Damned if I Do

by Philip Nitschke

  While these media battles were being fought, venue ­cancellations were threatening the whole workshop program. Suddenly there were last-minute cancellations of bookings that had been made months earlier. Excuses were ­sometimes provided, but not always. Those who did try to explain said they feared a backlash if the workshops proceeded, with possible violence or damage to the venue. I had no way of knowing if the threats were real, but last-minute cancellation of a venue is a very effective means of censorship. The chaos caused, with little or no time to locate or even publicise an alternative, effectively prevents the message from reaching an audience. A win perhaps, for our opponents, but not completely. A frequent, but unexpected reaction was that some in the community were so incensed by this behaviour, which they saw as an attack on free speech, that they were moved to help by trying to find venues that could be used at a later date. Important ones identified were the Brighthelm Community Church in Brighton, under the tutelage of Reverend David Coleman, and Hamilton Hall Hotel in Bournemouth, which is a naturist resort for gay men. As well, the wonderful David Michael, formerly a councillor in Stroud in Gloucestershire, offered the local community hall as a venue. So, even though the first UK workshop program had been all but paralysed by controversy, seeds of hope were planted for a possible future visit.

  The second visit to the UK took place a few months later and our meetings and workshops did take place, but only just. A new threat had emerged. At Heathrow, Fiona and I found ourselves ushered out of the queue at Immigration, and down into the labyrinth of underground corridors to a bare room and told we were being detained. The reason: they needed time to decide if I was a suitable person to be allowed into their country. Fiona could have gone on, but I’m glad she decided to stay. We waited while the ­officers examined news reports past and present, trying to ­identify grounds for entry or deportation. All of our luggage was with us and a great deal of attention was directed at a small ­plastic container with three hypodermic syringes, labelled ‘Exit Nembutal Test Kit’. While there was nothing illegal about the kit—it had been developed for home testing of euthanasia drugs—they were clearly worried. Then the Immigration officers located a recent Time magazine article about the development of the kit, called ‘Foolproofing suicide with euthanasia test kits’1 and we were told we just had to wait while the decision was made.

  To the Immigration officers’ credit, while we weren’t allowed to have a lawyer present in the interviews, we were given unfettered access to our mobile phones. The first call I made was to Murray McLaughlin at the ABC in Darwin, telling him of the detention. Within minutes, the story was on the international newswire. I remember one Immigration officer coming into the holding room where we were waiting, muttering something like, ‘This is particularly unhelpful.’

  Our second call home was to our barrister in Sydney. We were lucky; she was out walking her dog with another lawyer friend, whose sister was married to London media lawyer Mark Stephens (who would go on to represent Julian Assange in one of his many court battles over extradition to Sweden). He contacted the Home Office, demanding answers, and also rang his friend Geoffrey Robertson QC, in case we needed backup. I’d crossed paths with Robertson years earlier, on his Hypotheticals television series. As word got round, other major media players got involved. Cole Morton at The Guardian contacted the Home Office to see if he could get access to me to complete a forthcoming profile piece. Journalists from The Times, The Independent and The Observer all weighed in, along with television and radio outlets throughout the UK and Europe. Nine hours after first setting foot in England, we were finally released, but with a strict ten days only on our visas. Bournemouth was beckoning, not only to hold the much delayed and rescheduled workshop, but also for the European launch of the prototype Nembutal test kit.

  The publicity generated from being detained worked to our advantage. The launch of the Nembutal test kit was one of those mad days of back-to-back media interviews. The ABC’s London bureau did an interview, as did ABC America, and other major networks from around the world. As well, Reuters and Associated Press were at the launch and took some iconic photos. No fewer than five media live-cross ­satellite vans were parked outside the innocuous little Hamilton Hall Hotel in Bournemouth. There were no death threats or violent protests, and owner John Bellamy said it was the most fun he’d had in years, as he kept the tea and biscuits coming for both workshop attendees and media.

