“I see [technology] It is equally important to democratize the process and demedicalize it,” says Nitschke, adding that Sarco does not rely on heavily regulated drugs to work. “So all of these questions are ways to make the process more fair. »

In Switzerland, where Sarco has been used, Nitschke’s arguments on access to assisted suicide are not particularly radical. Residents and visitors can already access assisted suicide even if they are not terminally ill. But in Nitschke’s adopted country of the Netherlands, Sarco reflects an ongoing debate over the place of assisted suicide in a medical system that dictates that only people facing unbearable suffering or incurable illness can proceed. Nitschke also believes that the promise of machines is to take the burden off the doctor. “I’m passionate about everyone’s right to have access to assisted dying, but I don’t see why they should make me a murderer,” says Nitschke, who graduated from medical school in 1989.

Theo Boer, who spent nine years assessing thousands of assisted suicide cases for the Dutch government, disagrees that gatekeepers are a bad thing. “We can’t leave this to the market,” he says, “because it’s dangerous.” He is, however, more sympathetic to Nitschke’s view that doctors should not be burdened by emotional stress in countries where assisted suicide is legal. “Even though what he is doing is strange, it contributes to the much-needed debate in the Netherlands about whether or not we need this strong involvement of doctors,” says Boer, now a professor of medical ethics. health care at the Theological University of Groningen. .

“We can’t put the doctor in charge of solving all our problems,” he says.

For three decades, Nitschke has been an agitator in the right-to-die debate. “He’s a provocateur,” says Michael Cholbi, professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and founder of the International Association for the Philosophy of Death and Dying. Cholbi is skeptical that Sarco will ever be standardized, but he believes Nitschke’s creation, while it seems irresponsible to some, raises important questions. “It’s trying to catalyze a perhaps difficult conversation about people’s rights to access anti-suicide technologies,” he says.

Now 77, Nitschke first explored the idea of ​​delegating machine-assisted suicide in the 1990s. After Australia’s Northern Territory became the first jurisdiction in the world to legalize the process, Nitschke was concerned that people might see him or his colleagues as “an evil doctor administering lethal injections to a dying patient who didn’t know what was happening.” said.