A controversial euthanasia campaigner nicknamed Dr Death is to run suicide seminars in Australia where people will learn how to make their own "death tablet". Dr Philip Nitschke says that the so-called Peanut Pill - named after a slang term for barbiturates - will be "more reliable and far more effective" than other methods of suicide. He claims that the tablet will be more advanced than his previous Peaceful Pill, made from modified alcohol and nicotine.
Dr Nitschke, 57, the director of Exit International. Australia's voluntary euthanasia organisation, said that 30 of his 3,000 members will meet at a secret location in the Australian outback to work on the deadly recipe later this year. At the end of the weekend workshop, each will leave with a 10g "death pill'' that they have made themselves. Excess chemical material will be destroyed and their temporary laboratory dismantled.
Assisting a suicide is a crime in all Australian states, carrying a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Dr Nitschke, however, said: "Suicide is legal so long as people design and make their own devices. They are not breaking the law."
The doctor has previously invented a "death machine'' made from common household objects, which delivered fatal amounts of carbon monoxide.
In 2002, he also unveiled the Exit Bag - a specially-designed plastic bag with an elasticated opening. It created an airtight seal around the neck to suffocate users, who would have taken a sleeping pill.
Every year, about 2,400 Australians commit suicide and Dr Nitschke claims that most resort to hanging themselves rather than a slow death. "Information should be made available so that these people do not suffer inhumanely," he said. The Exit Bag he said, was "a bit grim but simple". He said: "Helium inside the bag sped up the process but visually it was very disturbing. Nobody comes along and says, 'I want to put a plastic bag over my head.' "
Caren Jenning, 72, is among those anticipating a "peaceful and dignified departure'' after using Dr Nitschke's lethal Death Tablet recipe. "I should have the right to die when and how I want to," said Miss Jennings, from Sydney, who is in remission after undergoing two operations for breast cancer. She said: "I just want something simple that I can put in the cupboard and forget about until the time is right. I saw my mother suffer horribly. I'm not going to go the same way."
Dr Nitschke's plans, however, were attacked by pro-life campaigners. Mary Joseph, a spokesman for the Australian Federation of Right to Life Associations, said: "Producing a DIY suicide pill is grossly irresponsible and would put suicidal people at risk." David Cotton, a spokesman for Right to Life in New South Wales, said: "If Dr Nitschke is to be stopped before the corpses pile up any higher, we may need an amendment to the criminal law."
The controversy in Australia over both euthanasia and so-called mercy killings has raged since the mid-1990s, when for a brief period, doctor-assisted deaths were legalised in the Northern Territory. Dr Nitschke helped four people to die before the federal government, led by the prime minister, John Howard, revoked the measure after a 38-33 vote in the senate. The Howard government is planning to re-introduce a bill that makes it a crime to possess any type of information about euthanasia regardless of whether it is acted upon. The bill would make it illegal to use the internet to view, copy, download or transmit "suicide promotion material," incurring fines of up to £48,000. "This means all manner of end-of-life choices information will shortly be prohibited in Australia," said Dr Nitschke. It would "put Australia back into the dark ages."
Australia's "Dr Death" yesterday started recruiting the first of four New Zealand voluntary euthanasia advocates who will next year learn how to make a life-ending potion. But the one Auckland man who would most like to attend the potion workshop, Voluntary Euthanasia Society spokesman Jack Jones, said he would probably not attend for fear of alerting authorities and ruining it for others.
The workshop is to be held in Australia in May or June by Dr Philip Nitschke, the man dubbed Dr Death for his pro-euthanasia stance. In Auckland yesterday he met about 10 people, including a 90-year-old man and a disabled woman, to discuss his workshop. Speaking with the Herald before the closed-door meeting, Dr Nitschke said he would talk to the group about euthanasia, where the law stood, what would happen at his workshops and the risks of getting the potion back into New Zealand.
"It's important that I get to talk to everyone who is interested in participating in these [workshops] so they know exactly what they are getting themselves into." Dr Nitschke said he would show 30 mostly healthy people, including four New Zealanders, how to create a "peaceful pill" which would allow them to end their lives - when they were ready. The pill - actually a brownish barbiturate-based potion - is strong tasting and can kill within an hour, or minutes if taken with alcohol.
Right to Life spokesman Ken Orr said he was concerned to hear Dr Nitschke was promoting something which sounded like Nembutal, a popular euthanasia drug which cannot be legally prescribed by doctors.
However, voluntary euthanasia campaigner Jack Jones, who helped Dr Nitschke bring a plastic "suicide bag" into New Zealand last year, said the pill was a variation on Nembutal. He said it gave the elderly and suffering a more humane way to die, rather than "jumping off a bridge of slitting their throats".
Mr Jones said he would not attend the workshop in case his trip to Australia alerted authorities to the exact time and possibly the location of the weekend "rural retreat". Dr Nitschke, who founded the voluntary euthanasia lobby group Exit Australia, said he hoped to hold a similar workshop in New Zealand if the Australian one went well. He is a strong supporter of New Plymouth woman Lesley Martin, who was this week released from prison halfway through a jail term for trying to murder her ill mother.
