[Right_to_die] Do it yourself plan for Peaceful Pill

[right_to_die_2 at mailman.efn.org]

They Sydney Morning Herald Reports:-

Euthanasia backers plan do-it-yourself death pill
By Lindsay Murdoch in Darwin and Nick O'Malley
November 9, 2004

Groups of elderly people will meet across Australia to make their own
suicide pills, defying state and territory legislature outlawing euthanasia.
The euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke said yesterday that the first
group, made up of people mainly from Sydney and Melbourne, would meet
secretly at a remote location in NSW in March. Participants planned to use
substances available over the counter to make the pills during a three-day
weekend before passing on what they did to other groups, he said.

The first group includes people with the expertise to make lethal pills who
have already started gathering ingredients.

Dr Nitschke said the euthanasia group Exit International had been
"stampeded" with requests from people to join groups to make their own
pills.

Among those planning to attend the workshop is John Edge, 68, a retiree, of
Tweed Heads. "We don't want to end our lives; we just want the means to do
it when the time comes," he said.

Mr Edge said that those attending the workshop would help produce a sedative
no longer available on the market. He said each member would then take home
eight grams of the drug - enough for one fatal "self-deliverance" - and the
makeshift laboratory would be disassembled.

Dr Nitschke said people were acting with a sense of "urgency" because of a
proposed new federal law that would ban anyone from preparing material that
even informed people how to kill themselves.

Federal Parliament is expected to pass laws in the second half of next year
that provided for fines of up to $120,000 for the offence.

Existing laws already provide penalties of up to life imprisonment for
advising, counselling or helping anybody in killing themselves, although
suicide is not a crime in Australia.

Dr Nitschke said the pill making had to be handled carefully. Members of
each group "will just come together and they will walk home with 10 grams of
peaceful pill knowing they have done it themselves. That puts it right on
the edge of the law.

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