Suicide as a Human Right & Sarco Pod Controversies | Philip Nitschke (#17)
Episode Summary
Philip Nitschke, founder of EXIT International and a pioneer in the assisted suicide movement, joins me for an eye-opening conversation about the right to die, the controversies surrounding the Sarco pod, and the ongoing legal challenges he faces. Known as the first doctor to administer a legal, voluntary, lethal injection, Philip reflects on his personal journey and the resistance he has encountered over the years.
Expect to learn about the development of the Sarco pod and its controversial debut in Switzerland, the ongoing investigation by the Swiss federal police, and the broader societal debates on assisted suicide. Philip also discusses The Peaceful Pill Handbook, its role in empowering individuals, and the backlash it has received. This episode dives deep into a topic that challenges personal beliefs, legal frameworks, and societal norms.
Meet Philip Nitschke
Philip Nitschke is an Australian humanist, author, and former physician, renowned for his pioneering work in the right-to-die movement. In 1996, he became the first doctor to administer a legal, voluntary, lethal injection under Australia’s Rights of the Terminally Ill Act, assisting four terminally ill patients before the law was overturned.
As the founder and director of Exit International, Nitschke has been instrumental in advocating for voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide. He co-authored The Peaceful Pill Handbook, a comprehensive guide on end-of-life choices, which has sparked significant debate and faced bans in several countries.
Nitschke’s innovative approach includes the development of the Sarco pod, a 3D-printed device designed to facilitate a peaceful, autonomous end-of-life experience without medical intervention. The Sarco pod has been at the center of recent controversies, particularly following its first use in Switzerland, leading to legal challenges and widespread media attention.
Throughout his career, Nitschke has been a polarizing figure, often referred to in the media as “Dr. Death” or “the Elon Musk of assisted suicide,” reflecting both the groundbreaking and contentious nature of his work.
Currently residing in the Netherlands, Nitschke continues to advocate for end-of-life rights, emphasizing the importance of personal autonomy and the demedicalization of the dying process.
Contact
linkedin.com/in/philip-nitschke-73a2a318
Full Transcript
Mike: [00:00:00] You have been fighting for suicide rights for, must be over 30 years. Why has this been such an important mission for you?
Philip: I got into the area almost accidentally.
It wasn’t something that I’d been concerned about throughout my life. I mean, I’ve been involved in a lot of what I would call social causes and issues all my life, but never end of life choice. I just accidentally happened upon it in a way by being in the wrong, perhaps the right place at the right time or the wrong place at the wrong time.
I happened to be in the Darwin, the Northern Territory, which was my home, when, uh, the head of the government said they were going, he was going to introduce a law which allowed a terminally ill person to get help to die. I thought, great idea. Rolled over and went to sleep, but then I was taken aback totally by the intensity of the opposition that started and I just started practicing in my new job.
That is, I’d gone back and retrained [00:01:00] as a doctor. And so I found my new profession pushing back very strongly against what I thought was quite a wise suggestion. And, uh, I got involved in that way because I was upset by what had happened.
Mike: Where did the desire to fight this right come from for you? What have you seen which has convinced you that this is worth fighting for?
Philip: Well I don’t think actually, people often say, oh did you have, were you with someone who had a really difficult death or did you have some sort of history? Experience in your past, which was driving you towards this issue. And I can say honestly that it wasn’t. I didn’t have that. I didn’t have that experience.
I mean, the thing that annoyed me was what I saw. Uh, and that’s how I got involved was really annoyance. And what I saw is the willingness of my new profession to ride over. What were clearly expressed wishes of the broader public. But there wasn’t really some deep conviction over the issue, although I was pretty clear about what I would want, which is [00:02:00] why I rolled over and went to sleep.
I thought, good idea. I would certainly be wanting to have control if I was a person who satisfied the conditions of that law, that is, terminal illness, just about dead basically, uh, and of sound mind and over 18. Of course, I would want that option and I couldn’t see any reason why anyone else wouldn’t want that option.
And so when the vast majority of the territory’s population said yes, I thought, good, that’s what I think too, obviously, and that’s why I’m really annoyed when the, when this particular group, that is the profession, started to say, yeah, you think you know what you want, but we know what’s best for you.
Mike: You were the first doctor in the world to administer a legal voluntary lethal injection,
what was that like for you personally?
Philip: Well, that was really because that law, which did pass on the 1st of July, 1996. And, and it was the world’s first law. Uh, and so almost by accident, I suppose, because then of course, when the law passed, I was known to be one of the [00:03:00] very, very few doctors who supported it.
And people came my way saying, okay, I want to use this new law. So of course, crunch time came when I found that I had to try and make this law, which wasn’t terribly Well, uh, well written, but I had to try and make it work. The first person that I tried to get through that system was an abject failure. A person who tried to use that legislation rang me up and said, I want to come.
I’ve heard there’s new laws coming in on the 1st of July, 1990. 1997, can I come up and use the law? And I said, uh, talking to him, I could see that he was a person who spoke very, uh, very, um, clearly he didn’t seem to be a person who had any problems. He was dying, he said, of stomach cancer.
He is obviously going through a hard time. I went down the broken hill and talked to him and I could see at 20 meters he was dying. I mean, it wasn’t hard that, that bit wasn’t hard. Uh, and he was very clear. He said, this is a wonderful law. He said, I’m, I’m really pleased that I’m, I’m dying, [00:04:00] but it’s happening right now and I can use the law.
And I said, yeah, I guess you can. Uh, there was no, uh, uh, uh, geographic restrictions. You didn’t have to be a person living in the territory to use that law. So he said he was going to drive from New South Wales from Broken Hill to the territory. I said, what drive? And he said, yeah, he said, I was a taxi driver.
His cab was parked out in there. In the, in the carport of his small cottage in Broken Hill. And I said, it’s a long way, you know, that 3, 000 kilometres across the middle of Australia. Uh, are you going to make it? And he said, well, if I don’t make it, what’s it matter? Uh, I, I like driving. I said, well, there’s a certain sense there.
So I said, yeah, well, if you want to go, go ahead and see how you go. And he did just that. He, he managed to drive the, his cab all that way. Yeah. Came into, came into Darwin to be there on the 1st of July, enactment day. I put him into Darwin, Darwin Hospital, uh, [00:05:00] a very sick man. I’m surprised him, I was surprised he made it actually, but he did make it.
Uh, put him in the hospital and I set out the, uh, the really difficult task was to find another three doctors because that law we went, I was trying to use required four doctors signatures to allow the, uh, support for an assisted suicide to proceed. And I couldn’t get one. I couldn’t find one of the three other necessary doctors.
I had to have a surgeon. I know, because he was dying of stomach cancer, I had to find a specialist in that particular illness. I had to get a surgeon basically. I had to get a palliative care specialist and I had to get a psychiatrist to check mental capacity and I couldn’t get one, not one. I rang every doctor in the territory, begged, pleaded, couldn’t do it.
Uh, I, he was in hospital getting sicker and sicker. I went in after three weeks, I just had to give up. I went in there and told him the news. He looked at me from his bed and he just looked [00:06:00] up and he said, You didn’t do your homework, boy. And I could, it was, uh, he was right. And I felt awful about it.
