2023-07-18 23:56:10
A first in the Netherlands. According to a police investigation, Alex S. has supplied 1,600 packets of a deadly cocktail of toxic substances since 2018. The 30-year-old is sentenced to 3 and a half years in prison, including a year and a half suspended. “This is the first time in the Netherlands that someone has been prosecuted for providing assisted suicide drugs on a large scale,” they added.
He prepared postal parcels containing the suicidal means, guidelines for its use and an anti-emetic. “Each package contained 2 or 3 capsules: a lethal dose” for which there was no antidote, according to the district court of ‘s-Hertogenbosch (South).
A “terrifying” death
According to the judges, those who took “drug X” did not all die a pleasant death, they added. Relatives “described distress and panic, leading to a horrific death”. The number of deaths “can potentially be multiplied by 160”, the judges said, concerned about the number of “kits” provided.
Alex S. considered “helping people”, according to the judgment. “The defendant treated the lives of others with great levity and undermined the value of human life,” the judges said.
The practice of euthanasia strictly supervised in the Netherlands
If the Netherlands became in 2002 the first country to authorize euthanasia, it remains strictly supervised and imposes the intervention of a doctor. The patient must be lucid when he makes the request and feel unbearable suffering due to a disease deemed incurable by at least two doctors.
Euthanasia can only be performed by a doctor who administers a lethal dose, while patients can take the drug only if it has been provided by a doctor. According to the judges, by selling these toxic kits, the convict “thus undermined the practice of euthanasia applicable in the Netherlands”, they added.
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