Sorry I can’t stay longer, I’m hosting a party for visiting Paulists who don’t want to vote for McCain over on RWL.

That’s the view of many people who favour assisted suicide (voluntary euthanasia). Philip Nitschke’s group Exit International argues this places doctors in a unwarranted position of power, as assistance could just as easily be provided by someone who did not require approval by the state.

I agree with Exit International. Provided consent is informed and given freely, the choice of assistant should be for the individual to make, not the government.

Likewise, if a bunch of people dying from cancer wanted to advertise the fact that they grow and smoke marijuana to relieve their pain, that would sell the case for legalisation pretty effectively to the public.

Raids like this can only continue to outrage the public and perhaps shift the debate. Nitschke is a hero and these terminally ill criminals are political activists.

The thing is that being young and healthy doesn’t make you any less ’sovereign’ over your body than a sick and elderly person is. If suicide/assisted suicide is justified on the grounds of “individual sovereignty” then would seem to justify a lot of other things as well, some quite unpalatable.

No one wants a situation where people are objectively determined in some way as ‘worthy’ of death (and thus permitted to kill themselves) but the alternative, which is entirely subjective, doesn’t look very appealing to me either.