deprives users of human connection’. It is the ‘antithesis of what the choice of assisted dying represents’.

What is it about the Sarco that provokes such a reaction among assisted-dying campaigners? At $20, it’s much cheaper than other forms of assisted dying. Above all, it seems to give people the very thing assisted-dying champions claim to support – the right to choose. So why do they reject the very innovation that meets their objectives?

The reason is simple. It’s because the Sarco exposes the horrors of euthanasia that hide behind kind-sounding words like ‘assisted dying’ or the ‘right to die’. It makes it all too clear that death could become cheap, easy and accessible should we decide to go down this path.

The Sarco offers a glimpse into a dystopian future that we desperately need to reject. However unwittingly, the near-universal repulsion it has elicited has done society a great service.

Further articles on this topic:

• Nitschke's suicide business gets US tax deductible status (Link).
• The media are promoting Nitschke and Sarco again (Link).
• Switzerland has not approved suicide pod (Link).