Dr Philip Nitschke, dubbed “the Elon Musk of assisted suicide”, recently held a workshop in Dublin where he taught attendees the “practical steps for a DIY death”.
Nicknamed “Dr Death”, the inventor and former physician has promoted various means of suicide in recent years, including a “suicide coffin” that starves its occupants of oxygen.
Dr Death’s Dublin workshop demonstrated another method of “DIY death”, showing attendees how to acquire fatal poisons to kill themselves, admitting that if he gave them the substance he’d likely end up in jail.
Nevertheless, Dr Death holds himself responsible for the rise in suicides around the world and boasts that he’s watched many such suicides live-streamed online. He also says he’s working on a suicide implant for people with dementia.
“We understand life is a precious gift”, he has stated previously, “but what sort of gift is it if you can’t give it away?”
Dr Death recently wrote to Liam McArthur – the MSP campaigning to legalise assisted suicide in Scotland – to advocate his suicide coffin, which, he claims, results in “a peaceful, even euphoric death”.
A “disastrous slide towards death”
SPUC’s Michael Robinson, Executive Director (Public Affairs and Legal Services), said: “Dr Death is not alone in proudly boasting about how many deaths his advocacy is responsible for. In 2020, a doctor in Canada said she’d assisted in the suicides of 400 people, in some cases for reasons of ‘loneliness and poverty’.
“This disturbing trend in the West, demonstrated most clearly in Canada, now threatens the UK where advocates are campaigning hard to legalise assisted suicide.
“Already in Canada, tens of thousands of people have been killed through assisted suicide, and the rate of state-sanctioned deaths increase by roughly a third every year – and stories have even emerged of veterans suffering from PTSD being recommended suicide.
“This disastrous slide towards death as a solution to the challenges of life cannot be allowed to happen in the UK. The public must be informed about the consequences of such irresponsible and dangerous legislation.
“Rather than revelling in death, society should make every effort to support vulnerable people rather than ushering them into an early grave.”
A Canadian horror story – over 13,000 suicides in 2022
There were 13,241 state-sanctioned assisted suicides in Canada in 2022, surging by almost a third yet again, and the province of Quebec saw a 54% rise. Following several potentially wrongful suicides, an official memo warned doctors to respect the limits of the law on assisted suicide.
Even the noted medical journal The Lancet commented on the alarming rise.
Last week, SPUC reported on the story of a Canadian cancer patient who was granted assisted suicide within two days after waiting weeks to get through a chemotherapy backlog.
His widow later stated: “I think I could still have my Dan if he had gotten treatment sooner. If we had more money, we could have gone to the States. But we’re just regular people.”