Um, I mean, I’d, I’d beg these doctors didn’t have to agree with his decision. They simply had to confirm that yes, he was terminally ill. Now, you don’t have to agree is that a person has any right or otherwise to die. You just had to come along, look at him and say, yes, this man’s dying of stomach cancer and the surgeons could have done that.
But when I asked them to do that, pointing out that they didn’t have to agree philosophically or ideologically with his decision to take this step, only confirm the factual reality that he was a man dying of cancer. And they still said, no, no, don’t involve me. Don’t involve me. This is too controversial.
So I got pretty annoyed with them. Anyway, the point was, as, as he pointed out, I didn’t do my homework, boy, and he said, I’m going back to Broken Hill. There’s nothing for me here. And he signed himself out of hospital. Three weeks later, very, very sick man. His [00:07:00] cab was still there. His house had been on the market in Broken Hill, but it hadn’t sold.
It had been stripped. Climbed back into his cab. I said, were you going to drive back? And he said, yeah. So I knew, I knew the answer if I challenged that. So I said, okay. And he said, Oh, and he actually surprising surprised everyone. He actually made it. Um, he fell out. He got out trying to refuel at Coober Pedy halfway in the middle of the Australian desert and fell over and was too weak to get up and passing truck driver, picked him up off the ground and put him back behind the, behind the steering wheel, filled up the car and off he drove.
I flew down to Broken Hill and we bought him a knife and fork and cup and saucer and plate and the mattress thing. And he camped in his own stripped house until I put him into Broken Hill Base Hospital three weeks later, and he died in all the ways he didn’t want to die. I mean, it was a complete failure.
In fact, the head of the College of Physicians in Australia rang me up and said, you got your law, but it’s never going to work. I mean, they were gloating over the fact that they had [00:08:00] succeeded in frustrating this person’s plan and showing they felt that the world was not going to have this law, and certainly the Northern Territory of Australia was not going to have it.
And, uh, I basically, uh, thought he was probably, he was probably correct, although I had realized one thing and that was that at the time of his trip, it was being reported by Australia, one of Australia, well, Australia’s premier documentary, Four Corners had followed the trip into Darwin, followed his time in the hospital and followed the failure, uh, and documented his, uh, his failure.
And that went to air. In a pretty compelling episode called road to nowhere, which sort of summed up his journey and the day after that screen, which was pretty powerful television and the fact was interesting also because it showed for the first time the face of this man as an image rather than me ringing up [00:09:00] doctors and describing him on the phone.
And in fact, the very next day I got rang up by one of the, one of the eminent surgeons in, uh, in Darwin, who I knew relatively well, a chap called John Wardle, uh, rang me up and he said, uh, just seen your patient on television. I said, yeah, well, you could have seen him in real life by walking into the hospital.
And he said, I’ve just seen him. I feel like shit. And I said, you should. And he said, well, look, he said, I, I, he said, all right, he said, if it happens again, let me know. So basically he was letting me know he was breaking ranks with the profession. And so I was pretty pleased. And in fact, when it was only a couple of months later, the next person came along.
And I said, here’s your chance. I rang up water and I said, look, he’s okay. Personally, he actually lived in Darwin, dying, dying of prostate cancer. And I said, here’s your chance. And he said, right. He said, bring him in. So I did. I took in a chap called Bob Dent. Uh, into, uh, into John Wardle’s office and he looked damned degreed he was dying of prostate cancer, signed the [00:10:00] papers, uh, and then I set off out on an equally daunting task of trying to find a psychiatrist and a, uh, and a palliative care doctor, but eventually succeeded.
And, uh, and then on that day in September, that was in fact when, uh, when Bob Dent had a legal lethal voluntary injection, the world’s first. Um, that event took place and, uh, it was pretty significant, uh, and I remember it pretty well. And I think your question was how did it, how did it, uh, feel? Well, it was a difficult day.
Um, I could have just gone around there under the new law and giving him a lethal injection, but I didn’t really want to do that. I, I thought, well, I don’t want to sit there and inject some drug into his vein and have him die at the end of the needle. I thought, well, he can do that. I can build a bit of a device or a machine.
He can press a button. The machine can give him the drugs. I’ve got to be present, but I don’t have to be sitting there in that immediate [00:11:00] personal space. displacing out of that personal space people who could and should have been there. That is the people who he was closest to. I was just in the sense of technician making it work.
And so, uh, this so called machine, the so called deliverance machine, which I built, uh, I was worried that that wouldn’t work, but I took it around there on that Sunday. He said, come around for lunch. His wife said, come around for lunch. Judy sat there for a very, very difficult lunch. Uh, everything you’re about to say, you, um, you run past in your mind.
And if it’s got some future component, you sort of edit it out of your conversation. And I found myself. Almost so edited that I was almost mute. I don’t find anything you can talk about. We ended up watching football on television because we could talk about the immediacy of what was, what was happening on the screen.
I couldn’t eat my sandwich because my mouth was so dry and I didn’t know what was going on. I looked down and my shirt was soaked in sweat. It was embarrassing [00:12:00] and I thought, what’s going on here? It was hot. It was September in Darwin. It wasn’t that hot. And I think, my God, what’s happening here? And then I realized, this is my anxiety.
I was a very anxious person. And the anxiety was over, what if something goes wrong, because I was by myself, and he had to die. I mean, it wasn’t a matter of saying, oh, let’s do it tomorrow. He wanted to die, and I had to make sure it happened, and I was by myself, and I had this machine, which I didn’t, as I said, have the fullest, uh, fullest, uh, belief in, even though they’ve been tested and tested and tested.
But anyway, he said, alright, let’s do it, he said, and walked into the next room, and then Surprisingly, I managed to get a needle straight into a vein, which has come, sometimes can be troubling, but that worked, that was good, connected up the machine, loaded the drugs, handed him the machine, and then went and sat on the other side of the room, and just waited anxiously, because the machine presented him with three questions, which he had to answer positively.
They’re all statements of the [00:13:00] same thing. If you press this button, you will die. Do you want to? Yes. No. Next question. Do you really want to die? Yes. No. And the last one. Do you really, really, really want to die? If you press this button in 15 seconds, you will die. Do you wish to go ahead? Press? Yes. So, um, Bob just pressed those three buttons as fast as the machine presented the questions on the screen and the uh, syringe driver started up and it was 15 second delay before it started, it started with a ticking sound and I just remember those 15 seconds as some of the longest 15 seconds I’ve ever spent, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, and then that first tick and the relief that flooded through my mind, it was like, how did you feel?
The feeling was one of relief because I could see the drug starting to flow along the line. I could see them going down into the, into the intravenous cannula and I just felt immense relief. It had worked. And then I watched as he died, he died very peacefully in his [00:14:00] wife’s arms. Uh, and, uh, yeah, that was a feeling, feeling, feeling of relief.
I sat there for about half an hour. She sat there holding him and then I got up and, uh, confirmed that he had died. And, uh, packed up everything and, uh, packed up the machine and, and went home. Uh, uh, me immensely relieved that, that, that, uh, that happened. Um, I also realized that things were never going to be the same after this and indeed they haven’t been.
