An assisted-suicide advocacy group in Switzerland has announced that a first-of-its-kind portable “suicide pod” will soon be available for widespread use by people wishing to end their lives without medical supervision.
The Sarco device, short for sarcophagus, is a sealed capsule which enables the person inside to press a button that rapidly replaces the oxygen inside the pod with nitrogen gas, resulting in death by hypoxia. Marketed as a “beautiful way [to die]” by its supporters, the ghoulish and futuristic-looking capsule essentially amounts to a single-person gas chamber.
In a press conference Wednesday announcing the capsule’s impending availability, representatives of The Last Resort, the Swiss assisted-suicide organization which sponsored the capsule’s development, noted that once the person sealed inside presses the button releasing the nitrogen gas, “there is no way back.” Philip Nitschke, the infamous euthanasia advocate and Sarco’s inventor, noted that the release of nitrogen gas in the sealed capsule is an irreversible process that first leads to a sense of euphoria, then several minutes of unconsciousness, followed soon after by death.
Florian Willet, co-president of The Last Resort, said at the press conference that he would “probably use the Sarco myself instead of living through my last days in a miserable state while seriously ill.”
While the suicide pod has already banned in two Swiss cantons, the device’s release represents the inauguration of a troubling new development in international campaigns for assisted suicide and euthanasia. The highly mobile and cheap-to-use killing device, which requires a payment of just 18 Swiss francs (or about 20 U.S. dollars), allows death-on-demand to be much more accessible than under most current legal euthanasia and assisted-suicide regimes, which often involve a series of psychological evaluations, medical approvals, and the dispensation of doctor-prescribed or doctor-administered drugs.
The notion that assisted suicide is now something maximally convenient and glamorous — as Nitschke noted, “[t]he machine can be towed anywhere for death . . . [i]t can be in an idyllic outdoor setting or on the premises of an assisted suicide organization, for example” — helps further transform death-on-demand from something tragic, if supposedly necessary, to an occasion of far lower stakes that fundamentally is something to be celebrated and welcomed. The Sarco device, with its futuristic, other-wordly appearance and its promises of easy transportation to “eternity,” romanticizes its victim’s death by whitewashing what is actually happening when someone steps into the capsule and presses the button.
This portable gas chamber is nothing short of dystopian and grotesque — and the fact that it will soon be available for widespread use marks a dark new chapter for the death-on-demand movement. Recall that when Alabama in January conducted the world’s first execution by means of nitrogen hypoxia, advocacy groups were quick to condemn the execution method as violent, inhumane, and degrading. United Nations experts went so far as to suggest that execution by nitrogen hypoxia could constitute a violation of the U.N. Convention Against Torture.
Perhaps there was truth there. But will the U.N. and the advocacy groups who condemned nitrogen hypoxia in Alabama then condemn the ghoulish suicide pod now? Consistency demands it.