  Never underestimate the interest the media shows when a euthanasia gadget or device is involved; I’d seen this before with the development of the Deliverance Machine back in 1996. Now here it was again, this time focused on the homemade Nembutal test kit. It was a prototype, after all, and looked like it: a set of three syringes in a small plastic box from a two-dollar shop in Darwin. But it was treated as though it was a suicide kit itself, presumably because of the presence of the hypodermic syringes. Fiona would later say it was the closest she got to experiencing the paparazzi, given the blinding camera flashes shot off in her face every time she opened the hotel’s front door.

  From Bournemouth, we moved on to Brighton, but just to hold a public meeting; the idea of a workshop had proven too controversial for Brighthelm Church’s management committee. Nevertheless, the church’s goodwill was very welcome and allowed us to break the Brighton black ban. Then it was on to the neighbouring seaside town of Eastbourne and once again, more doors closed in our faces, more cancelled venues. Again we had to promise to return at a later date, to make it happen sometime in the future. (It would take another two visits to Eastbourne before a venue would finally stand firm. With the help of Kathy Beech, a local who had been incensed by the earlier cancellations, a meeting and workshop took place at the Eastbourne Riviera Hotel in November 2011.)

  The Stroud and Glasgow workshops went ahead without a hitch. A few protestors at Stroud held a prayer meeting outside the hall, but it was clear from the crowd of more than a hundred attending that we were offering something they wanted. Clearly, not all of the UK was as reactionary, or as timid, as the southern seaside centres. The further north we went, the easier it became.

  Attention now turned to North America. While I had visited the US and Canada regularly for conferences and NuTech gatherings etc., now was the time to take the next step and run our own set of workshops to showcase Exit initiatives. The job of publicising our 2009 trip was made much easier when the Vancouver Public Library cancelled our booking, alleging that an Exit meeting would breach section 241 (a) and (b) of the Canadian Criminal Code, and that I would be guilty of counselling, aiding and abetting suicide. It was ironic that, the same week, the library ordered multiple copies of The Peaceful Pill Handbook and requested urgent shipping, presumably in response to heightened public demand.

  I was totally amazed: more censorship, and this time in North America. We began looking around to see if we could find someone to help, someone willing to challenge this discrimination. We didn’t have to look far—the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) soon came to our rescue. Led by the indefatigable David Eby and with full backing of its board, the BCCLA insisted that the library hold a special meeting to reconsider their decision. When that didn’t work, the BCCLA convened a press conference with the founder of the Canadian Farewell Foundation, Russel Ogden, which I attended via Skype from Darwin. The association’s support of Exit that day was admirable. And it was also very pleasing to see them lead the successful 2012 Dying with Dignity case in the British Columbia Supreme Court, which saw the ban on assisted suicide struck down.2 This legal battle is ongoing.

  Again we were saved by the public reaction to the Library’s attempt to ban my talk, and almost immediately, the Vancouver Unitarian Church stepped forward to fill the void. The Vancouver workshop then went ahead, as planned, in front of a packed audience. The Unitarians would later continue this support by providing Exit with workshop venues in Toronto and Montreal. Other workshops on that tour were held in San Francisco, Be
llingham and Anaheim in ­southern California. No security was ever needed, despite my ­concerns, even in gun-bearing America. While our small Bellingham gathering was picketed by a disproportionately large crowd of right-to-lifers, the much bigger San Francisco meeting attracted only a handful of wheelchair protestors, this time from the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund.

  When well-known activist Marilyn Golden managed to get her wheelchair wedged in the front door of the San Francisco Buddhist Centre, where the workshop was being held, Fiona was able to quietly dislodge her, in what she says became a battle of brute force. Luckily for us, no ­photographs were taken.

  Over the years, I have experienced right-to-life ­protests on a number of occasions. Nelson, on New Zealand’s South Island, is home to a Christian sect called Light of Christ Covenants Community. They reliably turn out with their placards and their children each time we visit. We also had a Christian youth group demonstrate with megaphones outside a Sydney conference Exit was holding at the YWCA. However, it was not until we held a workshop in Ireland that we felt the full impact of organised opposition.