Mike: How was his family leading up to this?
Philip: Well she, his wife, he didn’t have children, but his wife, uh, Judy had watched him going through hell with this cancer and, uh, she wasn’t at all surprised. I mean, they had also watched what had happened with Max Bell, the, uh, the taxi driver from Broken Hill and the failure.
And they’d seen the television story. They knew about the new law, of course, and they knew that it hadn’t worked [00:15:00] the first time, but they did see it as a possibility and as Bob had been talking to me for some time about, uh, in that period when the debate was going on, we weren’t sure if we were ever going to get a law, but he had often said to me.
Do you think I would be a person who could use this law? I said, Yeah, of course, you’re a person. You’ve got a terminal disease here. But after, of course, the incident with the drive taxi driver, I had to be a bit, I had to be a bit wary of what I was promising. I didn’t want a second person telling me I hadn’t done my homework.
And, uh, so I was pretty pleased when Wardle broke ranks and because he was kind of a well known and very, uh, eminent, if you like, for better word, surgeon. That sort of gave the courage to other doctors to start saying, all right, maybe, maybe, maybe, and that’s how we finally got the four signatures. But by hell, it was a, it was a hard task.
Three more people used that law. My, my, uh, patients, [00:16:00] they all used the machine and they all died before that law after only eight months, uh, bound to the pressure of the federal government and some powerful forces in politics in Australia. Motivated, I might add, by the Australian Medical Association and the, and the church.
And as several prominent politicians, including the new Prime Minister, John Howard, managed to get rid of the law they didn’t like.
Mike: I do find it really difficult to understand what the reasoning would be, especially in such an extreme situation. So I understand if someone’s a bit younger, they’re not sick.
They’re mentally ill, at least I can understand the reasoning, but if you’re very terminally sick with the support of your immediate family, What do you think is the main reason? Is it just because no one wants to be responsible?
Philip: If, if you ask that question in Australian society now, or even if you asked it, then if you are terminally or suffering, no hope of recovering, do you think you should [00:17:00] have, uh, the option of a le legal help from a doctor to end your life? You’ll get about 95% of people in Australia would say yes to that even then.
Support for the situation of a terminally ill person getting help to die from a doctor is very strong, and so it’s hard to try and explain what the opposite, what, in fact, why it was that people like John Howard and the recently deceased politician Kevin Andrews in Australia, who really put a huge amount of effort into getting rid of that law, what particularly motivated them to do that.
Usually, you come back to religion and a particular person’s particular religious beliefs. I mean, if you believe that life belongs to God, it’s a gift of God’s, that you have no, uh, uh, right to interfere with, and many people do have that belief. I guess you will, under all circumstances, object to the, a piece of legislation that might seemingly provide that choice.
And that was certainly what was motivating some of [00:18:00] the, some of the most active federal politicians who worked tirelessly to get rid of that Northern Territory initiative. I mean, the Territory is not known for doing things, for doing positive initiatives, having positive political initiatives in anything really.
And so to see it for once actually leading the world, which it did, it actually led the world, uh, was quite amazing, and I think something they should, uh, be proud of, and I’m kind of glad now, this is 25 years later, uh, that they are actually finally going to be introducing a sort of a Uh, a display in the museum in Darwin about the fact that, uh, associated with what was this, you know, like world changing event that took place in that, uh, backwater.
Mike: I guess, um, what happens if people are so sure they want to take their own life and, uh, They don’t have the proper means to do it. They find other ways to do it themselves. My grandfather, three years ago, [00:19:00] he was 92 years old and unhappy because his third partner recently died and he’d had enough.
He was found in his house with a plastic bag over his head. And that mustn’t be uncommon, because he was at a point in his life when he thought, you know what, this isn’t it for me, and if there was a way for him to do it, where we could say goodbye and do it properly, I think it would be a wonderful thing.
Philip: Yeah, I mean, I think that, well, that’s That’s true. And I mean, well, there’s a couple of couple of comments about that. I mean, if a person’s not sick, you’re not going to qualify for any of the legislative models around the world, except the one exception, which is Switzerland, because all of the models are medically based and you’ve got to be suffering and having some sort of be able to adjudicating panel, generally doctors, that you’re suffering sufficiently for you to be eligible to make use of the law.
Okay. Now, in your, the situation you described, that may have been the case, but if a person’s well or doesn’t have a terminal illness, that is a person, something that’s expected to take your [00:20:00] life within six months, you’re simply not eligible. And if you went along and said, hey, I want help to die because I feel like I’ve come to the, if you like, a reasonable conclusion to a life and I feel now’s the time I would like to end it.
The answer will be, well, come back when you’re sick. Uh, and that, that comes up quite, uh, commonly. Uh, in fact, it became quite common. It was actually what drew attention to the unique nature of Swiss law when we took 104 year old David Goodall across to, uh, to die in Basel in Switzerland. Um, whereas as a 104 year old, As a retired academic, he’d worked till he was 103 in the University of Western Australia.
Then he decided, Oh, well, I’ve done everything and now I’m retiring. Oh, now’s the time to die. And of course, he finds out that he’s no way he can use any of these laws because he’s not sick. And they said, well, you’re 104, you must be a bit sick. And he said, so I’ve got to say I’m sick to be able to use the law.
And that’s the answer. [00:21:00] Yes. If you say you’re sick, maybe you’ll find someone who’s prepared to believe you and let you use the law. But. You don’t have any legal options. So, but Switzerland was unique. And so he was able to, to take advantage of that. But the other comment I was going to make about that is that people sometimes see, or certainly find out about people making use of plastic bags.
And think this must be pretty dreadful. In fact, it’s actually one of the one that it’s a very sad, very straightforward and reliable and fast, peaceful way for a person to lawfully and their lives because you don’t need any assistance and suicides, not a crime. So it doesn’t, in fact, many people say, Oh, I don’t want to be found looking like that.
And I, and I say, yeah, I can understand that, but that’s more of an aesthetic consideration rather than anything to do with the physiology, the, the actual physiology from the so called plastic bag death is pretty good, pretty compelling. Uh, and, uh, in fact, that’s what, that’s the [00:22:00] basis behind the whole Sarko development, makes use of the same process.
Okay.
Mike: You authored the Peaceful Pill Handbook, also a very controversial book which is now banned in Australia and New Zealand, which provides detailed instructions on various euthanasia methods. Yeah. Why was that book important to write?
Philip: Well after that law was overturned after only eight months, uh, I found myself in Darwin with people still ringing up every day saying, what can I do?
What can I do? What can I do? Now this law’s gone. And as I said, Australia went back into the dark ages legislatively, uh, 20 years after that. I mean, what it meant was that assistance to suicide is a crime. Uh, and it’s a, and it’s a significant crime, not just a trivial crime, and this is quite a, this is quite an anomaly in the law, because suicide is not a crime, but assisting a suicide is a crime, and the penalties for this crime of assistance.
[00:23:00] It’s savage. It’s not just a slap on the wrist. So helping someone do something which is lawful can attract the most savage penalty the state can issue. In the Northern Territory, for example, and Queensland, the penalty for assistance was up to life imprisonment, which is the most savage of penalties the state can issue in Australia.
