Swiss voters to vote on assisted suicide in Zurich Canton

This Sunday, the Canton of Zurich will be voting on whether or not to ban or restrict assisted suicide in the Canton by stopping death tourism.

An article by Ariane Gigon in Swissinfo explains how assisted suicide has become a political issue in Zurich. The article states:

Swiss law tolerates assisted suicide when patients commit the act themselves and helpers have no vested interest in their death. But since the 1990s pressure has grown on politicians following various scandals involving the deaths of mentally ill patients and so-called “suicide tourists”.

Christoph Blocher, justice minister from 2004-2007 and a member of the rightwing Swiss People’s Party, didn’t want to change the status quo. His successor Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf from the centre-right Conservative Democratic Party wanted to ban assisted suicide but nothing happened.

The ball is currently in the court of Simonetta Sommaruga, from the centre-left Social Democratic Party, who has promised a new bill “in the first half of 2011”.

This explains the high symbolic value of the Zurich vote. No one is giving either vote a chance of passing – they are judged almost impossible to apply because they violate the principle of non-discrimination between citizens.

But Bernhard Sutter, spokesman for assisted suicide organisation Exit in the German-speaking part of the country, is hoping for a clear result “to send Simonetta Sommaruga a strong signal”.

Sommaruga has indicated she wishes to include questions of suicide prevention and palliative care in her response.

The parties seeking to ban assisted suicide in canton Zurich are the Christian-based Evangelical People’s Party and the Federal Democratic Union.

The advocates of the ban believe palliative care is the best option to take care of seriously ill people at the end of their lives.

They also believe that assisted suicide damages Zurich’s image, not to mention the cost to the taxpayer of SFr3,000-5,000 ($3,400-5,700) per case for the legal medical tests.

“Those who take their own life do not die in dignity but in moral distress and despair,” they claim.

Supporters of assisted suicide insist on the right to self-determination. However, a majority reject suicide tourism: when foreigners travel to Switzerland to end their lives.

Exit and Dignitas, the two biggest assisted suicide organisations in Switzerland, are not working together on a campaign, but they both warn against banning assisted suicide or creating insurmountable obstacles to getting a doctor’s approval.

Canadian criminologist Russel D Ogden, who considers the current Swiss model one of the best in the world.

“Every case of assisted suicide is subject to an official enquiry and can be documented,” he said.

But he fears that if the government introduces greater obstacles to gaining access to assisted suicide, “it will lose the control that it is looking to obtain. As a result, people will observe the precautionary criteria less than the specialist organisations do today”.

Ogden points to the increasing use of helium in suicides in countries that ban assisted suicide, such as Germany.

Dignitas, which helps around 100 people end their lives a year (a third less than before 2008 and the introduction of the obligation in Zurich to consult a doctor twice instead of once), resorted to helium four times in 2008 but has not used it since. Exit says it has never used gas.

We hope that the citizens of Zurich will recognize how assisted suicide threatens the lives of vulnerable people. That suicide tourists are often subtly coerced into an assisted death out of fear of being abandoned rather than being assured that they will be cared for until they die a natural death.

It is interesting that Russel Ogden, the leader of the Farewell Foundation, a group in British Columbia Canada that has been set-up in a similar fashion to the Dignitas suicide clinic in Zurich, continues to pass himself off to the media as a researcher and expert instead of promoting himself as a suicide activist and an activist who has been involved with NuTech.

The Farewell Foundation is attempting to overturn Canada's assisted suicide law through the court.

Cashing in on despair

Is the Dignitas Suicide clinic a profit obsessed killing machine.

An article written by Allan Hall and published in the UK Daily Mail investigates the claims of former Dignitas nurse Soraya Wernli who has accused Ludwig Minelli, the founder of Dignitas of being obsessed with profit and not with dignity.

Link to the article on the Mail online:

Soraya Wernli

When Wernli accepted a job with the Dignitas assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland she thought she was being hired to be a ‘companion’ to assist people in their final journey to the ‘other side’.

She anticipated that her work would involve paperwork, words of comfort, a gentle hand for those about to end their pain-filled lives. This is the work that she was signing up for when she agreed to work for Minelli.

Wernli claims that:
‘just a few days into the job, he (Minelli) asked me to sort through the stuff in these plastic bin liners clogging the stairs.’ Minelli told her to ‘empty the sacks onto a long table ... and sort through everything.

In the sacks Wernli found - Mobile phones, handbags, ladies’ tights, shoes, spectacles, money, purses, wallets, jewels, and more.

Ludwig Minelli

Minelli had his “patients” sign forms saying the possessions were now the property of Dignitas. He then sold everything to pawn shops and second-hand shops.