  To date, we have held two series of workshops in Dublin, both attracting large numbers of pro-life demonstrators. A notable feature at one meeting was the number of professionally produced placards bearing the message: ‘LOCK UP YOUR GRANNIES. DR DEATH IS HERE.’ This was a variant of the media headline that used to appear when the Rolling Stones were in town—‘Lock Up Your Daughters’.

  As to be expected in a Catholic country such as Ireland, moral outrage in this part of the world is well organised and systemic. Through groups such as the Youth Defence and the Christian Solidarity Party, not to mention the Catholic and Anglican churches, opposition to voluntary euthanasia is every­where in the Emerald Isle. This has led to the usual cancellation of venues for our events. In fact Dublin still holds the record, with four venues in a row cancelling over the course of two days. Included in this list was the famous Buswells Hotel, which had initially approached us when they heard of our problems. They told me there wouldn’t be any issue with us. They’d hosted pro-abortion gatherings with Mary Robinson, political meetings with Sinn Fein, even at the height of the Irish unrest, and never cancelled. Twelve hours later they cancelled, with just a brief phone message; no explanation, no appeal. The problem was solved eventually with the assistance of local groups such as Atheist Ireland.

  In Dublin we also saw the infiltration and disruption of our meetings by protestors (something that has rarely happened before). Andrea Williams, CEO of an organisation called Christian Concern, trotted out an argument that was new to me. She said, ‘In the context of such a dismal economic climate [in Ireland], Dr Nitschke’s message is a great danger to vulnerable people who may feel pressured into taking their own lives’.3 A line difficult to take seriously.

  But there has been an upside. Voluntary euthanasia in Ireland is now an issue that is increasingly discussed and a topic of public debate. While the authorities continue to wield a heavy hand—in 2011 the friend of a terminally ill Exit member was threatened with charges should she accompany her friend to Zurich for an assisted suicide—there is an emergent right-to-die movement in that country. Our meetings, and the media that our visits have attracted, have changed the climate. That Exit now has an Irish chapter, or branch, led by activist Tom Curran, is testimony to this. In 2012 I took part in a debate on the euthanasia issue at the Dublin debating society ‘The Phil’ at Trinity College, with Tom and Sir Terry Pratchett, and in late 2012 Tom launched his own court action in Ireland, aimed at restoring the right of his long-term partner, Marie, who is severely disabled by multiple sclerosis, to choose when she might die.4 This important case found its way to the Irish Supreme Court, but in March 2013 her case was dismissed.

  Exit’s workshop program sees me visit the UK and North America on a regular basis, and I’ve also often found myself travelling abroad for debates, conferences, talks at medical schools and even literary festivals. I am always keen to extend the Exit meeting-and-workshop program to new countries, but that does require some local support to get things set up. As we offer people better practical end-of-life options, and associated technologies like drug testing, the need to spread the program increases. In 2013 Exit held its first ever workshops in Germany and the Netherlands, and there are now active negotiations to stage such events in South Africa, Israel and Singapore.

  In 2009 I was excited to be part of a new cable network channel broadcasting into China. Led by Hong Kong entrepreneur Robert Chua, the thirteen-part series Dignified Departures aimed at getting the Chinese middle classes to talk about how to plan ahead for death. I travelled to Hong Kong to participate in the venture and had the chance to learn of some of the subtle cultural differences that exist. This was the first time Chinese mass media had tackled the issue on the mainland, an important milestone.

  It never ceases to amaze me that the elderly workshop attendees and conference audiences in places as diverse as India, New Caledonia and even Switzerland all ask much the same question—where do I get my Nembutal, how do I store it for the next twenty years and what will my death be like should I ever drink it? The same applies to ­journalists, regardless of whether they are from prominent Polish newspapers, such as the Gazeta Wyborcza, or the ones asking me questions at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club, or tiny regional publications like Barrier Daily Truth in Broken Hill. Why do you do it? How many of your patients have you helped/killed? Have you ever been arrested? While emphasis may change from country to country, the strong ­interest in how we are to die is universal.