The longer-established Voluntary Euthanasia Society has no plans to join forces with the Lesley Martin-led lobby group Exit New Zealand. Martin, convicted in March of attempting to murder her terminally ill mother, has been released from prison and vows to continue fighting for her cause.
Ms Martin says she became fed up with the complacency of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, which has been running for 25 years and she is now involved with a similar group, Exit New Zealand. She says people join the Voluntary Euthanasia Society with the hope that they will push for right to die legislation, but she claims that last year when the Death with Dignity Bill was being debated, the society was nowhere to be seen.
The Voluntary Euthanasia Society says its membership is conservative and does not believe stunts are the best means of achieving a law change. President Jack Jones says the society set up 25 years ago, has just merged its Wellington and Auckland branches and plans to set up more branches. He says on that basis the society would hardly merge with the Wanganui and New Plymouth-based Exit, but would consider it becoming a branch.
Exit New Zealand is talking to high profile Australian campaigner Dr Philip Nitschke about aligning itself more closely with his group Exit International.
Exit New Zealand has 200 members while the Voluntary Euthanasia Society has 1,500.
IF they judge the time to die has come, Bill and Olive Mettyear want the right to choose to do so peacefully. They would like medical assistance to help them but, as that is illegal, they want to know how they can do it themselves – painlessly and quickly. This week they were among about 30 people who attended workshops by voluntary euthanasia campaigner Dr Philip Nitschke, a founder and director of the group EXIT Australia.
The Adelaide couple have been married 23 years and involved in voluntary euthanasia groups for several years. Both well and active, they say they do not want to suffer if they become ill and their quality of life deteriorates.
"It seems to me that this end of life is handled very badly," Mr Mettyear, 75, said. "I would like the ability to say `this is enough and I would like to die'. I'd like the option to say my life is over and I don't want it prolonged."
The Mettyears attended Dr Nitschke's meeting where he talked about the legal implications associated with assisted suicide. Dr Nitschke also is in Adelaide to select people to attend a workshop in NSW next year.
They will make their own "peaceful pill', a barbiturate suicide drink – a prospect that has outraged right to life groups.
President of Right To Life Australia Margaret Tighe has called on police and state authorities to stop Dr Nitschke's NSW workshop.
"God help those lonely people who may attend, go home armed with the Nitschke poison and, in a moment of depression, swallow it and end their lives," Mrs Tighe said.
Mrs Mettyear, 78, defended Dr Nitschke and the drink. "I think it (the drink) is very good, provided it is given only to people who are sensible and if they have reached a point where there is no quality of life," she said. "I can see there are pitfalls but the people against it don't have to avail themselves of it."
Dr Nitschke said the drink was the result of a survey of around 1000 of EXIT Australia's members. They said they wanted "something simple" to use to suicide. "Ninety per cent of our members said they want something simple, rather than things that involve paraphernalia like bags," Dr Nitschke said.
EUTHANASIA advocate Philip Nitschke is in Adelaide this week to pick South Australians to participate in a workshop where they would manufacture a peaceful suicide pill. Dr Nitschke said it was anticipated about 30 people would take part in the workshop in a rural location in NSW in April next year. A laboratory will be set up at the workshop to manufacture 10g of barbiturate-based peaceful pill for each participant. More workshops also will be scheduled for later in 2005.
Dr Nitschke said about 12 people in South Australia had already indicated their interest in attending the first workshop. Those wanting to take part must be members of his Exit International right-to-die group and have already attended one of the group's introductory workshops which discuss aspects of the law related to assisted suicide and palliative care.
"Many people leave these introductory workshops wanting more," Dr Nitschke said in a statement. "They want access to the best drugs and the only option available is for them to make the drugs themselves. That is why the manufacturing workshop program was developed."
Dr Nitschke said elderly people were keen to participate in the workshops because they could see no hope for voluntary euthanasia legislation anywhere in Australia
The executive director of the Pharmacy Guild of Australia, Steven Greenwood, has described a proposal by Philip Nitschke for workshops to make euthanasia pills as "sensationalist rubbish".
Dr Nitschke says pharmacists will help a group of pro-euthanasia advocates make "peaceful pills" using over-the-counter drugs early next year at a western New South Wales property.
Mr Greenwood has dismissed the idea. "Like a lot of [what] Dr Nitschke says, it's sensationalist rubbish," he said. "If pharmacists were to help him they would be breaking the law and the guild would ask the pharmacy boards in each state and territory to prosecute them to the full extent of the law.
"The Pharmacy Guild believes in preserving life, not ending it."
Worried that a recent election victory for conservatives will further hamper their efforts to promote and legalize euthanasia, "right-to-die" activists in Australia are moving ahead with a plan to equip people for possible future suicides.
The move comes at a time when the U.S. government is appealing to the Supreme Court in an effort to block doctors in Oregon from helping patients die. Australia's leading proponent of euthanasia, Dr. Philip Nitschke, has been concerned for much of this year about federal government attempts to ban the use of the Internet or telephone help lines to promote suicide.
