Video guide to suicide is shown on television

A video on how to commit suicide is being shown on public access cable television in Oregon, United States, sparking widespread controversy. The 34 minute video describes the most effective means of committing suicide and lists the most useful suicide drugs with required dosages and in order of potency.

Tips on how to obtain the required drugs illegally are included, and recipes for a lethal but palatable "drug pudding" are given. Viewers are also shown how to wear a mask or plastic bag to ensure adequate suffocation.

The video is the brainchild of Derek Humphry, a veteran British journalist, founder of the Hemlock Society (a US "right to die" organisation), and author of the book Final Exit, a guide to taking one's life for terminally ill people.

It is being shown on a non-profit, public cable television channel in Springfield and Eugene, Oregon, the only state in the United States where doctor assisted suicide is legal. Yet even in Oregon, where the Death with Dignity Act was approved in 1994 and reaffirmed in 1997, the video has ruffled feathers. Opponents of the video call it irresponsible, and they are worried that it will give depressed people the means of acting on their depression and somehow give the act of suicide a seal of approval as a legitimate means of dealing with one's problems.

Moreover, they worry about the effect it might have on vulnerable children and teenagers.

Even staunch supporters of Oregon's Death with Dignity Act oppose the video. Barbara Coombs Lee, executive director of Compassion in Dying, an organisation dedicated to providing terminally ill people with adequate pain relief and the right to die, called the video "irresponsible." She said: "The video's intended audience, terminally ill individuals, deserves better than hardware store paraphernalia and a secretive death with no family members present."

Deborah Josefson, San Francisco


studentBMJ 2000;08:45-88 March ISSN 0966-6494