Uh, well, helping someone do something which is lawful, as Noah, for example, in law, helping do, helping someone do something which is lawful attracts penalty. Helping someone do something which is illegal is, attracts penalty, but not, and so this anomaly really needed to be tackled, but it wasn’t being tackled.
People kept saying, what can I do? And the only answer I said, well, you can suicide. And they say, yeah, okay, uh, how do I do that reliably and peacefully? That was the current criteria. People say, I don’t want to mess it up. What can I do? And so that was with the background to public, uh, writing and publicizing that information in a book form that which could [00:24:00] update because it’s a changing field.
There’s a lot of strategies and options that were available and increasingly are available. So we wanted to keep some way of getting people to know what they could do. lawfully. So by working out what they could do, getting everything themselves, if it meant getting drugs, getting the drugs, if it meant doing this, doing that, doing it themselves, okay, then using it themselves without help, that’s not, that’s not breaking any laws.
But you’ve got to know what you’re doing. And so we published the information. I mean, the reason it was then banned. Well, the claim was, I mean, it was banned. It actually went to the went to the Office of Film and Literature Classification in Australia. And they said, oh, yes, all right. Well, I suppose we can give it a restricted classification, which meant.
As a book, that it could onlycouldn’t be on display, could be sold, though, uh, couldn’t behad to be in a brown paper wrapper or something. I mean, it had some sort of restrictive classification. We thought, all right, that’sthat’s okay. But almost [00:25:00] immediately after getting that restricted classification, the, uh, Attorney General Federal, at the time, Philip Ruddock was his name, appealed the decision of the office, supposedly independent office of film and literature classification, and said that he was using his ministerial powers to overrule the decision of that independent body.
And so he said, I want the book banned, and he got his way. The book was then banned, um, and that followed in, uh, in New Zealand, uh, shortly after, but it’s not banned anywhere else. I mean, most countries, we’re pleased to see, take the idea of book banning fairly seriously. In fact, we almost immediately had to move to America and publish in America, which does take the idea of freedom of speech a little more seriously than clearly Australia did in those, in that time back then.
And since that time we’ve been able to publish in every country except Australia and New Zealand.
Mike: One of the critics that I [00:26:00] noticed about the book that kept coming up, the top critic, is it enables people to take irreversible action where perhaps they wouldn’t otherwise. What would you say to something like that?
Philip: Well, it enables people to take irreversible action. I mean, it enables people to take irreversible action. People can take irreversible action. I mean, if you understand, if you’re a person of sound mind, you understand the permanence of death. And if you do something to end your life, you realize that’s irreversible.
So enabling them to do it, well, I mean, everyone knows about standing in front of trains and jumping out of high buildings. I mean, it’s not as though you need any instruction on that. And that would be an irreversible action, which the book would have no relevance to. What I suppose it does do, though, we would hope is it offers people the option of a peaceful and reliable means of taking irreversible action, that is, to end their life.
Now, people sometimes argue that no one should ever have that ability, and [00:27:00] that would be the same people who would argue that you should never have a law that would allow eternally ill people to get help to die. If you don’t think anyone should ever be able to take that step, and many people do, especially people with strong religious convictions, you should never take that step.
I guess I would argue along those lines that a book that in some ways facilitates that, uh, is not something they would, uh, they would condone and support. There’s this feeling that the information might be misused by the people who have not got sound or are children. And, uh, the same people often argue that if you don’t publish the book, then children won’t be able to misuse the information or the mentally unwell, those without, uh, mental capacity will not be able to misuse the information.
And so it would be safer and better for society if that information was never published. And now I’ve heard that argument a lot. I can understand it. My counter argument to that is [00:28:00] that there are a great number of people who really want that information, people of sound mind, who want to be in control of the time in which they die.
In fact, what we’ve seen, or what I’ve seen over my many years in this issue, is that when elderly people get that information, they stop worrying, because it puts them back in control. And so this idea of getting to your twilight years, realising you might get some horrible disease or worse, waiting until you get a horrible diagnosis.
And saying, Oh my God, Oh my God, what am I going to do now? By having something in the cupboard, which you know that if you simply drink will give you a peaceful death while you sleep is immensely reassuring. And the same people that instead of getting into a panic stricken state, when they get that adverse diagnosis, uh, have comfort.
They know that, okay, I don’t, I don’t care what happens. If it gets bad, I can always take my step back. Open the cupboard. Drink the down. I will die. And that’s, that [00:29:00] gives often the people the strength to keep going. And people then, when they do sometimes get that adverse diagnosis, knowing that’s in the cupboard, live longer than people that are more inclined to precipitously act out of panic and stand in front of a train.
And so this idea of giving people the means prolongs the life of a lot of people. Now the counter, I suppose, is, well, how do you judge prolonging the life of a lot of elderly people by giving them comfort? Against the premature deaths of some younger people, perhaps who have, uh, not got mental capacity.
Uh, are acting precipitously and misusing this information and certainly there’s been plenty of examples of people who do fit that category, have used information out of the book and have died at a young age and left behind some pretty aggrieved, understandably, family members. Who do not like the presence of that book at all, and have spent the rest of their lives on some plan to try and rid [00:30:00] the world of it.
So there’s a sort of a counter going on saying, well, if you try and use some utilitarian principle, I think it’s probably better that overall increase in longevity of the human race. is probably benefited by having that information out there. There will be a few people who die prematurely, but there’ll be a huge number of people who live longer.
So how do you trade those? Or how do you compare those? An issue that I’ve had to think about. And I do think a healthier society is when people have access to information and allowed to make informed choices, rather than this idea that by keeping everyone in the dark with no information, We have a society which just sits around, smiles at the wall and lives forever.
Um, I mean, I’ve had this information for a long time because of my background. I’ve got drugs in the cupboard, which I can go to after the end of this talk and end my life now if I want to. It doesn’t shorten my life, I don’t think. I know it’s there. I feel quite pleased [00:31:00] about it and people never criticized me having it because I was a doctor, but if I find such comfort from having that, I couldn’t see why other people couldn’t and the fact, if I suppose if I did, if I want to do something stupid because I get into a dreadful state because I don’t know, I don’t know what something, something goes wrong, I don’t know, something upsets me.
And I go off and open the cupboard and drink the drugs and drop dead, I will know as I’m doing it, that this is a permanent, irreversible step that I’m now taking, and I guess if I really think that’s what I want to do, so be it. I don’t imagine that’s going to happen, but it might, and I don’t think that the risks of having that stuff in the cupboard should be mitigated.
Uh, I outweigh, uh, the reason why I see it’s a benefit to me.
Mike: Does age play a factor for you? You mentioned earlier that if anyone is of sound mind over the age of 18, then in theory that should be acceptable. I don’t know how many people there would be that would fit the category of someone in their twenties, mentally [00:32:00] sound and wanting to make this decision.
Okay.
Philip: It’s not, no, it’s not too common. I mean, I’ve usually got some pretty compelling reasons. The 20 year olds who do come our way occasionally saying they want to die. And they’ve got some pretty compelling reasons and they would almost always be medical reasons. I mean, we, we come across a group, uh, A growing number of people who actually come along with non medical reasons, so called social reasons for wanting to die.
