Photo by Youtube
World News
02.03.14
The Internet’s Deadly ‘Neknomination’ Drinking Game
A
bizarre new craze called “neknomination” is being blamed for the deaths
of two young men in Ireland over the weekend amid fears the game could
spread worldwide.
An Irish judge, Paul Carney, added his voice to the furor this afternoon when he told a court during a sentencing for a rape which took place when the offender was drunk, “If the current Internet drinking contest takes hold, it is going to result in a tsunami of homicide and rape prosecutions coming for this court”.
The dangerous craze—dubbed “neknomination” by the creators of a Facebook group with over 16,000 likes—is believed to be behind the deaths of a 22 year-old DJ found dead at his Dublin home on Saturday morning after taking part in drinking games the previous night and of a 19 year-old amateur sportsman who drowned after jumping into a swollen river following the downing of a drink as part of a “neknomination” challenge in the Irish countryside on Saturday night.
The brother of 19-year-old Jonny Byrne, from County Carlow, posted an emotional message on Facebook saying, “This neck nomination shit has to stop right now. My young 19-year-old brother died tonight in the middle of his nomination. He thought he had to try and beat the competition and after he downed his pint he jumped into the river. If people have any decency and respect they will refrain from any of this stupid neck nomination shit.”
He also changed his profile page to say “Stop ‘Neknomination’ before it’s too late. Share this.”
His father Joe said, “I’m appealing to everyone who is associated with this to please stop. It cost my son his life because of a dare and I don’t want to see anybody else in the same situation, because it has destroyed our family.”
A senior Irish government official, Communications Minister Pat Rabbitte, today called on Facebook to take down the ‘neck nomination’ groups and described the online drinking contest as a “stupid and silly game” with possibly “tragic consequences.”
“Firstly the responsibility is with young people who are falling for a foolish and stupid ruse that can have devastating consequences,” the minister said.
Rabbitte said that it would be “helpful” if Facebook intervened, adding that he may ask an advisory council to examine the ‘neknomination’ phenomenon.
The vast majority of the posts on the various pages are, in and of themselves, harmless. They simply show people drinking down cans or pints of beer in one go, often in unusual location such as while skiing or being held upside down.In a video posted on Ross’ Facebook page just over a week ago he is seen participating in a “Neck Nomination,” drinking a pint of what appears to be beer, before nominating two of his friends to continue the cycle.
However, after completing their nomination, the drinker then challenges friends to do the same thing. The game is believed to have started in Australia and New Zealand, but has quickly spread to Ireland due to the large number of Irish immigrants in Australasia.
The death of Byrne on Saturday night followed the discovery of the young Dublin DJ, 22-year-old Ross Cummins, whose body was found by friends early on Saturday morning. In a video posted on Ross’ Facebook page just over a week ago he is seen participating in a “Neck Nomination,” drinking a pint of what appears to be beer, before nominating two of his friends to continue the cycle.
Gardai are awaiting the results of post-mortem to establish the circumstances of his death, but it is being reported that he had been drinking spirits as part of a ‘Neknomination.”
Facebook has declined to take the pages down, arguing that while the pages are controversial they do not violate its rules.
In his video, Thomas, holding a rugby ball, turns to the camera and says: “People of Shrewsbury, if I could have your attention please. Dai Roberts thank you very much for my neck nomination, here it is.”
Thomas then drinks the pint in one, before turning back to the camera and saying: “I’d like to nominate Alan Roberts and Dean Pritchard, you have 24 hours, good luck.”
Thomas told a local paper: “Good innocent fun I say. But I would think that. Can’t say I agree with necking pints of Vodka etc as it can get dangerous. But there’s nothing wrong with a beer and a bit of semi-nakedness.”
Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty
Entertainment
02.03.14
Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Deadly ‘Ace of Spades' Heroin
Philip
Seymour Hoffman was found dead with a needle in his arm and envelopes
of heroin stamped with an Ace of Spades logo. This isn’t the first time
the brand has been in the news.
He left behind his longtime partner and creative collaborator, Mimi O'Donnell, and their three young children.
Watch the Reel Numbers behind Hoffman's celebrated career and untimely death, set to the trailer to his masterpiece, 'Capote.'
“Inside their car, detectives recovered $25,000 in cash and 5,000 packets of heroin packaged for street sales,” said Suffolk District Attorney Thomas Spota in a statement. “Just a few hours later, we executed a search warrant at Mr. Cruz’s property in Queens that we suspected of being his heroin distribution center. Inside the apartment at 32-15 112th Street in East Elmhurst, we found 2,000 bags of heroin packaged for individual sale, thousands of glassine envelopes, scales, a grinder used to cut the heroin with lactose, three loaded handguns and an AR-15 assault rifle stored in Mr. Cruz’s guitar case.” He added that they also found “packaging paraphernalia including scales, grinders and stamps these dealers used to label their product with names like Ace of Spades, Underdog, and Stop Snitching.”
