Eideard

Excerpts from CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta: No matter how old someone is, or how sick they have been, it still comes as a shock to hear they have died. 83-year-old Jack Kevorkian, Dr. Death himself, died this morning as Bach, his favorite, played over the intercom. I felt an involuntary gasp of air in my throat when I learned of his passing.

Last June, he agreed to sit down with me, and participate in what would be the last interview of his life…

Dr. Kevorkian told me he was afraid to die. “Just like everyone else,” he added. If you sat and listened to him, that wouldn’t seem nearly as ironic as you think. He also said he wasn’t ready to die. He said he needed to warn the world about the perils of an overabundant society, change their views on euthanasia, and help re-establish the glory of the 9th amendment…

I told Jack I hoped to see him again one day. And, I meant it. RIP.

Please read the following interview that Dr. Gupta did with Kevorkian.

CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta interviews Jack Kevorkian

A great-grandmother selling do-it-yourself asphyxiation kits by mail said on Thursday she was ordered from her house at gunpoint by federal agents who raided her home and seized cartons of documents, computers and sewing machines.

Sharlotte Hydorn, 91, told Reuters about a dozen agents in flak jackets from the FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service arrived at her San Diego-area home at about 7 a.m. local time on Wednesday, and ordered her outside, shouting, “Come out, or I’ll shoot.”

“I had guns in my face. I thought, ‘I’m dying on my feet.’ … I didn’t know what to say,” she recounted, sitting inside a sprawling three-bedroom ranch house still strewn a day later with papers and boxes.

They presented her with a 37-page search warrant signed on Tuesday by a U.S. magistrate and proceeded to comb through her house for nearly 11 hours, leaving the dwelling in disarray when they left, she said…

A copy of the search warrant shown to Reuters indicated Hydorn was under investigation for alleged conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, tax evasion and the “sale of adulterated or misbranded medical device.”

Hydorn made headlines after one of her mail-order customers from Oregon, Nicholas Klonoski, 29, described by his family as suffering from depression but otherwise healthy, used one of her kits to take his own life in December.

Her product consists of a plastic hood that closes around the neck, and tubing that connects the hood to a tank of helium or other inert gas users must supply for themselves.

Hydorn says her so-called “exit kits” are intended to help terminally ill people end their lives with dignity in their own homes, though she has acknowledged she performs no background checks or screening of individuals who order the apparatus.

She sells them for $60 each, including shipping and instructions, under the brand name GLADD, which stands for Glorious Life and Dignified Death.

Perish the thought the law, the government, politicians, priests and police should allow someone to choose to end their own life – without harming another human being, simply making a choice and receiving a bit of assistance from another thoughtful human being.

They disgust me with their fears and rules requiring government approval to die.

Voters in Zurich overwhemingly rejected on Sunday proposed bans on assisted suicide and “suicide tourism” — foreigners traveling to Switzerland to receive help ending their lives.

Only 15.5 percent of voters in the local referendum backed a ban on assisted suicide, while nearly 22 percent supported a ban on suicide tourism, final results showed. About 200 people commit assisted suicide each year in Zurich.

Assisted suicide has been allowed in Switzerland since 1941 if performed by a non-physician who has no vested interest in the death…

A rise in the number of foreigners seeking to end their lives in Switzerland, and a study showing that more and more people seeking assisted suicides in the country do not suffer from a terminal illness, have provoked heated debate…

Turns out the people raising the debate were noisier than their numbers.

Right-to-die group Exit has agreed rules to govern assisted suicide with prosecutors in Zurich in the hope they might eventually form the basis of national regulation.

Foreigners are not explicitly excluded under the new rules, but a Swiss doctor who prescribes the deadly anesthetic must have met the person twice over a period of time to be sure of their wishes.

Here in the Land of the Free we get to have everyone who believes the religion governing some small portion of their life forbids anyone else from choosing death with dignity. Since our politicians fear the religious even more than they fear honesty – there is little chance of entering into a public dialogue and decision about the topic in most American states.

A retired GP who has been told she will not be charged over allegations she advised a seriously ill woman on how to die has said she has “no regrets” but has admitted she feared the police investigation would put her in “deep, deep trouble”.

Dr Libby Wilson, 84, was the first person to be arrested in connection with an assisted suicide after new guidelines on euthanasia were published by Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions. She allegedly spoke to Cari Loder, 48, a multiple sclerosis sufferer, twice on the telephone in the days before she took her own life last year.

Speaking yesterday after the case against her was dropped, Dr Wilson, the founder of Friends At The End (Fate) lobby group, pledged to carry on helping people end their lives. “I have no regrets over what I did and I would do the same thing again.