And my own philosophy changed a lot after that initial acceptance or belief in the, uh, uh, the ideas that motivated that first law to the point now where I believe that any person for whatever reason of sound mind who wants to end their life, be it medical or otherwise, should have that option. Now, amongst the 18 year olds or the 20 year olds who come along with.
Uh, of sound mind who come along with non medical reasons. I can’t, uh, I can’t, um, I don’t know of any action. We haven’t had that experience. We’ve had some people with medical reasons, which some people would say we’re not particularly compelling, [00:33:00] uh, and we’ve generally tended not to associate in those situations.
We have a sort of a It’s not my idea, but our organization has a sort of a self imposed, uh, age limit of 50, saying that if you’re younger than 50, you want to have a very good reason before you contact us. Uh, and that’s to try and eliminate the problems that take place with the, with the sound mind 20 year old who wants to die.
Now, philosophically, I believe that they’ve got every right to. And I. It uses my counter. I mean, I’m not too sure why everyone is so upset about this, because, I mean, we teach 18 year olds how to go off and kill other people when they join armies, and we see that as a good thing for our society, apparently.
Yet, as soon as they start talking about having the option of killing themselves, everyone goes into a panic, as this is some sort of horrendous, horrendous, unthinkable thought. Uh, it seems to me that they’re in some ways flip sides of the same coin, but I’ve agreed to the, uh, wisdom of other people that are [00:34:00] involved in our organization, setting us age limit of 50 so that we can say, well, at the age of 50, you’ve got significant life experience, whatever that means.
Uh, and then I guess if you make that decision for whatever reason, social or otherwise, well, we’ll support it. So that way you can have the book. Now of course, we can have the book, but of course the information out of the book, minutes after we update it, as we do every month, with new information, the information immediately bleeds and is then, uh, spread on the internet and around.
We can’t control the information. Once it’s out there, it’s out there. But I still don’t really, I’m not really convinced by that argument because it will bleed. That you should not produce or release or publish the information to the people you try and see importance to get it to, even though, even though that information might believe and we’ve seen that play out in a very big way [00:35:00] in recent years over the whole sodium nitride issue.
It’s just exploded around the world and it’s causing a lot of grief. And of course, we’re dragged into it and tangled up in the middle of it, uh, and I have to say this over and over, look, we published that information because our members wanted it and they feel comfort from it and I know hundreds of elderly, 80 year olds that have got that substance in their cupboard and living longer because of it.
Uh, and so that’s immediately countered by, yeah, what about the hundreds of teenagers that have died because you published it in the first place and no one knew it was a poison until you did that. And so I’m finding myself having to counter these arguments all the time.
Mike: And sodium nitrate is what is injected, um, and there’s something you can also drink.
Is that right?
Philip: Yeah, you’ll just, it’s a, it’s a simple inorganic salt. It’s been around, well, I’ve been around, been around forever, but I mean, I didn’t know, I didn’t realize it was a poison. Until, until I sort of happened upon the fact that Australia was going to use this, [00:36:00] well, I released a new humane way of killing feral pigs, and I thought that’s interesting, because I mean, I used to work for many years in National Parks and Wildlife in Australia, as I, and I was quite, I was always pouring out horrible chemicals onto animals we didn’t like.
Mainly dingoes, uh, and, uh, always felt, always felt pretty bad about it, uh, but, uh, when I heard, I was over in Europe by that stage, but I heard recently, no, 2017 it was, uh, that, uh, people were upset about the sort of things we were pouring out onto wild pigs to kill them, uh, and then I heard that there was this wonderful new humane poison around, so I thought, well, that’s interesting, that’s a good thing, Uh, but then I also thought, hey, well, if it kills pigs with rather similar metabolism to humans, it might kill humans.
And so I looked into it, and sure enough, then I found out it was a very, very, very simple salt sodium nitride, NaNO2, from my high school inorganic chemistry days. And I thought, wow, is that poison? [00:37:00] And I look into it, yeah, sure enough, it’s poison. So we published it in 2017, and then since that time, it’s just, it just took off.
And it took off partly because of the overly successful control of the premier end of life drug that people wanted and that for years ever since I’ve been involved trying to get for themselves and that’s pentobarbital which is what’s used and people it’s almost impossible to get people have to travel to South America to be able to get it and it’s been made harder and harder and harder to in the 25 years I’ve been doing this I’ve just watched it getting more and more difficult and elderly people desperate for something for the cupboard Just give up.
I say, I can’t get that. It’s just too hard. Uh, and then suddenly this new substance comes along and so people immediately found out, Wow, I can buy this. It cost me about 50. It will keep forever. And it does the job not quite as good as, uh, not quite as good as sodium pentobarbital, but pretty good and it’s humane.
And, uh, so there’s a [00:38:00] lot of happy people now with that stuff in the cupboard. But there’s also a huge number of very unhappy people who have had very, uh, younger members of their families misuse that information. And so the general argument that comes my way is if you’d never mentioned that in your damn book, no one would ever have been using this stuff.
So you’ve got on your hands or your shoulders or your head, the deaths of all these, uh, all these people. And I’ve got to try and say, yeah, but hang on, I’ve got all these thousands of 80 year olds that are living happier and longer lives. Because they’ve got this substance in the cupboard, and there’s no, no one’s going to win that argument.
Mike: And I guess it’s hard to, impossible to measure all of these people that are using your book to end their life their own way. It does make you wonder whether or not they would have, it would have been inevitable that it would have killed themself anyway, just a different way.
Philip: Well, that’s, that’s, that’s another argument too, I mean, okay, so they can’t get the book so they stand in front of the train or they jump out of a window, I mean, there’s no mystery about how to end your life, [00:39:00] uh, without any, uh, particular substance or clever, smart ingredient or difficulty, I mean, people know about those sort of violent options, but I think the idea Even from a harm minimization point of view, I feel comfortable about the idea of telling people what is peaceful, what is a little bit easier than the violent depths that everybody is aware of.
Mike: How do you, how do you define sound of mind when a patient comes to you?
Philip: It’s a difficult one. It’s been worrying, worrying for many, many years about the issue of so called mental capacity, because it’s a funny characteristic. Um, people are assumed to have mental capacity. By functioning in society, it’s a sort of an assumption.
If you’re, if you’re functioning in society, it will be assumed you’ve got mental capacity. And if you do something wrong, that is going to rob a bank. And get dragged in front of the law courts and say, uh, and you will be assumed when you go in front, uh, in front the [00:40:00] jury and the judge that you had mental capacity.
Just an assumption because you function in society. If you try to argue, hang on, I don’t have mental capacity, so I’m not responsible for my actions. You would have to argue pretty hard to find any kind of, uh, any kind of, uh, exemption from your bank rubbing activities. However, if you say, Oh, I want to kill myself, almost immediately people say, Oh, this person can’t have mental capacity.
No one with mental capacity wants to kill themselves. Well, that’s just not true. But I mean, that argument is out there and many people in the medical profession still believe it. That if you’re talking about wanting to die, you must have some mental illness because people that don’t have a mental illness don’t want to die unless they’re suffering horribly from some terminal illness.
