There is a certain irony, not to say hypocrisy, in the fact that a man called Kenneth Law, with a history of various occupations, should have been tried in Canada on a charge of having assisted 14 suicides (though he assisted many more, over 70 in England and Wales alone). For Canada is one of the great proponents and practitioners of that enlightened practice. For example, one in 12 deaths in Quebec is now by assisted suicide.

Law’s crime, then, was fundamentally that of not having followed procedure, a crime than which for a modern state none is greater. He cut out the bureaucratic middleman, so to speak, by selling a fatal substance (when taken in sufficient quantity) through the post to those who wanted to die. He was guilty of lèse-bureaucraté. 

There are two legs to the argument in favor of assisted suicide. The first is that it will reduce the unnecessary and futile suffering of those very near to death. The second is that it will increase the sovereignty of human beings over their own bodies. It extends the realm of choice and therefore (say the proponents) of freedom.

It is true that there are some ways of dying whose suffering cannot be fully alleviated. But if it is suffering that is to be reduced by assisted suicide, it makes no sense—indeed it is illogical—to confine it to the dying. There are many forms of chronic suffering, and intolerability is in the mind of the sufferer. What is intolerable to you might not be intolerable to me, and vice versa. Even in the worst of conditions, there is variation in subjective intolerability, and there is no instrument that will measure it as weight or hemoglobin can be measured.

In fact, the younger a chronic sufferer without hope of remediation is put down, the more suffering is avoided. And why, after all, should the dying have all the best deaths? This is the purest prejudice and discrimination in favour of some and thus, inevitably, against others.

As to the increase in humanity’s sovereignty over its own body (if that is what assisted suicide is), this would be immeasurably increased if the right to assisted suicide were extended to everyone, sight unseen as it were. To have to give a reason for wanting to die is already a limitation of such sovereignty, indeed an assault on it. Why should anyone be required to give a reason to a busy-bodying bureaucracy for wanting to end his or her life? Sufficient unto the day is the desire thereof. 

Now it might be argued that everyone already has the capacity to end his life: He has, for example, only to stop drinking for a few days. Patients already have the right to refuse treatment, however lifesaving, if they are adults in their right minds (and we assume that desiring to die is not in itself proof of not being in their right mind). Therefore, all that anyone has to do to end his or her life is to refuse to drink or accept nasogastric or intravenous administration of fluids.

To die in this way is not anyone’s idea of fun, of course, but the discomfort of doing so is easily alleviated by simple measures and does not require anyone to assist in bringing about the death. But assisted suicide is much neater and cleaner. The precise time of death can be controlled to within a very small margin (it has always astonished me that capital punishment in the United States carried out by means of lethal injection, a simple technique, should have been so often subject to technical error), and time and effort, to say nothing of money, will be saved by it. 

The economic benefits of assisted suicide for all, especially of the old, are very considerable. Millions of people who are now uselessly and unproductively lingering, while not having a particularly good time of it, and could be inexpensively deprived of their inherent parasitism by comparatively simple means. A campaign could be mounted to increase assisted suicide: posters, for example, with a celebrity pointing to passers by and saying, “Your country doesn’t need YOU!” And perhaps a small inducement (smaller, of course, than the cost of their continued existence) could be offered the old to shuffle off, with all due assistance, this mortal coil. 

Think of the pension payments saved! Think of the relief of the legatees of the voluntarily deceased! Think of all those carers for the old who could be transferred to more productive occupations (assuming there be any to transfer them to)!

Law, then, was no criminal, but a prophet without honour in his own or any other country. In time, he will surely come to be seen as a pioneer, even as a liberator of mankind. 

He was also a hero of the free market, while at the same time not responsible for anyone’s death (as he himself pointed out). Do we blame the train company if a man throws himself in front of a train, even if the train company knows for certain that someone, somewhere, will act thus? All Law ever did was send some chemicals through the post: Caveat emptor! The decision of the recipient to take a fatal dose was not his; it remained that solely of the purchaser. If I stab someone to death with a carving knife, it is not the fault of the kitchen supply company. 

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Indeed, it is even possible that Law prevented distressing scenes of attempted suicide by other means, for example that of someone who throws himself from a high building on to the ground below. Recently, indeed, I have twice been on a train journey much delayed by a suicide on the line. Train drivers are understandably traumatized, often for the rest of their lives, by such deaths—deaths which they feel they ought to have prevented but which they were powerless to avert. And all this, to say nothing of the inconvenience and anxiety caused to hundreds of people! 

For obvious reasons, the disruption to services by a suicide on the line is not just to that of the train involved, but to other, later trains. If even only one of Law’s so-called victims would otherwise have thrown him- or herself in front of a train (men are much more likely to do so than women), think of all the trouble he saved, to say nothing of lost productivity averted!  

One day, when they have taken down the statues to people like Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister, they will erect one to Kenneth Law, pioneer of choice and efficiency.