Inventor to rebuild suicide machine in U.S.

[AZTOY]

Inventor to rebuild suicide machine in U.S.
Associated Press
Jan. 13, 2003 07:56 AM

SAN DIEGO - A doctor whose prototype suicide machine was seized as he left his native Australia to attend a euthanasia conference says his U.S. supporters will help him rebuild the device.
Dr. Philip Nitschke said that Australian customs agents in Sydney seized his COGen machine Thursday. He had planned to unveil the device, which lets people kill themselves with carbon monoxide, before a national meeting of the Hemlock Society in San Diego.

"They were waiting for me. It's clear," he said. "We'd been quite public about bringing the machine to the U.S. to demonstrate it."

Nitschke, 55, told conference participants Sunday that he intends to challenge the Australian law banning the exportation of any instrument that could be used to assist in suicide. He said another suicide machine would be built in the United States.

Because his invention can be operated single-handedly, it does not break U.S. laws barring assisted suicide, Nitschke said. It consists of a coffee-can-sized canister, an intravenous drip bag and nasal prongs. Chemicals are combined in the canister to produce carbon monoxide, which is then inhaled.

Although it has not been tested, Nitschke estimated it would render a person unconscious within minutes and cause death in 30 minutes to an hour. More than $11,000 was spent to develop the patented device, but Nitschke said he hoped to make it available for free to pro-euthanasia groups.

"It has all the essential elements of being simple, transportable and the patients use it themselves," said Hemlock Society founder Derek Humphry. "This type of machine cuts out the legal risk."

American euthanasia advocate Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who is serving a 10- to 25-year prison sentence for the 1998 death by injection of a Lou Gehrig's disease patient, also used a device that employed carbon monoxide. Kevorkian's machine relied on a compressed version of the toxic gas, which is hard to obtain and transport. Nitschke said his machine produces carbon monoxide itself.

An earlier system Nitschke developed featured a syringe that administered a lethal injection at the push of a button on a laptop computer. It was used by four terminally ill people between July 1996 and March 1997, when a short-lived law permitted voluntary euthanasia in Australia's Northern Territory.

Nitschke's appearance drew protests from the California Life Coalition, which called his invention ghoulish.

"Instead of helping people overcome their problems, he can only help to murder them," coalition director Cheryl Sullenger said in a statement.

But Nitschke said he was providing a humane alternative. He predicted that as the Baby Boom generation ages, more people will want to control how and when they die.

"It's pretty ghoulish when people shoot themselves with shotguns and hang themselves," he said.http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0113DeathMachine-ON.html

 

[Blackhawk]

I guess plastic vegetable bags from the produce department are not exotic enough...?

 

[2nd Amendment]

"It's pretty ghoulish when people shoot themselves with shotguns and hang themselves,"

But it's not "ghoulish" to plug oneself into a bizarre contraption and punch out?

 

[nualle]

Is your problem with the thing that it's bizarre (i.e., unfamiliar) or does it lie deeper? Some of us believe in the individual's right to choose suicide. We see positive value in a method that minimizes secondary trauma to those who have to (find and) see to the disposition of the body.

 

[Jim March]

Well let me offer a contrary view.

I have a friend who's also a gunnie, and he has a friend who died of ALS (Lou Gherig's disease) about a week ago. By the time he died, he couldn't move, eat or breath and he was in constant pain, much worse off than wazzizname, the physisist in England. This guy my friend knew had "fast onset" ALS versus the much slower (rarer) kind.

Anyways, about two months ago my friend was over to visit this guy. And he very weakly, very slowly pointed one finger at his head and made wimpering noises. Took a bit, but my friend figured out that the guy was asking for a bullet to the head.

Really gut-wrenching stuff. Remember this the next time you condemn the idea of a "suicide machine".

 

[ArmsAkimber]

In the situation you describe, Jim, it appears a suicide machine would have been little help, as the poor man was rendered helpless by his condition. An assisted suicide (read "manslaughter" or "murder") machine would be in order.

I was told by a doctor friend of mine of a case involving a man who experienced extensive burns all over his body. His prognosis was bleak and he was in terrible pain. He begged his caregivers time and time again to "help" him die. He had every reason to believe he was going to die, and he simply wanted to end his life faster. Those caring for him refused. He recovered, albeit permanently scarred and handicapped (to a degree I cannot recall). He now lectures against "assisted suicide" and in his speeches rhetorically thanks the doctors and nurses who didn't give up on him.

I hope anyone who sells or makes available to a person a suicide machine (no need for quotes, it is what it is), knowing that person's intention is to use it for its intended purpose; should be treated the same way a gun dealer should be treated if he sells a gun to a customer who clearly states he plans to commit suicide with it. I see no difference.

While I think making suicide illegal is patently stupid, and I believe that an individual has the right to end his own life at will, giving others the legal ability to "help" is a slippery slope I hope we don't begin sliding down.

I'm glad the horrible thing was seized, and I am glad Kevorkian is cooling his heels in a (hopefully) cold cell.

 

[stockpile]

no problems with the machine but it seems like a more complex verision of sitting in a running car in the garage.



Stockpile.

 

[Oleg Volk]

The ethics come down to the question "Who owns you?" If you believe that a higher power (god, government, family, etc.) own you, then suicide would be unethical. If you own your own life, then it would be entirely ethical. In either case, the decision should be yours.

Similarly, I've often wondered about people who would choose suicide over death in combat (Masada, Japanese in WW2, etc.) --- perhaps they did not want to go through the trauma of combat when it would change nothing in the end.

Personally, I do not see much of a difference between killing someone who is sane and asking to be killed, providing the tools for suicide or just leaving with the knowledge that a friend will either suffer needlessly or suicide without your help (perhaps in an "accident"). The legal safeguards are useful to prevent murder disguised as an assisted suicide, but criminalizing suicide and assistance in that process in general seem excessive. One of the side effects is needless suffering (eps. since painkillers are heavily regulated and sometimes unavailable). The other side effect is the suicide by cop.

 

[PATH]

We don't allow animals to suffer needlessly but we will allow people to suffer needlessly. Why should someone in the agony of end stage cancer be made to prolong his/her suffering.

I believe in more morphine until breathing and the heart stop. If you can't cure someone then give them a choice if they want it.
I have already made provisions to have friends enable me to terminate in case of emergency. Hell you'd all do it for an animal so why not a person?

 

[romulus]

Because we're not beasts. We kill those with little compunction of heart for food or when they are simply pests as well as to put them out of their misery.

Techniques for treatment of pain are advancing by leaps and bounds. Legal assisted suicide will put an end to research on and application of effective pain treatment - remember Kevorkian's refusing an offer of assistance from two Texas pain specialists in the case of one of his victims, he went ahead with the execution anyway.

 

[nualle]

Legal assisted suicide will put an end to research on and application of effective pain treatment...

I disagree. It will reduce the pool of potential test subjects, but it will not reduce it to negligibility.

Assisted suicide presupposes that a person of sound mind decides upon suicide and acts upon that decision so far as to request it. The same person could just as easily decide to serve science as a guinea pig for a new pain treatments. The essential difference is the choice.