Meet the bad boy of the euthanasia movement From 1843mag
t’s a sunny autumn morning in the Jordaan, Amsterdam’s chocolate-boxiest district. Over tea in a modishly renovated maisonette, a voluble Australian 72 year-0ld wearing round glasses and fashionable denim is regaling me with his new-year plans, which involve “an elegant gas chamber” stationed at a secret location in Switzerland and “a happily dead body”.
Nitschke and Stewart are much jollier than you’d expect the right-to-die movement’s only power couple to be. They’re full of – well –and arch banter about everything from Brexit to the roadworks that have denuded the front of their home of a beloved creeper. “If it’s not dead, boy is it doing a bloody good impression of being dead,” observes Nitschke, correctly. Stewart is at the kitchen table, processing applications from her laptop, and asking correspondents for proof of age.
This, he thinks, is specious and evidence of the medical profession’s creeping paternalism, which he finds abhorrent. “[Doctors are] always there, setting themselves up as the gatekeepers when it comes to areas of human endeavour that they should have no role in – because when you medicalise something you’ve got to have a medical controller,” he says.
Nitschke studied physics at the University of Adelaide before heading to the Northern Territory to work as an Aboriginal land-rights activist. Having studied for his medical degree with, he says, the intention of “curing himself of hypochondria,” in 1996 he became the first doctor in the world to administer a legal, lethal voluntary injection under the short-lived Rights of the Terminally Ill Act which, astonishingly, made the statute books in the Northern Territory by one vote.
Initially, Nitschke ran Exit workshops exclusively for the terminally ill. His self-described “big, blinding road to Damascus change” came courtesy of a French academic from Perth named Lisette Nigot, whom Nitschke met in 1999 when she was 76. She had no desire to live to see 80, and repeatedly approached Nitschke asking for information about suicide drugs.
Sarco’s raison d’être, admits Nitschke, is aesthetic. It obviates what he calls “the yuck factor” inherent in other tools of “peaceful” suicide, such as the humble plastic bag and gas. “That’s just as efficient,” he says. “You can tell people over and over and over, as I do in my workshops, that it’s cheap, reliable, quick and legal, but they say, I don’t care if it’s a peaceful death, I do not like the look of it and I don’t want to be found like that.
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