I shouldn’t be surprised by anything the mainstream media does today in boosting social outlaws into cultural icons. For example, when Jack Kevorkian was at the top of his deadly game—even offering extracted kidneys from a disabled assisted suicide victim for transplant in a news conference— Time magazine invited him as an honored guest to its gala 75th anniversary party where Tom Cruise ran up to shake his hand.
Now in “Foolproofing Suicide with Euthanasia Test Kits,” Tim e gives the Australian “Dr. Death,” Philip Nitschke, the star treatment. Nitschke has called for the right of troubled teens to get access to suicide pills . He advised an Australian woman named Nancy Crick on how to commit suicide—and in the public advocacy leading up to the deed, told the press she had terminal cancer. After she committed suicide in the presence of assisted suicide advocates—not Nitschke since he didn’t want to risk legal consequences—those in attendance applauded when she took her poison. When Crick’s autopsy showed that she was not terminal, Nitschke shrugged, said he knew it all along . Nitschke also holds how-to-commit-suicide seminars all over the world.
That should rate him unequivocal condemnation. But Time swoons at his newest gambit: an assisted suicide test kit to make sure your poison makes you die if you want to kill yourself. From the story :
Now, in an effort to provide certainty to those contemplating suicide, one of the world’s leading euthanasia advocates plans to sell barbiturate testing kits to confirm that deadly drug cocktails are, in fact, deadly. “People who are seriously ill don’t want to experiment,” says Dr. Philip Nitschke, the physician known as ‘Dr. Death’ for his efforts to legalize euthanasia in his native Australia. “They want to know they have the right concentration of drugs so that if they take them in the suggested way it will provide them with a peaceful death.”The kits, which will debut in Britain in May and retail for $50, include a syringe that allows users to extract half a milliliter of barbiturate solution without breaking the sanitary seal. “Clearly sterility doesn’t matter given that death is the desired outcome,” Nitschke says. But the solution deteriorates slower in a sterile environment, allowing those with painful conditions to “lock it away in the back of the cupboard in case things gets too bad.”
One point of the story is to say that if we legalized assisted suicide, Nitchke’s valuable work wouldn’t be necessary. But that’s pure baloney. Assisted suicide is illegal now and all manner of people are being offed at suicide clinics in Switzerland. We in the U.S. have traveling suicide clinics known as the Final Exit Network , whose members certainly don’t limit their suicide “counseling” to the terminally ill. And if you legalized assisted suicide, say, for the terminally ill, the clinics would still “serve” the despairing disabled and the elderly tired of living. And once the law allowed this cohort to be served, there would still be the mentally ill—who already have a constitutional right in Switzerland to assisted suicide. And also, healthy spouses who want to go with their dying partner.
Oh, Wesley! Now you go too far. No I don’t. It is already being planned
The head of a controversial assisted-suicide group in Switzerland says he will seek legal permission to help a Canadian woman and other healthy people like her kill themselves, raising startling new issues in the emotional debate over euthanasia. Betty Coumbias, an elderly Vancouver resident, has indicated she wants to die alongside her husband, George, who suffers from severe heart disease.
We are in a moral free fall into an abyss which has no bottom. And to borrow a famous quote from Chris Matthews about another matter, the mainstream media is getting a thrill up its collective leg.
