Suicide Tourists dying in Switzerland

By Alex Schadenberg

The Dignitas suicide clinic in Switzerland helped to kill 335 suicidal people in the past two years with 85 percent of them being foreigners.

Ludwig Minelli, the director of the Dignitas suicide clinic in Zurich has recently released his statistics on the number of deaths at the Dignitias clinic.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1216810.ece

The Dignitas clinic admits to charging approximately 5000 British pounds (approximately $10,000) to assist the suicide of their clients. One must first pay a membership fee to Dignitas before they will consider assisting a persons suicide. Of course it has nothing to do with money.

Minelli stated that 50 percent of the deaths are German suicide tourists with the British and the French making up the next two most common nationalities to die at the clinic.

Dignitas has been involved with suicides in vans, similar to the acts by Dr. Kevorkian, and they currently employ the plastic bag and helium method. They began the bag and helium method to avoid the need to receive approval from a physician who would write the lethal prescription.

Recently the Swiss court approved a case of assisting a suicide of a person who was chronically depressed and not physically dying.

Previous comments by Wesley
http://www.wesleyjsmith.com/blog/2007/04/dignitas-to-finish-hate-crime-with.html

http://discardedlies.com/entry/?15281_

Doctors in Switzerland have compared the methods used by Dignitas to those that were used by the Nazi’s.

Some say that this is not a fair comparison because the Nazi’s weren’t concerned about the choice of the victim, but since when have depressed and suicidal people freely chose death.

It is imperative that countries support suicide prevention strategies for their most vulnerable citizens whom Minelli and his Dignitas team are preying on.

We must recognize that a caring society protects its vulnerable citizens at their greatest time of need.