Dibs

The author of a new book advocating euthanasia is outraged that 45 copies of it have been seized by Customs at Brisbane airport in Australia. Medical doctor Philip Nitschke is a controversial figure in his home country, where he has founded a euthanasia group called Exit. Defying Australia’s anti-euthanasia laws, Nitschke has personally assisted several people in ending their lives and provided how-to advice to many more. He made national headlines in 2002 when a 70-year-old woman named Nancy Crick — whom Nitschke had diagnosed with a recurrence of bowel cancer — took a lethal dose of barbiturates and was dead twenty minutes later in the presence of over a dozen friends and family whom she had gathered for the occasion. It turned out that Crick was not terminally ill at all. According to ABC.net, Nitschke is now comparing the seizure of his book The Peacefull Pill Handbook to “the burning of literature in Germany during the Nazi era.” Can a day not go by when someone doesn’t compare something to Nazis and Hitler? It rather cheapens the actual Holocaust. Nitschke is perhaps best known for devising and providing what he calls an “exit bag” to those who want to die — it’s a simple plastic bag with an elasticized opening, designed to suffocate the wearer.