Swiss Government Says Assisted Suicide Capsule Does Not Meet Safety Standards
I mean… if you want the most mirth-inducing headline of the day, this is almost certainly it, but the Swiss government isn’t laughing:
Killing yourself is not known to be a particularly safe or well-regulated practice but in Switzerland, it’s legal, under certain conditions. Unfortunately, people who want to end their lives via medically-induced suicide near the snowy Alps have to do it the right way. Creators of a euthanasia vessel learned that the hard way this week when the first known use of the device ended in multiple arrests and claims from government officials that it had violated government safety regulations.
The Sarco pod—a 3D-printed capsule that releases nitrous gas at the click of a button—is the creation of a group calling itself The Last Resort. The group, which claims to be made up of “a small international collective of human rights advocates (with a law, science, medicine and healthcare background),” says its mission is to “diversify (and improve) the assisted dying process in Switzerland.” The Sarco pod is designed to put its occupant to sleep in a matter of seconds via the nitrous gas. The gas then swiftly lowers the oxygen levels in the pod until the person expires. The whole process is said to take a matter of minutes. […]
The Sarco pod was originally given legal approval for public use in Switzerland way back in 2021, but since then controversy has dogged the device. It was used for the first time on Monday, when an American woman reportedly ended her own life in a rural area near the German border. The Last Resort announced the death in a short post on its website, and Nitschke said via social media that the woman’s death had been “an idyllic, peaceful death in a Swiss forest.”
While that may be true, the first use of the device seems to have been a total disaster for everybody else involved. As of Monday, multiple people have been arrested in connection to the woman’s death The Guardian reports, noting that a local prosecutor’s office had “opened an investigation into suspected incitement and aiding and abetting of suicide.” It isn’t yet totally clear who was arrested.
Slightly puzzled by the aiding and abetting bit if suicide is legal in die Schweiz, unless doing it this particular way is the problem. I don’t know. The safety regulations thing feels a bit odd too; if the whole purpose of the device is that it kills you, I’m not sure how you regulate it to be safe. How do you test if it’s unsafe? (And for that matter, how do you prove it works?) The thing that strikes me, though, is that Phil Nitschke invented this thing in 2017 but it’s taken until now for someone to actually use it. I don’t know what if anything that indicates, other than that people aren’t rushing to use it…