  SEVENTEEN

  Time out

  … George Fraser soldered a broken exhaust pipe for the headstrong schoolmaster, and begged him not to go on with the mad project of crossing the desert to Ayer’s Rock in the midsummer heat.

  Frank Clune, The Red Heart: Sagas of Centralia, 1940

  At times my life has been seriously out of balance. Being absorbed in various causes—Aboriginal land rights, resistance to US bases, voluntary euthanasia—that take up energy and time can seriously effect personal relationships. Thankfully, that is not the case now. With a partner as involved in the voluntary euthanasia issue as I am, work and personal matters are often intertwined, but it is still possible on occasions to step back and enjoy life together—simple things like camping, the silence of the Outback, a shared enthusiasm for craft beers, overseas travel, good food, friends and so on. As I said in an interview a few years back, ‘We don’t just sit around talking about death and dying all the time.’

  I’m fond of films and music. The quirky Harold and Maude, the first time I’d ever heard of the right age for an elective death, long before I met Lisette Nigot, and the ugly Wake in Fright, which so captures the atmosphere of Broken Hill and dispels the romantic outback myth, are among my favourites. In recent years I’ve discovered internet radio, which has made my treasured library of old 78s all but ­obsolete. Going bush, I liked the idea of copying Karen Blixen, with the wind-up gramophone on the fold-up camp table and a slow waltz around the camp site. Now when Fiona and I are out, as long as we are close enough to an Aboriginal community with good internet connectivity, we just tune the iPad to one of the amazing 1930s or 1940s music internet radio stations and bring the sounds of the interwar years into our happy-hour drinks.

  Over the years, the way we take time out from work has varied a lot. There’s been the occasional trip to Singapore (closer, and cheaper, than Sydney for a short break), the odd five-star hotel in Europe (as a treat), and more than one beer-and-brewery tour in either New Zealand or the US. One motif of home-based holidays is touring on either our motorbike or in the MG through the desert or hills.

  My father had motorbikes when I was very young, and my brother Dennis rode one for years and I’ve always been interested in them. In 1976 or thereabouts, I was ­walking along Todd Street in Alice Springs when I saw a ­dishevelled rider covered in oil a
nd dirt pull his motorbike up to the kerb and almost fall into a heap in the gutter. I had a ­motorbike at the time, a 1955 British Matchless 500cc single cylinder ‘thumper’, so I knew a bit about classic bikes. I recognised this as one of the relatively new Russian Cossack 650cc, which I commented on.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘and if you want it, you can have it.’

  He’d come up from Adelaide. In those days, the Stuart Highway was unsealed and known for its corrugations. They were bad and unavoidable, from grader ridge to grader ridge. This poor guy was covered in dust and was still shaking from what had clearly been a very rough ride.

  ‘How much?’ I said.

  ‘Four hundred bucks.’

  I guessed the bike was about two or three years old. Four hundred dollars wasn’t a sensational bargain because the bikes sold new for $650; people used to joke that they cost a dollar a cc. But getting a bike like that in Alice in any other circumstances would have been difficult, and here was one on a plate. I bought it there and then. Later, I bought another one and I kept the original on the road by cannibalising parts from the second.

  The Cossack is a Russian copy of a pre–World War II German BMW designed to be fitted with a sidecar—the sort of thing you commonly see in war movies, with a machine-gun mounted on the front, the officer in the sidecar in his leather coat with another stormtrooper doing the hard riding. The Cossack had only a six-volt electrical system, which caused trouble, and brakes so poor that it seemed they’d been added as a late optional extra. The biggest problem though was kick starting, especially with the sidecar fitted; in the Russian Steppes, with a sidecar on the right, a kick starter on the left may have been manageable. But here, forced to mount the chair on the opposite side, kick starting this beast was almost impossible.