Hundreds of foreigners choose every year to end their life in an ordinary building nestled by the railroad tracks, just east of Zurich.
Many who end their life are terminally ill, but some are young and physically healthy except for a permanent disability or severe, debilitating mental disorder.
Switzerland is known around the world as a somewhat easy place for foreigners to end their lives. More than 100 Germans, Britons, French, Americans and others come to this small commuter town each year to lie down on a bed in an industrial park building and drink a lethal dose of barbiturates.
The decades old practice was revealed last week, when a British TV special showed Craig Ewert, a 59-year-old Chicago man with a severe form of motor neuron disease, killing himself in Switzerland two years ago.
Other places have recently passed laws that allow the terminally ill to find a doctor who can hasten their death, those include the Netherlands, Belgium, and Oregon and Washington in the United States.
Switzerland is the only place that permits foreigners to come and kill themselves, placing few restrictions on the how, when and why. The controversial law was passed in 1942.
Doctors have the ability to prescribe a veterinary drug for that very purpose, and five minutes after drinking a glass of water laced with sodium pentobarbital, they fall asleep.
Death follows about half an hour later.
Dignitas is one of several Swiss organizations dedicated to the cause. It was founded by Ludwig A. Minelli, who built the group into a nonprofit operation.
Critics say Switzerland is turning into a black hole of so-called “suicide tourism.”
Dr. Bertrand Kiefer, editor-in-chief of the Revue Medicale Suisse, a medical journal, says he’s worried some people are killing themselves not to escape intolerable suffering but to relieve family or society of a burden.
Dignitas says the only criteria for assisting a suicide are that the person “suffers from an illness that inevitably leads to death, or from an unacceptable disability, and wants to end their life and suffering voluntarily.”
Kiefer also says assisted-groups lack financial transparency.
Dignitas says it charges 10,000 Swiss francs ($8,300) for its services, which include taking care of legal formalities and arranging consultations with a doctor who will prescribe the deadly medicine.
“We need to ensure that there’s no economic incentive for these organizations to encourage people to commit suicide,” says Kiefer.
Officials in the canton of Zurich threatened to restrict services by forcing doctors to see each patient more than once, and by limiting the supply of sodium pentobarbital.
In return, many groups hoarded the drug and Dignitas was criticized after it was reported they were suffocating people with plastic bags and helium.
The bag is placed over the head of a person who then opens a flow of helium, falls into a coma and dies “in 99.9 percent of cases,” according to Derek Humphry, a British author who wrote the suicide manual “Final Exit.”
The canton of Zurich investigated the helium process and determined this year that the group had done nothing illegal.
However, Minelli was transformed into a tabloid hate figure, because the use of helium reminded many Swiss of Nazi gas chambers.
Like most Swiss, the townspeople support the principle of assisted suicide, but “the helium was the last straw,” says Manfred Milz, who is evicting Dignitas from his building.
Dignitas claims demand continues to grow. Its membership has reached nearly 6,000 over the past decade. Some are supporters of its work; others want to die with its help when the time comes.
Bernard Sutter, a spokesman for Exit, Switzerland’s largest assisted-suicide group, which only helps Swiss residents, says other countries should change their laws.
“We can’t solve all the problems of Germany, England, France and Italy,” he said.
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