There’s a new twist in the ongoing saga involving Dignitas, the Swiss group that caters to old, ill and disabled tourists wanting to kill themselves.
As we reported earlier, Dignitas has run into problems with the NIMBY (“not in my back yard) phenomenon. The group was kicked out of two apartments as a result of complaints by neighbors who apparently objected to the physical reality of corpses and body bags in their making regular appearances in their living space.
Well, the group’s troubles continue to mount. According to press reports (more below, with link), the Association of Zurich Hoteliers has officially barred the group from using hotels rooms for its “services.”
So they’ve worked out a new solution, which will be familiar to those of us who followed Jack Kevorkian’s killing career – “mobile suicide services.”
There are several stories running around about this latest development, but this one from the UK Telegraph is one of the most detailed:
A controversial Swiss suicide charity is now helping people to die in car parks after being forced out of its premises by local residents.
Two German men aged 50 and 65 have already used the “death on wheels” service of the Dignitas charity, which handed them a lethal cocktail of drugs in a car park near Zurich last week.
The deaths were only reported yesterday, with a local prosecutor confirming that both men drove to the woodland parking area in the Maur suburb and took an overdose of barbiturates in their cars.
This isn’t exactly a new idea. This was Jack Kevorkian’s way of doing business for quite some time. It’s interesting that a lot of people found the “esthetics” of what he was doing much more objectionable than his actual facilitation of people’s suicides (news articles such as the one linked above often made mention of the extreme age and poor condition of his van).
Looks like Dignitas is getting some of that same reaction:
Josef Hecken, the justice minister in the German region of Saarland, said Dignitas’s methods were “outrageous”, while the Swiss Social Democrat MP, Dieter Wiefelspütz, said: “We need to do everything we can to stop this group from operating. It is degrading.” (according to the article, over half of Dignitas clients come from Germany)
It’s clear that Dignitas has become a huge source of embarrassment to the Swiss. What is less clear is what – if anything – they are willing to do about it. –Stephen Drake