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.

Assisted Suicide Eviction

Can you blame them? The housing association where the Swiss assisted suicide organization Dignitas maintains a death apartment, has evicted the group because other residents are sick of the suicide parade.

It is a familiar sight for the residents of Zurich's Getrud Strasse number 84. Three or four times a week, during office hours, an ambulance pulls up in front of the unassuming dirty grey housing block. A body is carried out of the building in a charcoal-coloured sack. Often the tenants meet it propped up vertically in the lift on the way down, or in the narrow corridor, before it is placed in the vehicle and driven away.

What a surrealistic scene--perhaps even more than Kevorkian helping extinguish people in his rusty van.

Yet as awful as that depiction is, the reaction of one of the tenents is, to me, even more disturbing:

Gloria Sonny, 55, who has lived in the building for six years - or, as she calls it, "under the same roof as death"--headed a petition calling for Dignitas to go. "I'm not against assisted suicide," she said, "but this is a place where people live. It's the wrong place to help people die. I don't see why I should pay with the quality of my life because Switzerland deals with the topic in a more liberal way than other countries."

She said the building smelt of death and that she suffered nightmares that she would be forced into one of the "death flats" against her will and made to drink a fatal cocktail.

How twisted we have become: Sure, go ahead and help kill them, just don't make me have to look. For someone my age, who remembers society's once unequivocal support for suicide prevention rather than facilitation, this whole story is almost unimaginable. But the times they are a changing, as Dylan had it, and not necessarily for the better. Unless we reject the terminal nonjudmentalism--illustrated so vividly by Ms. Sonny--that is increasingly permeating society, one day cities might begin issuing zoning permits for euthanasia clinics--think E.G. Robinson going "home" in Soylent Green. After all, it isn't the killing that is wrong: It is the poor aesthetics.