Switzerland is the world’s suicide tourism capital. Indeed, for the price of transportation and about $11,000, you can be helped to make yourself dead at one of the country’s notorious suicide clinics.

Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland if not done for a “selfish” purpose and if the soon-to-be-dead person has decisional capacity. (Why charging more than $10,000 to help make one dead isn’t considered “selfish” is beyond me, because it sure ain’t altruistic!)

It used to be that each such assisted suicide had to be at least cursorily investigated by the authorities. But now, that minimal protection has been gutted in one canton and the costs of what’s left of oversight passed on to the suicidal deceased. From the Swissinfo.ch story:

The camera image shows a person lying on a bed. They reach out to a drip and open a valve. At once, the lethal dose of sodium pentobarbital starts flowing into their blood.

Such videos are at the core of an agreement, unprecedented in Switzerland, that was signed late last year between canton Solothurn and the right-to-die organisation Pegasos. Under the new arrangement, if Pegasos provides video evidence that the suicide was carried out by the person themselves, as well as additional information, then the authorities do not send in a legal and medical team to investigate the death.

Instead of a full investigation, the body is briefly examined at a medical institute:

This reduces the costs of the post-mortem investigation to between CHF1,000 ($1,110) and CHF2,000 per case. What is more, the bill is paid by the right-to-die organisation, and therefore ultimately by the person who wanted to die.

Saving taxpayers’ money is seen as essential because the number of assisted suicides is expected to increase dramatically in the next ten years:

Lately, over 1,700 Swiss residents a year have committed assisted suicide. In addition, over 500 people from abroad travel to Switzerland for this purpose each year. And demand is increasing: observers expect the number of assisted suicides in Switzerland to double by 2035.

We live in nihilistic times in the West in which suicidal people are increasingly abandoned to lethal assistance, with steps continually taken to make death easier to access, under ever-lessening oversight, to ever-expanding cadres of the eligible. Unless we change our cultural course, eventually we will reach the final destination: a fundamental right to death on demand.