“I don’t wish to become a martyr to the cause and realise people may try to get me into more trouble. I will have to live with that. I have a conscience and it is perfectly clear.

“My sons and daughters were far more worried than I was. I just could not see how they could put an 84-year-old great grandmother in jail for 14 years for twice speaking to someone on the telephone.

“If I was some little flower it could have finished me off but, thankfully, I’m not and I didn’t lose too much sleep. My main worry was if the police had started going in to Fate. I did think about getting rid of my computer hard drive as it was full of documentation about other cases…

“My main concern is that pro-life campaigners call pretending to be people looking for advice on how to kill themselves. These people may try to trap me and start a new case. That’s a risk I will just have to take.

“I have campaigned for more than 30 years for assisted suicide to be legalised and I will continue to do so.”

Bravo! A brave doctor, a doctor with a conscience and more courage than any ten politicians or priests.

Elderly people should be allowed to end their lives with the help of a doctor even if they are not terminally ill, according to a new campaign group that claims to have widespread support.

The Society for Old Age Rational Suicide, led by a former GP…says that pensioners should have the human right to declare “enough is enough” and die with dignity.

Dr Michael Irwin says he knows of an elderly English woman who is considering taking her life through Dignitas, the Swiss “suicide clinic”, as she is suffering from progressive arthritis and worsening eyesight.

He believes that many more will want to take the same course of action as Britain’s population ages.

The new group has commissioned a national poll that found 67 per cent of those questioned agreed that very elderly and mentally competent individuals should be allowed to receive a doctor’s assistance to die, if they are suffering from health problems but not terminally ill. Only 19 per cent of the 1,009 adults questioned by ICM said they opposed the move while the rest were uncertain.

It opens up a new front in the war to create a right to die in England and Wales, following the high-profile court battle last year that led to unprecedented legal guidelines being published…

Last year a landmark court case won by Debbie Purdy, who has multiple sclerosis, forced the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, QC, to set out exactly when prosecutions would be brought against people who assist another to die..

But the new campaign, SOARS, wants to legalise assisted suicide with the help of a doctor for those who are merely tired of life because of their age and health problems rather than a terminal disease.

Its hope is that a future law would allow two doctors and a legal witness to agree that the patient was mentally competent and not being pressured to die by relatives, then for the elderly person to be provided with the “necessary medication” after a two-month cooling-off period.

Organized religion and most conservative political organizations will reject this measure of individual liberty. For no other reason than they think they should in order to appear moral. Whatever that might mean.

Personally, this is a right I intend to exercise if I ever feel I need to or wish to. It’s just a boatload of bother that I would have to engineer the whole process to be certain those I love aren’t attacked by the state afterwards.

Kay Gilderdale and her daughter, Lynn

A judge made the rare step of attacking the Crown Prosecution Service…for pursuing a case of attempted murder against a loving mother who helped her seriously ill daughter to die.

Stoking the debate over mercy killings, he praised the common sense, decency and humanity of the jury at Lewes crown court, who took just two hours to clear Kay Gilderdale over the death of 31-year-old Lynn.

Kay Gilderdale administered a cocktail of lethal drugs to end Lynn’s life in December 2008 after her daughter called her for help when her own attempts at suicide failed…

At Lewes today Mr Justice Bean, the Gilderdale trial judge, openly challenged prosecutors, demanding to know who had made the decision to pursue the case.

“Are you in a position to tell me why it was thought to be in the public interest to proceed with the prosecution of attempted murder rather than accepting the plea of assisted suicide?” he asked the prosecutor, Sally Howes QC.

He said interim guidelines on assisted suicide, drawn up last November by the director of public prosecutions to reassure relatives they would not be prosecuted for helping a loved one die, should have applied in the case.

Turning to the jury he said: “I do not normally comment on the verdicts of juries but in this case their decision … shows that common sense, decency and humanity which makes jury trials so important in a case of this kind.”

I have nothing polite to say about the officials who decided to prosecute for murder. I hope their political careers are over.

Kay Gilderdale, Justice Bean, the members of the jury gathered to rule on her aid to her daughter – obviously – were the only human beings in the courtroom. They deserve all the praise in the world.

Martin Amis told the Guardian: “What we need to recognise is that certain lives fall into the negative, where pain hugely dwarfs those remaining pleasures that you may be left with. Geriatric science has been allowed to take over and, really, decency roars for some sort of correction.” He said his comments were meant to be “satirical”, rather than “glib”.

