At least 200 terminally-ill people from Australia, Britain, New Zealand and the United States have visited Mexico since 2001 to buy a euthanasia drug, a newspaper has reported. The Mexican newspaper Reforma cited Exit International - the mercy killing organisation run by Australian euthanasia advocate Phillip Nitschke that promotes Mexico as a destination for patients seeking to end their lives. "On the basis of Exit research, the best places to visit are the 20-odd (United States-Mexico) border crossings, from Tijuana in California through to Matamoros on the Gulf of Mexico," the group says on its website.
Australians in their 20s and 30s are killing themselves with the drug that euthanasia advocate, Dr Philip Nitschke, has promoted as the ''peaceful pill''. The Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine has found that 51 people in Australia have died from an overdose of Nembutal in the past 10 years. While the lethal barbiturate is only available for veterinarians to euthanise animals in Australia, Dr Nitschke has been helping people obtain it from Mexican vets and other overseas sources since the late 1990s.
Today's sentencing of a 50-year-old Mt Nebo man to three years' jail for assisting the suicide of an elderly friend is a significant milestone in Queensland's criminal legal history, a Queensland University of Technology (QUT) law expert has said. Associate Professor Ben White said Merin Nielsen was the first person in Queensland to be convicted of assisting a suicide. He was convicted of assisting the suicide of 76-year-old Brisbane man, Frank Ward, who died in 2009 after taking the drug Nembutal which Mr Nielsen procured for him in Mexico. In the Supreme Court this morning Justice Jean Dalton ruled Nielsen would serve six months of the three year sentence in prison. "The case will be used in future by judges considering how they should sentence similar cases," Professor White said. "It will be significant not only in Queensland but also in sentencing nationally as there are only relatively few cases of this type in Australia."