Wernli stated that she felt disgusted. As a nurse and a former care worker for the elderly, she was no stranger to death and she supported assisted suicide.

Wernli worked for the Dignitas assisted suicide clinic in Zurich for 2½ years. During that time she came to believe that Dignitas was less about ethical euthanasia for the terminally ill and more of a money-making machine for Minelli.

Since leaving the Dignitas clinic in 2005 Wernli has launched lawsuits, acted as an undercover informant for the police and she is now writing a book to expose the ‘production line of death concerned only with profits’ at the Dignitas clinic.

Dignitas has been involved in at least 1000 assisted suicide deaths since its founding. Minelli was operates the Dignitas clinic is the book-keeper, the secretary general-chief accountant and gatekeeper of the organisation.

While working for Dignitas, Wernli assisted the suicides of 35 people and she was well paid making ₤4,500 a month.

The first location for Dignitas was a small apartment in Gertrudstrasse, Zurich where access was only possible via a small elevator. This mean’t that people going into the apartment building and bodies going out of the apartment building needed to use the same elevator.

Wernli stated: ‘The room where people were to die was often filthy, because Minelli skimped on the cleaning bills. Often there would be shoes or underwhere or some other deeply personal item of an earlier victim lying beneath the bed or around the room. It was shameful.’

Wernli stated that Reginald Crew was her first assisted suicide. She stated: ‘Mr. Crew arrived in the morning and was dead just hours later. ... I argued that it wasn’t right that people land at the airport, are ferried to his office, have their requisite half-an-hour with a doctor, get the barbituates ...and are then sent off to die.’

She said that she told Minelli: ‘This is the biggest step anyone will ever take. They should at least be allowed to stay overnight, to think about what they are doing.’

Wernli said that Minelli would have none of it. She claims that he once said that if he had his way, he would have vending machines where people could buy barbiturates to end their lives as easy as buying a soft drink or a bar of chocolate.

When asked about the assisted suicide of Daniel James, Wernli said that he was by no means the first person to have been helped to die who wasn’t terminally ill.’

Wernli then described the case of Robert & Jennifer Stokes from the UK who were in their 50's, both had a history of mental illness and failed suicide attempts. They did claim to be suffering from chronic conditions but neither one of them were dying and yet Dignitas assisted their suicides.

Wernli claims that she argued with Minelli that double suicides should never be sanctioned. She told him that one partner may want to die simply because he or she cannot cope with being alone. Later she learned that Minelli continued the practice of double suicides with another of the workers caring out those assisted suicide deaths.

The case of Martha Hauschildt was another concern that Wernli expressed. She explained that Hauschildt paid Minelli 200,000 Swiss frans for her assisted suicide whereas most of the time the people were charged ₤7,000 for an assisted suicide and funeral. Many wealthy people bequeathed ‘vast sums’ to Minelli in their Will. Minelli paid the doctors 500 Swiss francs for each assisted suicide prescription.

The gruesome 70-hour death of Peter Auhagen was the case that ended Wernli’s career with Dignitas and caused her to agree to be a secret informer for the police who were investigating Minelli.

Usually Minelli used a lethal dose of barbiturates to assist suicides but in the case of Auhagen, Minelli decided to test a “suicide machine” that the patient controlled the administration of drugs. Wernli said that: ‘the machine had a fault which meant it couldn’t pump all the poison into his system. The man was partially poisoned, in agony and thrashing around in a coma, frothing at the mouth and sweating. ... It was a terrible thing to witness, and I knew it could not go on.

Wernli recounts that Auhagen was still alive. She called Minelli who then came by and after a heated discussion he told the family to go for a walk and then someone administered the drugs by injection. Wernli claims that Minelli kept a supply of drugs in his personal office in case of an emergency.

Nearly four years after leaving her employment with Dignitas, the assisted suicide clinic remains open. Current employees are made to sign a privacy agreement to end any further leaks of information.

Wernli has not given up on her hope to close the Dignitas clinic. She stated: ‘this is Switzerland, and things move slowly, if at all. All I can promise is that I will not stop speaking out because Dignitas is an organisation that must be stopped.’

Australia's Dr. Death designs new suicide device

By Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Philip Nitschke, also known as Australia's Dr. Death, claims to have designed a new suicide device. Nitschke is also one of the early founders of the NuTech group and he is the leader of Exit International, a group that is devoted to developing suicide devices for assisting a suicide.

Suicide devices and methods are nothing new to Nitschke who is also known for his work on the "peaceful pill", a pill that he once said could be used by troubled teens. He is also known for promoting suicide tourism and encouraging people to go to Mexico to obtain veterinary drugs.