His stance on euthanasia had hardened since the deaths of his stepfather, Lord Kilmarnock, the former SDP peer and writer, in March aged 81, and his friend Dame Iris Murdoch, the novelist, in 1999, aged 79, two years after her husband revealed that she was suffering from Alzheimer’s.

“I increasingly feel that religion is so deep in our constitution and in our minds and that is something we should just peel off,” he said. “Of course euthanasia is open to abuse, in that the typical grey death will be that of an old relative whose family gets rid of for one reason or another, and they’ll say ‘he asked me to do it’, or ‘he wanted to die’, Amis said. “That’s what we will have to look out for. Nonetheless, it is something we have to make some progress on…”

In his interview, Amis said his step father had died “very horribly”. “He always thought he was going to get better. But he didn’t get better and I think the denial of death is a great curse.”

He said Iris Murdoch, whom he had known for a very long time , was “a friend, I loved her. She was wonderful. I remember talking to her just as it started happening, and she said, ‘I’ve entered a dark place’. That famous quote. Awareness of loss is gone, the track is gone. You don’t know the day you’ve spent watching Teletubbies; it just vanished.”

The pro-euthanasia pressure group Dignity in Dying said: “Like all too many people in the UK, Martin Amis has witnessed the bad death of a loved one.” But, it added: “Dignity in Dying’s campaign for a change in the law is not about the introduction of ‘euthanasia booths’, nor is it in anticipation of a ‘silver tsunami’. Our campaign is about allowing dying adults who have mental capacity a compassionate choice to end their suffering, subject to strict legal safeguards.”

Hear, hear.

I also suggest checking out the website of the Dignity in Dying campaign if you’re in the UK. In the U.S., there is Death with Dignity. Pretty much spot on.

A woman with pancreatic cancer has become the first person to die under a law passed last year allowing doctor-assisted suicide in Washington, according to an advocacy group that pushed for the law.

The woman, Linda Fleming, 66, of Sequim, Wash., died Thursday evening after taking lethal medication prescribed by a doctor under the law, according to a news release by the group, Compassion and Choices of Washington. The release said Ms. Fleming received a diagnosis of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer a month ago, and “she was told she was actively dying.”

Ms. Fleming was quoted in the release as saying: “I am a very spiritual person, and it was very important to me to be conscious, clear-minded and alert at the time of my death. The powerful pain medications were making it difficult to maintain the state of mind I wanted to have at my death.”

In November, voters approved the Death with Dignity Act, 58 percent to 42 percent, making Washington the second state — after Oregon — to allow assisted suicide. The laws in both states have been deeply controversial, particularly among religious groups. Washington passed its law after the United States Supreme Court in 2006 rejected an effort by the Justice Department to block Oregon’s law, which took effect in 1998.

Ms. Fleming’s two children and her former husband “were involved and supported her choice.”

Right on, Linda Fleming. Thank you for your courage and caring.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

An Australian doctor stopped at Heathrow Airport when he arrived to hold workshops on euthanasia has been granted leave to stay in UK.

Philip Nitschke was interviewed under the immigration and asylum act after arriving from Australia on Saturday…

Dr Nitschke said he had been surprised to have been detained and questioned, as he had been allowed into the UK to hold lectures before.

Dr Nitschke, who runs Exit International, told the BBC he had been searched, fingerprinted and formally interviewed after being told his workshops could be in breach of British law.

He said this had never happened to him before.

“I mean, this is a very fundamental question of free speech – people want to know about this,” Dr Nitschke said.

“This is an important cutting-edge social issue and to find people thinking about deportation because the message is supposedly so worrying says something about changes in British society which are quite troubling.”

The Blair-Bush corruption of individual liberty in the UK is maintained – and continues to be expended by the Clod in Charge.

Just as the Republicans in the US can’t see beyond the desperate reliance on fear and foreigners as their only campaign tactic, Brown is trapped in his own inability to revise the Dangerous Duo’s equally cowardly reliance on personal security trumping independent thought.

A Montana judge has ruled that doctor-assisted suicide is legal in the state.

The judge, Dorothy McCarter, issued the ruling in the case of a Billings man with terminal cancer who had sued the state.

In her ruling, Judge McCarter wrote that “the Montana constitutional rights of individual privacy and human dignity” give a mentally competent person who is terminally ill the right to “die with dignity.”

The ruling said that those patients had the right to obtain self-administered medications to hasten death if they found their suffering to be unbearable, and that physicians could prescribe such medication without fear of prosecution.

“Bravo” is the least I can say.

Montana deserves a bit of cranky respect for the occasional bit of what used to be American conservative ethics that still crops up. The rest of the denomination seems to prefer to be mired in religious reaction rather than individual liberty.