The Telecommunications Offences Bill would prevent him from using a website hosted in Australia to promote, counsel or incite suicide, or to provide instruction on how to commit suicide. The legislation would also make it difficult for him to continue holding workshops of the type he has been hosting for several years across the country, where participants are given advice on what his organization, Exit Australia, calls "end of life options."
In elections last month, Prime Minister John Howard's coalition increased its representation in the House of Representatives and, crucially, took control of the Senate.
In past years, left-wing parties have held the balance of power in the Senate, using that position to hold up initiatives they opposed by diverting them to committees for further inquiry. One of these parties, the Australian Democrats, made it clear last April that it opposed aspects of the Telecommunications Offences Bill and would seek amendments to it. The legislation lapsed when the election was called, and will need to be reintroduced. Coalition control of the Senate means it will likely pass easily, however.
Nitschke said the move that would "have a very significant effect on our activities" and return Australia to the "dark ages." The new Senate composition takes effect from mid-2005. In the meantime, Nitschke is pressing ahead with plans to hold a weekend gathering next March, where about 30 elderly people will each make a suicide concoction for personal future use.
Exit Australia has developed a formula for a "peaceful pill" - a deadly mixture of ingredients that are readily available from stores. The "do-it-yourself" nature of the planned meeting in an undisclosed rural location in New South Wales state would ensure laws against advocating suicide were not broken. Nitschke has said he also planned to move Exit's website offshore, probably to a server in North America.
The "peaceful pill" is the latest in a string of devices designed by Nitschke, including a "death machine" that facilitates the inhaling of carbon monoxide; customized plastic bags for suffocation; and an apparatus approximating an oxygen tent, designed to pump in lethal gas and enable two people to commit suicide simultaneously.
In earlier years, he helped four patients to die under the world's first euthanasia law, in Australia's Northern Territory, using a contraption linking a computer with a hypodermic needle and lethal barbiturate. Howard's federal government quickly overturned the Northern Territory law in 1997, a move that spurred Nitschke's campaigning to have euthanasia legalized in Australia. Although his workshops are regularly held and some of his patients - including healthy people - have taken their own lives, his lobbying for legislative change has been unsuccessful.
David Cotton of New South Wales Right to Life said Wednesday that Nitschke's latest initiative sent the wrong message to a society that was focusing efforts on preventing suicide. Australia has one of the world's highest rates of teen suicide.
"If it's a pill to kill for the elderly, how old will they have to be to be elderly?" he asked. "What about teenagers? What about somebody who's not elderly?" Cotton voiced some frustration about Nitschke, whom he said had been "sailing close to the wind" legally for years. He expressed the hope that the legislation banning use of the Internet and phones to promote euthanasia would be passed, and prove effective.
In the U.S., Oregon is the only state to permit physician-assisted suicide, and more than 170 people have used the "Death with Dignity Act" since 1998 to kill themselves.
The Justice Department on Tuesday filed a Supreme Court application to block the law.
Earlier, Attorney-General John Ashcroft directed that federal law prohibited the distribution of lethal drugs for the purpose of suicides, regardless of state law. But an appeals court in San Francisco last May ruled Ashcroft's directive unlawful, prompting Tuesday's Supreme Court bid. The administration argues that assisted suicide is not a "legitimate medical purpose." Under the Oregon law, terminally-ill patients may request a lethal dose of drugs after two doctors have agreed that he or she is mentally competent to make the request, and have confirmed the diagnosis.
Euthanasia campaigner Dr. Philip Nitschke said Monday he planned to hold a workshop for 30 elderly Australians to make their own suicide pills. The so-called "peaceful pill" is made from over-the-counter ingredients and euthanasia lobby group, Exit Australia, said the peaceful pill would be the focus of its efforts, reported the Australian Broadcasting Corp, Monday.
Nitschke said Exit's workshop scheduled for next year would occur at a remote location.
"They will each teach themselves, they will each only manufacture for themselves, they won't be making enough to sell to their friends or to give to their wives or husbands," he said. "They will just come together, they will walk home with 10 grams of peaceful pills knowing that they've all done it themselves and that puts it right on the edge of law."
John James of Australia's Right to Life group has voiced concerns about the pill and the proposed peaceful pill workshop.
"I would have thought public health authorities would be wanting to scrutinize this," he said.
Euthanasia campaigners are worried the Coalition's control of the Senate means draft legislation restricting the disbursement of suicide information will be passed without scrutiny. The draft legislation, which lapsed because the Federal election was called, must be reintroduced. It restricts the access, possession, production and transmission of suicide material via the telephone, Internet and workshops. Northern Territory euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke says, if passed, the legislation would put Australia back into the "dark ages".
"With the new composition of the Senate and with no needed Senate review, we expect the bill to go through," he said. "It will have a very significant effect on our activities. It basically means that our membership, our elderly membership, will not be able to get the information they so desperately seek on how they can establish real end-of-life options."