So it’s an impossible situation. What psychiatrists have kind of tried to argue is that there’s something called mental capacity, which is not intrinsically linked to mental illness. In other words, you [00:41:00] can have mental capacity and be mentally well, and you can have mental capacity and be mentally sick.
They don’t, they’re not linked together. Absolutely. Although some mental illnesses do take away mental capacity, it’s the ability to function and know what you’re doing. That’s, and they claim that It’s hard to assess that only psychiatrists can do it. So if you sit in front of a psychiatrist for half an hour, they’ll talk to you and then they say, yep, this person’s got mental capacity.
They may not have it tomorrow or yesterday, but they’ve got it now. They know what they’re doing and they sign a piece of paper. And that’s an essential part of gaining eligibility to any of the laws anywhere in the world. And that includes Switzerland. You’ve got to have mental capacity. But, as I said, the current thinking is that the only people who can assess this rather nebulous quality are psychiatrists or doctors in general.
But people say, oh yes, but you’ve got to be specially trained. And the psychiatric profession argues that we are the only people who can really [00:42:00] Make such a distinction between that and many other things that might be masquerading as mental incapacity.
Mike: Now, I wanted to now talk to you a bit more about the Sarco pod
it’s um, something that you’ve developed in assisting suicide and I wanted to sort of understand from you why did you go ahead and develop a pod like this as opposed to sticking with the current chemical method?
Philip: Yeah, well the, the, well partly for that reason I mentioned earlier that the chemical method that everyone agrees is the best.
Very close to it. That is pentobarbital, uh, so called the drug Nembutal is extremely hard to get and it’s been getting progressively harder when I first got involved in this issue of helping people work out their own choices. It was simply a matter of telling people to send an email off to China and they could buy their own Nebutal.
Uh, that was back in the, in the, uh, 1998, 1999, et cetera. But then, step by step, it was made harder and harder. It couldn’t be got, couldn’t be got, couldn’t be got. [00:43:00] Uh, and now it’s got to the stage where it is very, very difficult. You’ve really got to travel to Peru or Bolivia to be able to buy it. Uh, internet is really not an option.
So. That’s getting harder. So people kept saying, I want some way of dying. What can I do? And I said, well, you could have this lot of a holiday in Bolivia. And I said, I can’t go to Bolivia. Can I go that far? Isn’t there something easier? And I say, what? I said, well, there’s a plastic bag. That’s a very fast, very peaceful, very reliable, very legal death.
You don’t have to get some prohibited substance. It works fine, and the common answer I got, certainly not inevitable, but certainly quite common answer was, I don’t like the idea of being found like that, that is, with a plastic bag over my head. And I can kind of see why.
It’s a rather macabre image. And so the idea came, well, all right, what if I try to, what if we can make the plastic bag more acceptable? I was thinking along those lines when I was contacted from the law, by the [00:44:00] lawyers for Tony Nicholson in London, a man who had a thing called locked in syndrome in 2012, I think it was.
His lawyers contacted me and said, look, he wants to suicide, which is legal under British law. But he can’t because he’s locked in syndrome, a bit like a serious motor neurone, he couldn’t move his arms. In fact, the speech was difficult, and that was about the only movement he had was his, from his neck upwards.
And they said, can you build us a machine? Can you build a machine? So I sort of got a, got the other machine, my original deliverance machine, is sitting in the British Museum now. I mean, people sort of knew about it. And the idea was that, uh, maybe you could design something which would allow him through eye movement or voice or something, could activate something, and I said, yeah, probably, maybe we could use gas.
And so the idea was, well, how could I make a plastic bag look attractive and be possibly usable by a seriously disabled person? That’s really what started the idea of trying to, [00:45:00] uh, make less un aesthetic or more aesthetic. The plastic bag method, and I was in Netherlands by that stage, and I set out trying to find a designer who could turn a plastic bag into something that looked good, and that’s how the project started.
Mike: So there’s no, I was a bit surprised when you said that was a very painless way to do it. So there’s no struggle from the body, like asking for oxygen?
Philip: No, you need to have a very sudden drop in oxygen, uh, so what happens with a plastic bag is they put the bag over the top of their head, like around their forehead and fill it up, so they’ve got like a mini environment sitting on their head of pure nitrogen, or can be helium, used to be helium commonly, but they, the evolution of nitrogen was something that we more or less got involved in when helium became harder and harder to get.
Uh, but they both work, but they don’t work because there’s anything special about nitrogen or helium, it’s just that there’s no oxygen. So in that bag of sitting on your head, there’s no oxygen, you suddenly breathe out, get your lungs empty, pull it down. So you’re now in [00:46:00] a mini environment of pure zero oxygen and take a big deep breath.
So you’re filling your lungs up with zero oxygen. There’s a precipitous drop in the level of oxygen in the blood coming up from your heart past your lungs to your brain. That drops off precipitously, so that the blood gets to your brain with no oxygen. Your brain immediately, uh, conserves what little oxygen it’s got, and it does that quickly by you losing consciousness.
And so within two breaths, uh, you lose consciousness. That is faint. You faint, basically. You lose consciousness. Then you’re in a zero, zero oxygen environment, breathing easily. It’s just that there’s no oxygen. This is not the same sort of death you get when you obstruct breathing, like a rope around the neck.
or a pillow pushed into your face. They are horrible deaths, but this is you breathe easily, but there’s no oxygen. So it’s hypoxia. Uh, you got no oxygen, your brains switch, your brains meant you’re unconscious. Uh, and then step by step by [00:47:00] step, different essential activities controlled by your brain are switched down.
And finally your heart stops usually about five or 10 minutes in that zero oxygen environment, but your unconsciousness for the vast majority of it. Look, it says, I’ve seen a lot of people die using, uh, gas. I’ve seen a lot of people die drinking Nebutal or having it injected. And it’s, it’s not much difference really.
People lose consciousness very fast, uh, and, uh, stay that way until they die. With the lack of oxygen, uh, there’s often associated with some, uh, the brain, that way some contractions, some muscle contractions take place. And you see some uncoordinated, uh, movements of the limbs sometime, which can be a bit disconcerting to someone present who doesn’t, or hasn’t realized the person is deeply unconscious.
But, uh, usually when we can explain that, so you might see movement, but don’t think [00:48:00] that’s a person, you know, finding a horrible time and being tortured to death. This is someone who’s having an involuntary series of involuntary muscle activity.
Mike: How do you test the pod as you’re developing it?
Philip: Well, well, the test really was to make sure we could get rapid drops in oxygen level the same as we knew you could get with a plastic bag, which you just pulled straight down.
That’s quick. Uh, and so really the testing involved that, making sure that the generator we’re using, which is quite unusual in the sense we don’t use compressed gas, the generator uses liquid nitrogen, was able to allow that the, uh, the air in the capsule, That is the capsule of the Sarko, which starts off in normal air because you climb in in normal air.
