Zürich: no to assisted-suicide "in my backyard"

Residents call a halt to assisted suicide in Swiss housing block


· Dignitas forced to move after locals complain
· In nine years building saw 700 people end their lives

Kate Connolly in Berlin
Friday July 13, 2007
The Guardian


It is a familiar sight for the residents of Zurich's Getrud Strasse number 84. Three or four times a week, during office hours, an ambulance pulls up in front of the unassuming dirty grey housing block. A body is carried out of the building in a charcoal-coloured sack. Often the tenants meet it propped up vertically in the lift on the way down, or in the narrow corridor, before it is placed in the vehicle and driven away.You think to yourself - that's it, it's over, until the next one," Laurenz Styger, head of the residents' association for the Wiedikon, a working-class district, said.
This is the headquarters of Dignitas, the organisation located on the fourth floor of number 84, a normal housing block. For nine years it has been the centre of Switzerland's alleged "suicide tourism". A total of 700 people have taken their lives here.

But now the residents have called a halt to the practice. A passionate "not in my backyard" plea to the authorities has resulted in Dignitas being ordered to move out, after scores of people left the area in protest and other residents complained.

Gloria Sonny, 55, who has lived in the building for six years - or, as she calls it, "under the same roof as death" - headed a petition calling for Dignitas to go. "I'm not against assisted suicide," she said, "but this is a place where people live. It's the wrong place to help people die. I don't see why I should pay with the quality of my life because Switzerland deals with the topic in a more liberal way than other countries."

She said the building smelt of death and that she suffered nightmares that she would be forced into one of the "death flats" against her will and made to drink a fatal cocktail.

Another resident, Karin Bolliger, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung: "Once I saw a coffin in the backyard."

Others, like Priscilla Ommerli, have resorted to altering their household tasks so as not to "bump into a corpse while I'm taking out the rubbish".

The residents complain that not only do they have to confront death on a daily basis, but that their road is blocked by the high number of police cars, ambulances and other vehicles that turn up at the house. An after-school club in the same road has also complained that its children are habitually exposed to the sight of the bodies being removed.

"The dying arrive in a taxi, an ambulance or a wheelchair and you think: "In two or three hours they'll be carried out in a coffin," Mr Styger said. "It gives me the shivers just to think about it."

As well as its offices on the fourth floor, Dignitas occupies a flat on the ground floor of the block. Once the patients are in the yellow-walled bedrooms, with chiffon curtains, decorated with flowers and paintings of jungles or mountainscapes, they are given a glass to drink containing a lethal dose of the barbiturate natrium pentobarbital, which sends them into a deep sleep and kills within a few minutes.

The majority of patients seeking assisted suicide come from Germany, and the second largest group from Britain, according to Dignitas.

Dating from 1942, Swiss law allows anyone to help another person to die as long as a doctor has been consulted and the motives of the parties are not considered sinister. Belgium, the Netherlands and Oregon in the US are the only other places to permit assisted suicide, but the rate in Switzerland is by far the highest.

While the practice is largely tolerated in the country, it is not uncontroversial.

The general secretary of Dignitas, Ludwig Minelli, has repeatedly courted controversy over the years, most recently with his proposal to introduce a helium gas method of dying, involving a gas canister and a plastic bag. The new method would circumvent the problem of obtaining a doctor's prescription for natrium pentobarbital, a barbiturate usually restricted to veterinary medicine.

Mr Minelli declined to speak about the row with the residents yesterday. But through his lawyer he said he was "looking for new quarters". If he failed to find a new site, he said, the organisation would "set up in a caravan", giving Dignitas the freedom to move around.

Process

After a consultation and payment of a €3,500 fee, people wishing to die through assisted suicide are helped to obtain a prescription for the barbiturate natrium pentobarbital. They are taken to a small room by a "suicide assistant" and given 15 grams of the powder in water. The patient falls into a deep sleep within a matter of minutes. After around 15 minutes breathing gets shallower. The assistant checks for a pulse and shines a lamp on to the patient's pupils before confirming death. The police, prosecutor, pathologist and undertaker are then called to the scene so that death by suicide can be officially confirmed and recorded and the body taken away.