October 5, 2025

What sort of right is it if I can’t make it real?

The events of recent months show one thing.

It is categorically, absolutely not enough for the State to only be concerned with allowing end of life options for the terminally ill.

A good death is everybody’s right.

For heavens sake, this is 2025. Why is this fact so hard for governments around the world to appreciate?

What is it about the pro-life – anti-choice lobby who have the ear of governments?

One could suggest that this is the deep state at work. But let us put such conspiracy theories aside.

Let us concentrate on what we do know and what is obvious before our eyes.

As this, in itself, shows us the road ahead and the work that is to be done.

The French Connection

Back in Covid times, the French police conducted simultaneous raids across the length and breadth of France, seizing Nembutal from the fridges and back sheds of the elderly.

Most of those visited handed their precious drugs over. Some denied any knowledge.

Some, like Claude Hury, had their homes invaded and were taken into custody at the height of the epidemic.

(Never let the threat of a deadly virus stand in the way of French justice!)

In all, over 10 activists from Ultime Liberte were taken into custody. Dozens of bottles of Nembutal were seized.

Most were aged 60 – 80 years.

Le Figaro reported at the time that all had worked in the ‘intellectual and medical professions’ and all were members of Ultime Liberte.

Ultime Liberte is a breakaway group from ‘ADMD’. (ADMD is a group which has assumed the relatively conservative middle ground in the French end of life rights movement.)

This week, the case has drawn to a close for the UL members who have been prosecuted.

The prosecutor, Dorothée Branche, has requested suspended prison sentences for all those involved.

Branche has reserved her harshest sentence request for former UL President, Claude Hury.

For Claude, Branche has requested 18 months suspended.

And what for? Who exactly will this teach a lesson to?

Ultime Liberte would argue that the State has failed elderly people who seek to control their own deaths.

The legal barriers placed in their way must be challenged.

Sure, suicide is no longer a crime in France. But if you cannot get Nembutal – the best end of life drug – then how do you suicide?

This is the question to end all questions, just ask the Dutch.

Alexis Sciard / IP3; Paris, France, September 15, 2025 – Protesters gather in support of 12 assisted suicide activists at the opening of their trial, accused of helping people in France to illegally obtain a euthanasia drug, outside the Tribunal Judiciaire courthouse in Paris.

Middel X in the Netherlands

In April 2024, six members of the Dutch group Cooperatie Laatste Wil (CLW) received suspended prison sentences for their role in the distribution of end of life substance Middel X (sodium azide).

The verdicts follow charges from October 2022 when the Dutch prosecutor announced his intention to charge 10 CLW members for jointly maintaining a system whereby a means of suicide was provided.

However, in contrast to the prosecutions in France of Ultime Liberte members, the Dutch substance at the heart of the matter is (and remains) entirely legal to purchase, possess and use.

The sticking point was its distribution: the Dutch prosecutor argued that CLW had ‘a clandestine dispensary’ for the giveing out Middel X within its membership, and that this ‘hindered the government in protecting weak and vulnerable persons from themselves’!

CLW would go on to say

In the Netherlands, you have the freedom to arrange a lot yourself: who you marry, where you live… You can even decide down to the euro cent what happens to your money when you die. But you don’t get to decide your own death.

We are currently involved in court cases that mainly show how outdated the current legislation around assisted suicide is.

The Last Will Cooperative is fighting for new legislation so that you can choose for a dignified end of life when the time is right. Because the right to self-determination applies to your whole life, including death.

Trouble in Paradise on the Gold Coat (Australia)

At the September 2025 Exit workshop on Australia’s Gold Coast (an area also known as ‘God’s waiting room’ due to the exponential number of elderly retirees who live in this part of the country), an Exit member by the name of Brett Taylor announced that he had Nembutal for sale and to please see him after the meeting.

According to those present, a trail of elderly ladies followed Taylor from the building after Exit called security to eject him.

Such is the treasured status of the drug that many will go to any lengths, including wilfully and openly breaking the law, to get their hands on the stuff.

Background

For some years now, Exit was aware that Brett Taylor was a ‘man about town’. Like many others on the Gold Coast he could be described as a hustler. If you are going to start a get rich quick plan, the odds are you will do it on the Gold Coast.

What Exit didn’t know was that Taylor had recently established a charity which, on paper, was intended to supply copious quantities of Nembutal for beached whales.

What the police allege the charity was really about, was the selling of Nembutal to the elderly, including to Exit members.

Indeed, it seems that Exit was infiltrated by Taylor (and others) in order to establish a distribution network.

On the one hand you have to stand back and marvel at the ambitious nature of the scheme. Beached whales, cmon!

On the other, it is hard to ignore the recklessness of such obvious and blatant lawbreaking.

Buying Nembutal over the counter in South American countries such as Peru (cost price ~ $50) is one thing. Selling it for an alleged $10,000 at Exit meetings back home in Australia is next league.

Taylor’s next court appearance is Tuesday 7 October 2025.

Exit awaits the media reporting to find out the next twist and turn of the case.

Summary

The one common theme that emerges from each of these countries is that older people are demanding end of life options.

While Australia and the Netherlands both have medical model end of life laws.

By this we mean a law that says you can get help to have a good death, as long as you are seriously ill (terminally ill in Australia) or are suffering unbearably.

In France there is currently no legal option, although Switzerland is a neighbouring country.

And this trend is bigger than any one country.

It is not enough for end of life rights to be reserved only for the very sick and the almost dead.

Human rights apply to everyone equally, as long as that person has mental capacity and thus can make a decision rationally.

All of which raises the question of ‘is the future Swiss?’

The Swiss Way?

In September 2024, Exit International provided Swiss group ‘The Last Resort’ with the 3D-printed Sarco.

The Sarco would go on to be used in Switzerland for the first time on 24 September by a seriously ill American woman.

While ‘Ann’ was seriously ill, under Swiss law she didn’t have to be. And this is the point.

This is because under the Swiss Criminal Code, anyone can help anyone else to suicide as long as the person:

a) has mental capacity

b) is an adult

c) does the action that brings about death themselves

and as long as those assisting are altruistic in their motives.

Each of these criteria was fulfilled when the Sarco was used.

But regardless of the method that is used in Switzerland, the fact is that in this country, a good death is treated as a fundamental human right.

Anyone can have access and anyone can help

There is no black market trade in Nembutal in Switzerland; despite the fact it is the means of death in 99.9% of the assisted suicides that occur in that country annually.

Assisted suicide in Switzerland is performed every day yet life goes on in the streets of Zurich and Basel just the same.

If there is moral panic in Switzerland over people getting help to die, it is to do with the number of foreigners who fly in.

People who have no choice in their home countries.

France, the Netherlands and Australia (and others like the UK) should all be looking to Switzerland to see what universal end of life human rights look like.

Switzerland doesn’t always get it right but on the issue of human rights and assisted suicide they remain the sine quo non!

Philip Nitschke cruising Lake Lucerne