The Man Who Invented a Suicide Pod
He also wants to create an implantable suicide device
For those of you who don’t know, Philip Nitschke is an Australian doctor who is famous for being a strong proponent of assisted suicide. He believes that everyone has a right to take their own life as long as they have decision-making capacity. And his ultimate goal is to demedicalize assisted suicide by removing the necessity of physician approval.
Nitschke has been in the news recently because his suicide pod, the Sarco (short for sarcophagus), was used for the very first time in Switzerland by a woman from the Midwest. The Sarco is a 3D-printable pod that releases nitrogen after being activated from the inside.
I had the opportunity to interview him twice about this subject—once before and once after the Sarco was used. Here are the links:
Overall, I found the conversations to be very interesting. It’s clear that Nitschke has strong beliefs about how assisted suicide should be done.
First, he’s against having a suffering condition, meaning that he doesn’t believe that a patient should have to convince a doctor that they’re suffering intolerably. Rather, he thinks it should be about autonomy, and so he’s against obstacles that prevent a person from exercising that choice.
This is where the Sarco serves its purpose. It’s a way to remove the healthcare provider from the process because it doesn’t require any doctor to write a prescription. And to entirely remove the need for a doctor, he’s planning on creating an AI to determine if a patient has decision-making capacity. Once he does that, assisted suicide will be completely demedicalized.
And second, and this is what I found surprising, he’s troubled that more and more people are choosing euthanasia even though they can take their own lives. He suspects what patients are attempting to do is seek the doctor’s endorsement and include the doctor in the decision-making process. He doesn’t think this is appropriate. He thinks that since it’s not the doctor’s choice, the patient should take full responsibility for the decision by taking the final act. He also made it clear that he doesn’t want to be someone’s executioner if he doesn’t have to.
To me, it sounds like Nitschke has moral reservations about euthanasia. Because if he didn’t have any scruples about it, then why wouldn’t he be willing to participate? Why would it matter, you know? If you want X, and I don’t have any problems with it, and X could be done by you or me, why wouldn’t I perform X?
In the second interview, we discussed his proposal for an implantable suicide device, the purpose of which is to allow a patient to control the timing of their death after they lose decision-making capacity. The context is this. Some people don’t want to continue living after experiencing significant cognitive decline—e.g., due to dementia—but those people will not be able to access assisted suicide at that future point in time because they will lack decision-making capacity at that time. So these patients will be disqualified by their condition.
Nitschke’s proposed solution to this problem is to create some implantable device that will release a lethal toxin at some point in the future if it’s not paused. The idea is that two days (or so) before the device releases its toxin, it’ll vibrate or make a noise. If the patient remembers what that vibration or noise means, then they can pause the release. If they don’t remember, then that’s a sign that the patient has cognitively declined, and so they would die.
I have a number of concerns about the feasibility and reliability of such a device, and Nitschke shares them. He admits that there are significant obstacles. One is that an implantable device can only be so big, and the other is that current devices can only release a drug into a person’s muscle. So, as of now, this device cannot be created successfully.