October 27, 2024
Cooperation Last Will Reconsiders the Salts
The Cooperative Last Will (CLW) will no longer call the suicide powder Middel X (sodium azide) “humane” reports the NRC‘s Kim Bos.
This is what chairman Rob van Doorn let us know.
The organization will change the description on its own website early next week.
“We need to publish a complete package insert that addresses all side effects,” Van Doorn says.
The CLW is making that decision after research by the journalistic collective Argos.
In the podcast series Dolle Mina‘s of Death, Argos examines the limits of assisted suicide and, in particular, the emergence and dispensing of Middel X.
Previous large-scale research by GGD Amsterdam and 113 Suicide Prevention, found that at least 172 people have died from similar powders since 2017.
Forensic physician Karen van den Hondel conducted the investigation with two colleagues and to do so read more than 100 autopsy reports, which describe the circumstances of someone’s death.
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CLW was founded in 2013 with the goal of bringing a humane method of taking one’s own life to market.
Within Dutch euthanasia laws, there was insufficient room for people who saw their lives as completed but did not want to wait for a doctor’s approval.
In September 2017, CLW presented Middel X on the TV program Nieuwsuur as a “readily available, inexpensive and humane substance” with which to end one’s own life.
Normally, the drug is used in laboratories.
Middel X was in the news a lot last year as several lawsuits played out from people who had provided the drug to others.
The largest case was against seven members of the Last Will Cooperative.
Their sentences were lower than the prosecution had demanded.
Four were acquitted of membership in a criminal organization and aiding suicide.
Two former board members were convicted, but received suspended prison sentences of twelve and four months.
Another defendant died naturally shortly before sentencing.
CLW had long been aware of possible side effects of Middel X.
In recent years, the organization emphasized that dying with the drug was different than “in a romantic movie,” then-chairman Jos van Wijk told NRC in 2021 .
“People rattle and gurgle. They have a struggle with it.”
But the emphasis was always on the humane death that Middel X would offer.
Even back in October 2017, according to Argos, Petra de Jong, then a CLW board member, acknowledged that serious symptoms could occur, such as “severe confusion, epileptic seizure, cardiac arrhythmia, rapid breathing and pulmonary edema.”
The document in which she wrote that was withheld for two years, according to Argos, and then published on the cooperative’s private website.
Although CLW says it will update the website soon, chairman Rob van Doorn still does not believe that Middel X causes inhumane death.
“Anyone who has ever been to a death themselves knows that it can be ugly. That sometimes there is screaming.
That’s why I think we should start calling it ‘a normal death’ from now on.
”The “new insert” being worked on should be on the website next week, Van Doorn said.
“I am of the opinion that you should make everything public, so that people can decide for themselves. I like absolute openness.”
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