“I see [technology] the most important thing is to democratize the process and destroy the process,” said Nitschke, adding that Sarco does not rely on highly restrictive drugs to operate. “So all those problems are ways to make the process more balanced.”
In Switzerland, where Sarco was implemented, Nitschke’s arguments about access to assisted suicide are not strong at all. Residents and visitors already have access to assisted suicide even if they are not seriously ill. But in the Netherlands adopted by Nitschke, Sarco reflects the ongoing debate about the place of assisted suicide in a medical system that only places people facing unbearable suffering or an incurable condition that can continue. Nitschke also believes that the promise of the machines is to take the burden off the doctor. “I love a person’s right to assisted dying, but I don’t see why they should call me a murderer,” said Nitschke, who received his doctorate in 1989.
Theo Boer, who spent nine years investigating thousands of cases of assisted suicide on behalf of the Dutch government, disagrees that gatekeepers are a bad thing. He says: “We will not leave this to the market, because it is dangerous.” However, he is very sympathetic to Nitschke’s point that doctors should not be burdened with emotional distress in countries where suicide is legal. “Although what he is doing is strange, it contributes to a much-needed discussion in the Netherlands, whether or not we need this heavy involvement of doctors,” said Boer, who is now a professor of health care ethics at Groningen Theological University.
“We cannot burden the doctor with solving all our problems.”
For three decades, Nitschke has been a driving force in the death debate. “He is an instigator,” said professor Michael Cholbi, founder of the International Society for the Philosophy of Death and Dying. Cholbi doubts whether Sarco will ever become mainstream, but believes that Nitschke’s creation, even if it strikes some as unanswerable, raises important questions. He says: “He’s trying to stimulate a perhaps difficult conversation about people’s right to access suicide technologies.
Now 77, Nitschke began exploring the concept of assisted suicide in machines in the 1990s. After Australia’s Northern Territory became the first place in the world to legalize the procedure, Nitschke was preoccupied with the risk that people would see him or his colleagues as “a bad doctor delivering lethal injections to a dead patient who doesn’t know what’s going on,” he says.