It’s got 21 percent oxygen, which everyone’s got around the world. Um, have that drop to a very, very low level in a very, very short time. And so the testing really made, was to make sure that it did what it needed to do to provide that reliable depth. We got it going pretty [00:49:00] well. I mean, it drops down to about 0. 5 or less percent from 21 percent in less than 30 seconds, which is pretty good going. Using, uh, using the generator we use and it’s a silent process. Uh, so we’re quite pleased with the way it did that and having done that, there’s very little difference getting than from getting into a capsule and pressing the button or to sitting in your, uh, in your lounge chair and pulling down the plastic bag.
Mike: Can you walk me through the events leading up to and just after the first time you used the Sarco Pod?
Philip: I mean, the first time it was used, the woman who wanted to use it had made contact with us amongst a lot of people who have made contact since they knew the device after 10 years and a lot of messing around and cost we’d finally got a working model in position. It was printed in Rotterdam and Netherlands and ready for use, passed all [00:50:00] its testing. Um, this particular woman from America said that she was, uh, she was one of about well over 200 people who said they wanted to use the device. Uh, and not sure, I’m not sure the exact reason why she was a person who was picked.
But I wasn’t actually involved in the selection process. Although I did, as soon as I got suggest, it suggested to me that she may be a person. I had a look at the medical records and I could see she was going through a difficult time. And I said, well, I can see no reason why she can’t. I mean, there’s almost no people who aren’t eligible from any physiological reason for using it.
It works. It always works. If you’re alive, you’re breathing, and if you’re breathing, this works. Uh, so I said, uh, yes, I could see no reason. She was a person who would have to have some assessment of mental capacity. Uh, and so, she traveled across from the U. S. Uh, I couldn’t find a psychiatrist in Switzerland, [00:51:00] which was not surprising because we had had a lot of publicity, which we didn’t, had done everything we could to try and prevent, but it had got into the Swiss media.
Uh, and we couldn’t control it. And it was attracting all sorts of comments and suggestions and there were artist representations of a picture of this device sitting underneath the Matterhorn and suggestions that it was going to be used in each particular canton.
Either way, we were trying to dampen down publicity, but it was impossible. She wasn’t too troubled by that. She came over, but I couldn’t get a psychiatrist. So we had to see a psychiatrist in the Netherlands. Which we, which I knew he was prepared to do it. He wasn’t very happy about it, but he was prepared to do it.
Uh, and then with, uh, armed with her certificate saying she had mental capacity, she traveled on to Switzerland and, uh, and went to the location, which was, uh, one which we’d spent a lot of time trying to find. And we finally had found in, uh, the little known canton of [00:52:00] Schaffhausen, and, uh, there where we, uh, I spent two days installing the device in a very nice location, uh, I met her when she arrived and, uh, showed her the device and how it was working, and then she said thank you very much, and then I left, and she stayed with our, she stayed there with our Swiss director of what we have set up an organization to facilitate the whole process, and that’s The Last Resort.
And, uh, when the time was right for her, she climbed into the device, pulled the lid down, uh, pressed the button almost immediately, much to my surprise, and, uh, died about six minutes later. I was involved in the sense that I was watching, I’d, I’d, uh, left the scene, I was in this stage in Germany, but I’d been contacted by the, by our, uh, The director of the last resort organization, a Swiss resident, Florine Willett, made contact with me and said she’s about to climb into the machine.
It was a camera, the device has cameras which operate, which show [00:53:00] her actions inside and outside of the capsule that showed her. Walking in without assistance, uh, talking to Florian, closing the lid, pressing the button and dying and, uh, staying that way. And certainly for the next half hour, then Florian rang the police, uh, to tell them there’d been a death, which he had, uh, been told from our lawyers.
In Switzerland, comply with Swiss law and, uh, that’s when everything started to go seriously, unexpectedly, uh, I guess wrong at that point because, uh, he, uh, he notified the police, uh, that this person had died and, uh, what turned up was not just, um, the police with our lawyers who were going to come along and make sure he was safe, but what, what, uh, appeared were 20 vehicles full of 40 emergency staff and God knows who else turned up for what seems to have been a very big [00:54:00] event for the forest of Schaffhausen.
Uh, and everything started to go strangely astray. At that stage, they arrested him. They arrested our lawyers, which was totally unheard of. Uh, they arrested a passing photographer from Dutch media who had been there not to have anything to do with the death, but simply to record the, uh, the positioning of the device.
The future reference and we spent the next 10 weeks trying to work out exactly what had happened and we still haven’t got a clear idea of what the actual crime quotation marks is. Uh, rumours were starting to circulate that there were suggested, uh, strangulation may have taken place because the autopsy phone call from the autopsy that took place in Zurich the following day had shown that there were marks on the neck.
So suddenly we, we’re, we’re being said, it was suggestions are being made that maybe she was being strangled. And of course, we had film showing that the capsule hadn’t even been opened. So that was impossible.
Mike: It doesn’t make any sense. [00:55:00]
Philip: No, it makes no sense. Our lawyers couldn’t make sense of it. Florian was languishing in so called pre trial detention, which is something which occurs in other countries, seems to occur a lot in Switzerland, we’ve subsequently found.
It’s an unusual thing. I mean, to be in pre trial detention, you’ve got to be a person who’s very likely to be found guilty of a crime, which is going to warrant incarceration. For example, in a country like the UK, to get pre trial detention, you’ve got to, there’s got to be a lot of evidence you’re a guilty person.
Now, given what evidence they had about Florian, which was nothing, it seemed very surprising to us that they were finding him, uh, that they thought they had evidence to suggest this rather draconian method of putting him in prison before trial and keeping him there, depriving him of his liberty. Uh, it was warranted and of course they used, in fact the Swiss prosecutor used the possibility this might not just be an assisted suicide, this could be a homicide as a [00:56:00] reason for arguing that it was so serious that they had to keep the possible offender incarcerated.
But that’s, as I said, was impossible because we had the film showing it couldn’t have been. And there were also other things. I have, we, I was recording oxygen levels inside the capsule and everything. There’s no possibility that the capsule had been open. In fact, it wasn’t open until 20 cars pulled up three hours later and everyone clambered out and, uh, and surrounded the place.
So I’m still not clear in their own mind, my mind and other members as to exactly what’s driving the. intense opposition to the use of this device in Switzerland. And I’m heartened by a number of comments which are made by eminent people in that country about what’s happening. But I also realize that there’s some powerful forces who seem to be seriously upset by what happened, and I’m still not clear.
What the full reasoning behind this overreaction for one of a better [00:57:00] word is. I mean, in the meantime, I had been advised I was in Budapest talking to a conference there. I got a message from our Swiss lawyers that there could be an arrest warrant out for me, and it might be a very good idea if I went back to the Netherlands where I was a resident.
So driving through the night, I drove quickly back to the Netherlands, and I’ve been told it might be a good idea not to move. Thank you. from this country until we know exactly what’s going on. And in the meantime, the Swiss have decided to go through my office in Harlem, my office in the city here in Harlem, and take away everything they thought was interesting.
So we’ve lost a whole heap of stuff, which is presumably also in Switzerland now. Uh, and, uh, we wait.
Mike: You and also the Exit International have faced significant harassment from governments and law enforcements in a lot of Different places it seems when I was reading about some of the stories that have made the news with your name in [00:58:00] it so it’s It’s not, doesn’t seem to be one particular country, it seems to be a force coming from just about every country in which you’ve, attempted something like this in.
