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“If you want to die, press this button”: Suicide machine now available in Switzerland

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The slippery slope to normalize euthanasia and suicide descends even further in Switzerland with the availability of a “suicide pod” that promises an easy and “euphoric” death.


A pro-euthanasia organization has created the world’s first suicide pod, allowing users to simply answer a few questions and promptly kill themselves by hypoxia — without a doctor’s supervision.

The Sarco, as the machine is known, was invented by Exit International, an organization founded by Dr. Philip Nitschke to advocate for the right of people to choose when and how they die. Nitschke was the first doctor to legally euthanize a patient in 1996, when euthanasia was briefly legal in Australia.

In 2018 Nitschke wrote an article for the Huffington Post about how he came to invent the Sarco pod. “As my work in this field has matured, my vision has shifted from supporting the idea of a dignified death for the terminally ill (the medical model) to supporting the concept of a good death for any rational adult who has ‘life experience’ (the human rights model),” he explained.

Exit International, he noted, believes sufficient life experience to be 50 years old.

“Why do you have to be terminally ill (i.e., almost dead) to die with dignity?” he questioned.

Nitschke doesn’t want death to just be dignified though, he wants it to be “exciting,” even “euphoric.”

He claims that death by hypoxia via one of these suicide pods can deliver just that. The Sarcos are portable and can be moved anywhere on private ground, even to scenic locations.

A person who wants to die via the pod enters the pod and is then asked questions confirming that the person knows who they are and what they are doing.

The pod then instructs: “If you want to die, press this button.”

Nitschke says that once the person pushes the button, the amount of oxygen in the air rapidly decreases. “Within two breaths of air of that low level of oxygen, they will start to feel disorientated, uncoordinated and slightly euphoric before losing consciousness,” he said.

“They will then stay in that state of unconsciousness for… around about five minutes before death will take place.”

He opined, “I cannot imagine a more beautiful way [to die], of breathing air without oxygen until falling into an eternal sleep.”

In his opinion piece from 2018, however, he described the experience less as a peaceful sleep and more like a drug-induced high.

“Ask someone who has lived through a rapid plane depressurization ― that drunk disorientation can leave you a little unsure of just why you should strap on that dangling oxygen mask,” Nitschke said.

“As I say in my workshops, ‘You’re only going to die once, so why not have the best?’ In that case, I’m usually referring to Nembutal, a barbiturate used as a euthanasia drug. While the modus operandi of Nembutal might be peaceful, reliable and, yes, dignified, it fails miserably at providing a euphoric death. And this is just what the Sarco is seeking to address.”

Florian Willet, chief executive of Last Resort, a pro-assisted dying group, says, that people are “indeed queueing up, asking to use the Sarco,” so it’s “very likely that euthanasia using the pod “will take place pretty soon.”

A double pod is being developed that would allow couples to commit suicide together.

Some cantons (the equivalent of a state) in Switzerland have stated that they are opposed to the procedure, but lawyer Fiona Stewart, who is on Last Resort’s advisory board, says it is legal.

“It’s our understanding that there’s no legal impediment to the Sarco being used… despite what any canton says,” she claimed.

Stewart says that nitrogen, which makes up 78 percent of the air in the Sarco pod, is not a medical product or a weapon. “We’re looking to de-medicalise assisted suicide, because a Sarco doesn’t require a doctor to be in close proximity,” she explained.

While the pod costed $710,000 to create, a person seeking to use it needs only pay $20 for the nitrogen.

The pod itself was designed to look appealing. On its concept page for Sarco, Exit International writes, “The elegant design was intended to suggest a sense of occasion: of travel to a ‘new destination’, and to dispel any ‘yuk’ factor.”

While the pod is meant to take the “yuk” out of dying, it doesn’t take the finality.

When he was asked what would happen if a person changed their mind at the last moment, Nitschke answered, “Once you press that button, there’s no way of going back.”

The slippery slope is very real when it comes to euthanasia and assisted suicide. The arguments always start with the belief that society should show compassion for the terminally ill by eliminating their pain and hastening the inevitable. Now, though, it’s being made widely available for those who aren’t terminally ill, just in pain or miserable or inconvenient.

For example, in the Netherlands a 28-year-old woman was recently euthanized, not because she was dying of a horrible illness but because she had depression, autism, and a personality disorder. A psychiatrist claimed there was nothing more they could do to improve her situation.

The use of euthanasia as a solution for life’s pain and adversities is rapidly increasing.

The number of people who used assisted suicide in the Netherlands in 2022 was 13.7 percent higher than in 2021. In Canada, which has steadily liberalized its Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program, the numbers are similar. In 2021, 10,064 people used MAiD, a growth of 32.4 percent over 2020, and in 2022, 13,241 people ended their lives through MAiD, making it the fifth leading cause of death in Canada.

Meanwhile the nation has sought to expand the program to those who are mentally ill and even to “mature teens.”

At the root of the euthanasia conversation is the question: Who gets to decide when a person dies? Nitschke has advocated strongly for the right of people to choose to end their lives whenever they desire rather than only when they are terminally ill.

Yet even Exit International says that a person should be 50 years old before ending his or her life. Why 50? Why is that sufficient life experience? Why not 30? Why not 75? And who is Nitschke to make this arbitrary call?

Sarco is the nightmarish outworking of man’s attempt to usurp God’s role as the Author of life, a morbid pied piper calling otherwise healthy individuals with a song of a “euphoric” or “exciting” end. What those who promote or choose Sarco or any similar measure misunderstand is, there is no getting away from the “yuk” of death.

Death is the hideous result of man’s choice to disobey God in the Garden of Eden. And just like Satan tempted Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil with promises that it would make them like God, leading to spiritual and later physical death, euthanasia tempts us to believe that we too can play God — only to lead us to our demise.

The Sarco pod is the perfect ad for why Pandora’s box of euthanasia should never have been opened. “Pay $20 and end it all in a oxygen-deprived high” is the hellish reality that a secular humanist rejection of the Judeo-Christian ethic has led man to.


PHOTO CREDIT: Exit International, PR image

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