Key Points
The device is designed to look as if the person inside were embarking on a journey, says its inventor, the Australian right-to-die activist Philip Nitschke..
His efforts to make deadly drugs more accessible, whether the people who want them are terminally ill or not, caused his medical license to be temporarily stripped in 2014, a book he wrote to be banned, and for people to publicly blame him for the death of their loved ones...
With the Sarco pod, Nitschke proposes taking the assessment process out of the hands of medical professionalswhom he calls gatekeepersand eventually delegating the task to machines..
But in Nitschkes adopted home country of the Netherlands, the Sarco reflects an ongoing debate about assisted suicides place in a medical system that dictates only people facing unbearable suffering or an incurable condition can proceed..
After Australias Northern Territory became the worlds first jurisdiction to legalize the process, Nitschke was preoccupied with the risk people would see him or his colleagues as some evil doctor delivering lethal injections to a moribund patient who didnt know what was happening, he says.. Thats how he came up with the euthanasia machine he called Deliverance, which connected a laptop with a syringe..
