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Death on TV Reveals a Swiss Haven for Suicides
Associated Press/AP Online
December 15, 2008
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.
