Death Becomes Him

Right? Wrong? In a gray area?  Not a current article but one I just came across recently.
Atlantic Magazine, March 2010
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/03/death-becomes-him/7916/

OVER THE PAST DECADE, LUDWIG MINELLI HAS HELPED MORE THAN 1,000 PEOPLE KILL THEMSELVES AND HAS TURNED ZURICH INTO THE UNDISPUTED WORLD CAPITAL OF ASSISTED SUICIDE. MINELLI SEES HIMSELF AS A CRUSADER FOR WHAT HE CALLS “THE LAST HUMAN RIGHT”—AND HE BELIEVES THAT HELPING MORE AND MORE PEOPLE TO DIE ADVANCES HIS CAUSE. EVEN IF YOU BELIEVE IN AN ABSOLUTE RIGHT TO DIE ON YOUR OWN TERMS, HOW FAR IS TOO FAR IN THE QUEST TO SECURE THAT RIGHT?

By Bruce Falconer


IMAGE CREDIT: DAVID LEVENE/GUARDIAN NEWS AND MEDIA LTD 2009

Ludwig Minelli, a lawyer and self-described humanitarian, helps people kill themselves. Last summer, he invited me to a party inaugurating the Blue Oasis, the latest in a series of properties he has converted into makeshift death houses for the purposes of Dignitas, an organization he founded in 1998.

The Blue Oasis is a two-story blue house with a flat roof, situated next to a machine factory and across from a soccer field in an industrial area a half hour’s drive east of Zurich. In the yard, flowering trees and tall grass frame a clear, round pond flecked with lily pads and stocked with goldfish. A gravel path winds from the front door across the yard...

A few hours later, with the party under way, Minelli led a tour of the Blue Oasis for his employees—five men and nine women, a mix of college students, professionals, and retirees, all of whom work for Dignitas part-time. Minelli himself is 77 and has thinning white hair, thick glasses, and a hearing aid in his right ear, but he displayed a youthful enthusiasm as he walked us through the house. It was clean and new, with hardwood floors and white walls decorated with watercolors of rural Swiss landscapes. In the front hallway hung a framed cartoon of a man concealing a vial of poison behind his back and waving off people approaching him with a wheelchair and a box of diapers. A cooler full of chilled champagne sat beside a hospital bed in one of two rooms specially outfitted for people who want to kill themselves.

Dignitas’s slogan is “To live with dignity, to die with dignity,” and for 12 years the group has been serving cocktails of sodium pentobarbital, a highly lethal barbiturate, to clients from around the world. During that time, Ludwig Minelli has helped more than a thousand people kill themselves, and he has cornered the market in what has come to be called “suicide tourism,” transforming his native Zurich into the undisputed world capital of assisted suicide...