Swiss suicide tourism

After paying a nonprofit the 10,000 Swiss francs (about $8,300), Craig Ewert drank a glass of water laced with sodium pentobarbital and died within 30 minutes. He had a motor neuron disease and under Swiss law had a right to kill himself. The reason this is new news is that British television just showed the suicide on one of their networks in the past week. It looked like a man falling peacefully asleep.

As the AP article notes, the only criteria for assisting a suicide are that the person “suffers from an illness that inevitably leads to death, or from an unacceptable disability, and wants to end their life and suffering voluntarily.” Some people believe that such services do a disservice, by making the option of suicide too readily available to people whose pain and suffering cannot be measured by current medical science. And yet people around the world are seeking out Swiss assisted suicide services...

It baffles me that prison executions in this country are expensive, complicated, frequently botched, stressful and allegedly painful when poorly executed. As the Psych Central article indicates, it doesn't have to be that way.