And I guess Switzerland is surprising because they’re already quite established.
Yeah.
It is interesting and also nice to imagine.
Philip: I mean, I think the, uh, the, I mean, this is a cutting edge social issue though. I mean, the trouble I had, uh, back in, uh, in Darwin in 1996, the arguments that were being wheeled out then are not being wheeled out as in, with such intensity now as everyone’s realizing the world is changing.
In those days, it was nowhere else. I mean, a month after the legislation in the Northern Territory was overturned by the federal government of Australia, the first state in America brought in a law, which was Oregon in 1997, late 97, and then other states followed. And now there’s countries all around the world.
And so the world is changing. So what was considered to be such a [00:59:00] dramatic and radical step back then is becoming very, very common. Uh, now the fact that we’re having trouble in Switzerland is a little unusual because as you mentioned, Switzerland has got this reputation. It’s the only country in the world that has a uniquely rights based law, not a medically based law, which I spent a lot of my time in the last decade running around the world telling everybody, if you’re going to bring in a law, don’t copy the mistakes made everywhere else.
Go and have a close look at Switzerland because it’s got a unique and much better piece of legislation than anywhere else. And, uh, I’m a bit surprised about the Swiss overreaction, uh, about this particular issue because we had got a lot of advice, a lot of legal advice that this should fit pretty comfortably into what was the understood and known and well tried and proven use of Swiss assisted suicide legislation, so we still don’t understand fully What’s causing the difficulty [01:00:00] now?
It’s true. I’ve had to have issues in a number of countries, but in some ways, they’re a lot easier to understand. than what’s happened in Switzerland, where I really have no idea, and still don’t, as to what’s driving, driving this. There’s been a few theories around, and I can sort of understand some of them.
I think that probably it is, uh, perhaps a time when Switzerland needs to have a clear, close look at its own legislation, which, as I said, is unique, and no other country in the world is following the Swiss model. I’ve been urging them to but they’re not. They’re all bringing in these medicalized laws and of course there is a pressure from within Switzerland by the Swiss Medical Association that they should have medicalized laws and you shouldn’t be offering assistance to people that aren’t sick.
But, uh, that issue may have to play out, uh, in Swiss society because even though the, the legislation is progressive, Swiss, Swiss culture isn’t overwhelmingly progressive. I mean, we’re looking at progressive. Yeah. Yeah. [01:01:00] I’ve, I, I, I lived for some time there and I, uh, and, uh, for a while when I did come to Europe, uh, and I found there was some interesting, it’s an interesting place.
I, I don’t really love the country, but it’s an interesting place. And for progressive debate on this issue. It’s hard to beat the Netherlands, which is actively debating in their own parliament issues such as tide of life, such as, well, should over a certain age, a person be issued with the drugs to end their life for no reason.
In other words, if you want them, you get them. You don’t have to give a reason. You’ve got to have sound mind. That sort of legislation, which is quite compatible with Swiss law. But it’s being argued about and discussed in society openly here in the Netherlands, uh, with much more willingness to discuss these things than what I’ve seen take place in the last few months as Switzerland confronts the first use of the Sarko tomorrow.
Mike: One of the great things about Switzerland is that if anyone wanted to change it, it’s a very democratic country, so it has to go through a [01:02:00] vote, which is not so common. Are you optimistic about the future of assisted suicide laws? You’re going through a turbulent time at the moment, but you have said that things are evolving.
How does the next 10 years look like to you?
Philip: Well, I’ve just, I mean, I watched with great interest in the last few weeks, the passage of this model in the United Kingdom. And it’s a dreadful law. I’ve never said it, and they’re proudly saying this is the most conservative, safest law in the world, which I guess it is.
It’s almost the most unworkable law I’ve ever seen. You’ve got to have two doctors plus a judge or something to be able to demonstrate eligibility. So they’ve, each country tends to make it more and more and more. inaccessible, presumably to try and dampen down feelings that were making suicide too easy, which fits in fairly comfortably with some quite important movements around the place to try and eliminate the scourge of suicide.
I’m trying to say, well, suicide isn’t always bad. Suicide, rational suicide is probably a good thing, but it’s not a popular argument. And so when you start talking [01:03:00] about tired of life issues and talking about whether people over the age of 70 should be given end of life drugs, just because they want them.
That’s, uh, these are considered to be, uh, confronting issues which cause debate. Now, I think that’s a good thing, and I want to be part of a cutting edge debate. The world is changing. When I first got to the Netherlands in 2000, when I finally made the move here, there The, uh, the ratio of people that supported the idea that anyone over a certain age or the age of 75 should get the drugs was around about 50 50.
Whereas if you said, if you’re terminally ill, should you get help to die to be about 95 percent would say yes, but do you, should you have the drugs just because you want them? If you’re over 75. 50 50 percentage and, uh, that’s slowly rising over the next, uh, 20 years or, you know, that’s since the, since 2000, that’s been slowly rising, but still it’s a long way [01:04:00] short of that number of people who would agree to the ideas of terminally ill person should get drugs.
Mike: Yeah. I guess suicide, it’s not a cause, it’s an effect as well. So it’s not, if you, people are worried about suicide, it’s not a cause. It should be more investigating the cause for why people would like to take their own life to begin with, that’s more of the important thing.
Philip: Yeah, well it’s coming up a bit now, especially in Canada, where I mean, they’ve been challenged and challenged.
Now they’ve got medicalised laws in Canada, but they’ve been challenged a lot in the courts. People are saying, okay, the age is this, why can’t I do it at a younger age? Or it says you’ve got to have a disease, well I’m going to die then, what if I’ve got this disease, am I suffering enough? And those challenges have gone through the courts.
But now, of course, there are people that have been able to get help legally under Canadian law who’ve got conditions which many people see as not being serious enough, like people with, uh, uh, anorexia, anorexia nervosa, or people that have got, but then it comes to people, what about people that are homeless and they’re living such miserable lives in their [01:05:00] homeless Canadian state that they’ve been able to make a case that the suffering brought about by their social deprivation makes them eligible to be able to use assisted services.
I know. Oh my God, oh my God, this is dreadful and it probably is dreadful. And the answer to it is pretty straightforward. Get rid of the numbers of people that are homeless. Give them homes. But of course, the Canadian government has shown no willingness to spend the money would be needed to solve that particular problem.
And so has left the situation now where homeless people have probably got a very compelling case. But if they hanker out long enough, they’ll be sick enough anyway. To be able to be eligible for Canadian law. So should something be, well, yes, I would like to see one should be putting effort into making conditions so that people don’t feel the need to die.
But if we can’t do it, I think we should accept the fact that when a rational person makes that decision, it needs to be respected.
Mike: Well, on that note, Philip, thank [01:06:00] you very much for this conversation. I think the work you’re doing is I think really important. It must be right. It’s very, it’s a very important thing.
I have a personal connection to this, as I mentioned. And. I, uh, I really hope things turn out well for you in the next few months.
Philip: Well, thank you very much. I’ll be watching the situation in Switzerland very closely. It’s what I do every day. Thank you.
Mike: Alright. Have a good one.
Philip: Thank you. Bye.
