By D. J. Webb
It is awkward to write about suicide. The subject affects us all emotionally, as we all recoil from the suggestion that someone should voluntarily end his life. Confronted with someone who wished to do so, any decent person would seek to talk him round, calm him down, point to the good points about being alive, reason with him that being dead has no good points.Yet liberty doesn’t really mean anything if you are not at liberty to end it all.
We have a Christian heritage in this country. We have traditionally been taught that suicide is one of the greatest sins, something that merits a one-way ticket to hell. Suicide was the path chosen by Judas Iscariot after betraying Christ. The Church of England, if it followed the instructions in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, ought to refuse to bury those who “lay violent hands on themselves” (such stipulations are no longer observed in the CofE).
I’m not suggesting that there is anything good about suicide. Neither am I denying the validity of the traditional view that suicide was immoral. But I am suggesting that these issues have nothing to do with the legal and regulatory framework that ought to surround suicide.
For a start, poisons used to be available in the chemist’s. Before the First World War you had to sign the Poison Book to purchase poison, and many of Agatha Christie’s novels revolve around the fact that suspects of poisonings had recorded a purchase of poison at the chemist’s.
Clearly, poisons can be used to commit murder, as well as suicide. However, knives, blowtorches and lengths of rope can also be used for such nefarious purposes, and are still available without licence.
It is currently difficult to buy large quantities of certain drugs. It is particularly annoying to be restricted to buying only 2 packets of 16 Ibuprofen tablets. Who in this country hasn’t ever run out of painkillers and cursed the regulators who determined we shouldn’t be allowed to buy tubs of 1,000 Ibuprofen capsules at once?
In the end, suicide is a valid option, and there are people who face lives of humiliation for personal or other reasons and who would, not entirely irrationally, prefer not to undergo the experience of trying to survive in circumstances felt by them to be hopeless.
We can mention assisting suicide here. It is illegal to assist a suicide of, for example, a “locked-in” disabled person, who can only just lie there. It would be absurd to regale someone with locked-in syndrome with all the “moral” reasons why he has to just lie there for a few more decades because it is wrong to do anything else. I have previously written on jury nullification, and, although I do believe assisting suicide should be a crime, I do support the role of juries in clarifying the application of such laws in individual circumstances, and if juries have proved reluctant to convict, their verdicts should be regarded as forming a valid part of our common law.
There is considerable uncertainty over what drugs are required to commit suicide: many “attempted overdoses” are no better thought-out than cramming as many sleeping tablets into one’s mouth as possible and seeing what happens. The results may be unpleasant and result in hospitalization, but often not death. Only a doctor or pharmacologist knows what drugs in what doses are required to be certain of death, and would-be suicides would be seeking, if possible, a cocktail of drugs that will produce a painless death. Death by hanging, strangulation or suffocation is currently the main method of suicide in this country; most such people should have been able to choose less painful ways to depart this life.
Drugs like Ibuprofen should be available to adults in unlimited quantities. I do feel that people who are suicidal and who have made their minds up should be able to get a “peaceful pill” prescription from their doctors, with doctors advised to offer counselling if the patient seems interested, but not to seek to deter someone who has already made his mind up.
Suicide has relevance to libertarians, because much discussion of the boundaries of liberty relates to Robinson Crusoe-style arguments of the benefits of organized society. We all accept some limits on freedom as a result of living in an organized society. Yet such considerations ignore the fact that, for many, the benefits of living in a society such as England may not outweigh a desire not to continue with life at all. All sorts of government policy decisions affect people’s appreciation of the value of their lives. Cuts to benefits have led to suicides. Government funding of family break-up also ruins many people’s lives. Anarcho-tyranny–the process whereby the state bears down hard on the law-abiding or on traditionalists whose “crimes” are political (“racism”, etc.) , while refusing to deter real crime–also destroys people’s lives. Having children taken into care for no good reason is another potential legitimate reason for suicide.
It clearly is not the case that the current way of running society allows all sufficient liberty to enjoy life and the pursuit of happiness. Suicide by a physically healthy person is a standing rebuke to society as a whole, and one that should give us all pause. Libertarians can take up many of these issues in the form of calling for people to be given great latitude to run their own lives. I have made clear that I support land taxation in a way that would reduce effective peonage of many. There is less spirit of community in a multi-cultural society, which I believe also devalues the lives of many.
Reading the Samaritans’ 2015 suicide report, I note that there were 6,233 successful suicides in the UK in 2013, a rate of 11.9 per 100,000 people. The breakdown is 19 per 100,000 for men and 5.1 per 100,000 for women. Male suicides are at the highest rates since 2001, with the highest rates for men aged between 45 and 59 (25.1 per 100,000). Suicide rates in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are higher than for England. Suicides of men in their 40s in the Celtic fringe countries are all around 40-45 per 100,000. There is also evidence that suicide is more common in depressed economic areas such as the North-east of England than in London.
Also alarming is the evidence that English people (dubbed “white British” in the jargon of our race-obsessed rulers) are much more likely than members of the ethnic minorities to commit suicide. It’s difficult to get hard figures, as the government claims in responses to freedom-of-information requests to have no statistics on the ethnic breakdown of suicide, but a 2003 report showed that among those aged over 35, white people were four times more likely to commit suicide than those of Afro-Caribbean origin. I put this down to the confidence of the ethnic communities in this country. Other data, including school exam results, show that English people are being marginalized. Clearly, the English are a large demographic group, and a highly stratified one, but the overall difference in the suicide rates is large enough to be worthy of comment. Disadvantaged white people are also more likely to feel shame as a result of low incomes or living conditions than ethnic people who are more used to making the most of life in disadvantaged situations (for example, in their home countries, or upon arrival in England).
I conclude that there is a right to suicide–a fundamental liberty–but that libertarians should also be interested in why society no longer works for many white middle-aged men. For every one person who commits suicide, there is a large penumbra of people who might do so if pills to do so painlessly were easily available. There will always be people who can’t cope in society, but there is something dysfunctional about our society, which ought to be organized to allow all (and not just the majority) to flourish within their abilities.
