Suicide pods now legal in Switzerland, providing users with a painless death
Global News
The sarco pods allow users to push a button from the inside, which floods the interior with nitrogen, lowering the oxygen level, killing the user painlessly.
Switzerland is giving the green light to so-called “suicide capsules” — 3-D printed pods that allow people to choose the place where they want to die an assisted death.
The country’s medical review board announced the legalization of the Sarco Suicide Pods this week. They can be operated by the user from the inside.
Dr. Philip Nitschke, the developer of the pods and founder of Exit International, a pro-euthanasia group, told SwissInfo.ch the machines can be “towed anywhere for the death” and one of the most positive features of the capsules is that they can be transported to an “idyllic outdoor setting.”
Currently, assisted suicide in Switzerland means swallowing a capsule filled with a cocktail of controlled substances that puts the person into a deep coma before they die.
But Sarco pods — short for sarcophagus — allow a person to control their death inside the pod by quickly reducing internal oxygen levels. The person intending to end their life is required to answer a set of pre-recorded questions, then press a button that floods the interior with nitrogen. The oxygen level inside is quickly reduced from 21 per cent to one per cent.
After death, the pod can be used as a coffin.
“We want to remove any kind of psychiatric review from the process and allow the individual to control the method themselves,” Nitschke said. “Our aim is to develop an artificial intelligence screening system to establish the person’s mental capacity. Naturally, there is a lot of skepticism, especially on the part of psychiatrists.”
“The benefit for the person who uses it is that they don’t have to get any permission, they don’t need some special doctor to try and get a needle in, and they don’t need to get difficult drugs,” Nitschke said in a Sarco demonstration last year.