Not going to lie...interested. Not for today obviously, but having survived heart issues requiring major surgery, and cancer, I have come to appreciate the option to be able to go on my own terms and before extensive suffering.
I find it quite interesting that we can provide someone with a calm and peaceful death, but prisons in many countries can't do any better than "ouch that looks pretty terrible" to "oh my god that's torturous!"... Nevermind the morals around whether the state should kill someone.
I'd rather people kill themselves cleanly, painlessly and successfully, that fail to do it, suffer and be made prisoners of others more than they were already of themselves.
If you are alone in an apartment you wouldn't want to accidentally flood your whole apartment with nitrogen after you die, it could be dangerous to anyone who finds you. Similarly it wouldn't be good to release nitrogen everywhere with neighbors so close.
On the one hand I think this is a humane option that people should have during palliative care.
However, I am also reasonably confident this will be used to facilitate capital punishment as well. I have mixed feelings about the use of the death penalty, but generally this does seem like a preferable solution to the other available methods so maybe that too is a small mercy in of itself.
Well for one thing because this (see link) was already a national news story earlier this month. So, it isn't exactly that far of a leap in logic for these suicide booths to be replicated for use in capital punishment in places where it is still utilized, like the United States.
One could even argue that it makes the process less morally objectionable, and therefore might make it harder to justify banning the practice. I am simply playing devil's advocate here because this is precisely the kind of logic that is already pervasive in US politics when justifying otherwise morally objectionable decisions.
The article is weird - the title is what it is, but there's barely anything inside of it that mentions anything about it being legal, except for a single sentence, with the rest of the article just saying how it works. Digging a bit deeper (by looking up the pod on a search engine lol), it doesn't seem that the pod is actually approved or made legal or anything, but it was apparently supposed to be made open-source in 2019, in 2021 the creator only sought legal advice about the pod and after that - no more news. Maybe I missed something though.
When universal healthcare takes care of assisted suicide you don't need pods. In Spain either the doctor will administer the drugs in hospital or you can take them home and do it yourself. At home method consists of drinking pentobarbital solution.
I had a friend who's niece, an American, was able to travel to use these. It was a difficult path to research and get these services, as well as expensive, but it definitely helped them a lot.
"I’ve always wanted to remove the role [and the] need for professional people to prescribe difficult drugs to use."
You probably will still need a doctor to declare death and in case anything fails. The drugs are not difficult to use. You just take a pill to suppress vomiting and after an hour drink 100ml of liquid. If anything goes wrong the doctor will inject drugs while your still unconscious. Maybe some people would prefer the pod but for me it looks like a gimmick.