German Suicide Machine?
Apparently the Germans took it as a point of national honor that the flow of Germans into Switzerland to get help killing themselves has to be reversed! Imagine those upstart Swiss thinking they could be the global capitol of assisted suicide!!! German suicide for the Germans!
Death for hire - suicide machine lets you push final button
One press of a button and you can end your life with a swift injection of potassium chloride. That is the boast of Roger Kusch, once one of Germany's most promising conservative politicians and now the improbable promoter of a mercy-killing machine.
If the “Perfusor”, designed to sidestep strict laws banning assisted suicide, goes into production then Germany rather than Switzerland could soon become the destination of choice for those seeking to kill themselves.
Some 700 patients, including several terminally ill Britons, have travelled to Zurich where the self-help organisation Dignitas arranges suicide. Assisted suicide has been legal in Switzerland since 1942 providing a doctor has been consulted and the patient is aware of the consequences of his decision.
But Dignitas has come under fire for experimenting with suicide techniques. According to video evidence presented to the Zurich state prosecutor, patients have been placing plastic bags over their heads and feeding in helium gas.
In four cases being studied by the prosecutor, one patient died after nine minutes and three after between 25 and 50 minutes. “The bodies twitched for several minutes,” Andreas Brunner, the prosecutor, said. Swiss papers compared the gassing method to the techniques used in the Third Reich.
Dignitas argued that gassing was faster than poisonous injection because helium did not require a prescription, eliminating the cost and the time involved in finding a sympathetic doctor.
(read the rest)
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posted by Dumb Ox at 3/31/2008
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