Nitschke said the method - which uses legally obtaining household products including a barbecue gas bottle - is “flawless” and has the unique characteristic of being undetectable which will make it harder to prove suicide.

Nitschke is not concerned whether the person who is seeking suicide is depressed or whether his device may be unsafe due to the combustible nature of the gas that his device uses.

Nitscke stated that: “It’s hard to see how the Government could possibly restrict access to common cylinders, and certainly there’s no way they could restrict access to (the gas),”

In the past the Australian government has confiscated his suicide devices and "Exit bags", they have outlawed the suicide counseling service that he operated via the internet and his book that he wrote to promote suicide and assisted suicide methods.

Link to article on suicide manual:
http://alexschadenberg.blogspot.com/2008/10/nitschke-launches-online-euthanasia.html

Earlier this year, Nitschke admitted that he did not disqualify Graeme Wylie from assisted suicide, even though he knew that he was suffering from dementia. Nitschke was willing to ignore the fact that Wylie was incompetent to make a proper decision in order to advocate for Wylie to die by suicide.

Link to previous article about Nitschke:
http://alexschadenberg.blogspot.com/2008/05/nitschke-hell-bent-on-assisted-suicide.html

The government is right to protect vulnerable people from Nitschke, who is more concerned about providing the means for people to die than making sure people are actually mentally or emotionally stable.

I am convinced that the media gives Nitschke attention because he offers entertainment. He is constantly creating new ways to break the law, if not the spirit of the law. He is continually promoting suicide, as if it should be the goal of society to encourage people to kill themselves. He is a colorful character. Too bad his entertainment will lead to the death of many vulnerable people.

Link article:
http://www.entertainmentandshowbiz.com/euthanasia-pioneer-unveils-undetectable-suicide-device-200812267748

Nitschke promotes his suicide machine in Australia

Philip Nitschke is once again promoting suicide. This time Nitschke is promoting a suicide machine that is able to be self-assembled at home.

Nitschke, known as Australia's Dr. Death, and a member of NuTech, an international organization of death lobby radicals who seek to develop new ways to commit suicide.

Nitschke, who has been working for years on the "peaceful pill", a pill that would be made from regular household products. Nitschke was quoted by the National Review online interview as stating that the peaceful pill could be used by troubled teens who wish to commit suicide.

Has Nitschke's lack of success with the suicide pill led him to producing a suicide machine?

At the World Federation of Right to Die Societies conference in Toronto - September 2006, Nitschke emphasized the need for assisted suicide or euthanasia to be available for people who are "tired of living".

Nitschke sells his ideology as providing choice and control for people at the end of their lives. The reality is that Nitschke and his friends are trying to create a universal human right to die. Nitschke and his death lobby followers believe that death is the last freedom that everyone should have access to at any time.

Sadly, many people who are depressed or who live with mental illness, emotional or psychological difficulties, are victimized by death advocates like Nitschke.

Nitschke has created video's, books, websites, and also a suicide counseling service.

If society becomes duped into accepting Nitschke's philosophy of life, we will turn into a nihilistic, negative death obsessed culture that will turn in on itself. In the end it will create a duty to die for anyone who lives with significant disabilities or mental health issues. We only need to examine the Groningen Protocol in the Netherlands to determine the likely outcome of this destructive philosophy

We must reject Nitschke and his philosophy and promote and recognize the innate dignity of each human person. We must build an ethic of quality of life that is derived from the interdependent care for the physical, emotional, spiritual and psychological needs of others.

Link to article on Nitschke's suicide machine
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/12/18/2449786.htm

The media's love affair with suicide outlaws

Wesley Smith has blogged an interesting article about Russel Ogden.

Ogden is a criminologist in British Columbia who is fascinated by suicide and assisted suicide. He claims to be a researcher and not an activist.

Decide for yourself.

Link to Wesley Smith's blog comment:
http://www.wesleyjsmith.com/blog/2008/11/medias-love-affair-with-suicide-outlaws.html

Link to the article in the Vancouver Sun:
http://communities.canada.com/vancouversun/blogs/thesearch/archive/2008/11/01/hard-headed-researcher-of-300-suicides-maintains-he-s-pro-life.aspx

Link to previous blog article concerning Russel Ogden:
http://alexschadenberg.blogspot.com/2008/07/professor-wants-to-witness-assisted.html

Professor wants to witness assisted suicide for research

For more information about the Russel Ogden controversy please go to this link at the surreyleader.com

http://www.bclocalnews.com/surrey_area/surreyleader/news/22883914.html

It should be noted that euthanasia is a criminal offense in Canada and is dealt with under section 222 of the criminal code.

To aid, abet or counsel suicide, whether suicide occurs or not is a criminal offense in Canada and is dealt with under section 241 of the criminal code