Dr Philip Nitschke, the Australian physician and founder of the right-to-die organisation Exit International, has a brand spanking new invention.
The creator of the notorious Sarco pod, a portable 3D-printed capsule which allows euthanasia without direct medical oversight, didn’t want to just stop there.
Nitschke has earned the title of ‘Dr Death’ even from mainstream outlets such as Sky News, such is his enthusiasm for finding new ways of killing people. The press nickname, apparently, came from his activities in Australia’s Northern Territory, where he built a computer hooked up to administer a lethal dose of barbiturates, through which he ‘helped’ in the deaths of four terminally ill Australians.
Now aged 79, he has spent decades of his career – thirty years – dreaming up new inventions, all with the end goal of death.
So it is not surprising that he has a new disturbing gadget out – and he’s ready to show it off to the world. Nitschke, who, to our shame, was invited before and gave evidence to the Joint Oireachtas Committee at Leinster House in 2023, has now invented a ‘suicide collar’.
The collar, which is modelled on a female mannequin with grey hair (note his target audience) in a photo which has gone viral on X, consists of two balloons that, when activated by a button or app, quickly exert pressure on the carotid arteries and baroreceptors in the neck. This cuts off blood flow to the brain, leading first to unconsciousness and then to death via cerebral hypoxia. To any sane person, this should be distressing. And if it’s what the future looks like, then please stop the world and let me off.
Oh, and death by strangulation. I can’t imagine that would be a dignified or serene end. And what happens when Dr Death wants to import his devices to the UK if the assisted suicide Bill passes? It is not beyond the realms of possibility that a private company could in theory be paid by the NHS and effectively granted a licence to choke a vulnerable person to death until they die.
The ink isn’t yet dry on the sales pitch, and Nitschke is already flaunting around London teaching people how to use a suicide collar. God help us.
It is called Kairos – the ancient Greek word meaning the exact, critical, or opportune moment to take action, and earlier this year, Nitschke said that he would conduct the first assisted suicide using the collar on a woman in Switzerland who he said would be his first ‘test subject.’
The collar is back in the news because Nitschke was recently in London for an Exit International workshop at Dragon Hall, advertised as an opportunity for him to demonstrate how to use it.
The good news is that he did not actually bring the collar into Britain, and left it in the Netherlands because he feared UK customs would seize it.
“I have left the device in the Netherlands. I feared it would be stopped at customs. We are under pressure from authorities about what they call “giving dangerous information to vulnerable people.”’ he told the Daily Mail.
Maybe it was that – but perhaps it was the noticeable public and political outcry over the visit, intensified by the fact it happened just days before MPs are due to vote on the revived assisted suicide Bill. MP Sir John Hayes called on the Home Secretary to stop Nitschke from entering Britain, along with other campaigners and MPs.
The genuinely terrifying thing is that devices could be legal to use for assisted suicides in the UK if the new Bill, which comes before MPs on Friday, passes. And we all know Ireland is not far behind. The visit helped to illustrate, with little room for doubt, what could happen if assisted dying were to become legal.
The Daily Mail reported from Saturday’s event that after a discussion about the option of travelling to Switzerland for an assisted death, many in the audience stayed on for a “do-it-yourself guide” to assisted suicide given by Nitschke.
Previous workshops have been focused on telling attendees about suicide methods, and a recent one held in London included footage of an American woman who killed herself in the Sarco pod. In a room in Dublin around two years ago, Nitschke also taught people how to die. Around a dozen attended to plan their suicides while on a screen, poisonous substances were ranked in order of convenience, availability and painfulness. The audience, a Sky News report said at the time, was made up of mainly elderly people, who were being promised an answer for their desperation.
We should recognise that Nitschke’s fixation with death, as it would be recognised in practically every other context, is entirely unhealthy. Nor is it healthy for people to sit together in a room in broad daylight in central London or Dublin and learn how to kill themselves.
Nitschke is a man who has an unhealthy obsession with death. A death fetishist if you will. How he can be regarded as someone fit to travel the world advocating for human rights is beyond me. His inventions have resulted in multiple criminal arrests by Swiss police. He even openly admitted introducing lethal poison to a Canadian chef who sold it to vulnerable youngsters in more than 40 countries – and who has been linked to more than 150 deaths around the world.
These people are not normal. The Guardian reported in 2009, in an interview profile of the then lesser known doctor, that his partly autobiographical book Killing Me Softly described Nitschke saying that, when he was 16, he was boarding with a couple in Adelaide. Nitschke described what happened to him as what today would be called sexual harassment or abuse. He said that in revenge, he took a hunting knife, found the couple’s dog, and cut its throat. The incident was reported in the local newspaper at the time.
“People say I’m a killer, I just have to live with it,” said Nitschke in the 2009 interview. This is the man who is welcomed to our Parliament, and onto the streets of Westminster, to advocate for choice and control and empathy. But these are all buzzwords. When the assisted suicide Bill returns before MPs on Friday, remember that dystopian suicide collars and pods that starve people of oxygen are part of the future they imagine for us.
And what about all the promises of safeguards? These aren’t the line – they are merely the packaging used to get us across it.