Rivera later pled guilty to a 14-count indictment including murder in the second degree, robbery, drug and weapons possession, and conspiracy to distribute narcotics.
The Ace of Spades heroin has been spreading across the country, too. On July 7, 2011, 12 people in Wichita, Kansas, were indicted on heroin trafficking charges, including Jermaine Ward, 28, who was accused of establishing a heroin distribution center in Wichita from drugs obtained in New York. The busts came as part of a 13-month investigation dubbed Operation Resection.
“This investigation targeted a form of powdered heroin that is easily inhaled rather than injected,” U.S. Attorney Barry Grissom said in a statement. “This type of heroin is growing in popularity in urban and suburban areas across the country. As a result, the number of overdoses caused by heroin is growing nationally, too.”
An investigator’s affidavit in Ward’s arrest described a series of undercover purchases made by investigators, the last of which came on Oct. 5, 2010, when investigators “reported paying $2,000 for 98 bags of heroin. The bags were stamped with the word ‘Ace’ in the shape of an ace of spades.”
It seems that most of the heroin is hailing from Brooklyn and Queens. In Jan. 2012, after a yearlong probe, eight members of a drug ring were arrested for selling high-quality South American heroin at various hotels, diners, and electronic stores in Brooklyn and Queens. Users would cop the heroin from pushers in Brooklyn and Queens and then transport it to eastern Long Island, resulting in the arrests of 120 suspects, 90 of which hailed from Suffolk County. According to the New York Daily News, the heroin could be purchased from the Brooklyn and Queens pushers at an extreme discount—$400 for 100 packets, or around a third of the street price. More than 8,000 packets of heroin were eventually seized, and prosecutors came to dubbing the Long Island Expressway “heroin highway.”
The Ace of Spades heroin popped up again recently on Jan. 16 when authorities arrested Kendall Sistrunk, 49, with transporting heroin from New York to Stamford, Connecticut, for sale. Sistrunk would take the train to New York every day, purchase heroin at discount, and hide it in his buttocks on the ride back, where he’d sell it on the streets of Stamford at double the cost.
“Police found 44 bags of heroin with an Ace of Spades brand with a street value of about $900,” according to Capt. Richard Conklin, head of Stamford’s Narcotics and Organized Crime Squad.
Books
02.02.14
Armistead Maupin Bids Farewell to 'Tales'
As
he writes his final ‘Tales of the City’ novel, Armistead Maupin talks
sex, drugs, marriage, mortality – and lapping up Burning Man’s craziness
- with Tim Teeman.
As any Tales fan will know, Maupin is quite the storyteller. For just shy of fifty years we have followed the wild adventures, secrets, and tangled lives and loves of the residents of 28 Barbary Lane in San Francisco, even long after they left that address of wafting pot smoke and a familial comfort not – immediately at least - defined by biological ties. The books have sold over six million copies, and birthed a TV mini-series in the early 1990s starring Olympia Dukakis. Presiding over the fragmented brood in The Days of Anna Madrigal, this final novel, is the graceful and ever-mysterious landlady Anna Madrigal, who confronts her own past growing up a boy in a dusty Nevada whore-house.
Discussing Tales, it is hard but necessary to avoid spoilers because if you haven’t read them you should and fresh. You will, like so many before you, disappear for a few days or weeks as you turn page after page. Of this final book it is safe - and I hope temptingly vague enough - to say Mrs. Madrigal is the focus, ageing, thinking of her mortality, and much else. Michael/Mouse is settled with his younger husband Ben. The gang pitch up at the radical, hippyish Burning Man festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, where Shawna, Brian’s daughter, wants to conceive a child and Ben wants his partner to embrace his inner freak. Of course, we all know Michael embraced his inner freak pretty heartily back in the day.
It was “amazing to be able to Google ‘1930s whore-house menu’ and find out what a dry-job was,” laughs Maupin. “Penetration without ejaculation. It was the cheapest thing on the menu because it meant less mess for the girls.” Lysol, he discovered, was used as a spermicide, before later being considered as a feminine hygiene product, before it became the household product of today. “Imagine husbands coming home telling their wives they smelled as fresh as the kitchen floor,” he says.
Just like the characters in the new book, Maupin has been to Burning Man, in 2012 and 2013, with Christopher Turner, his husband, who (like Ben in the book to Michael) is younger than Maupin by almost thirty years. The men met on the street in San Francisco’s Castro, just like Michael and Ben do in Michael Tolliver Lives: Turner ran a website, Daddyhunt, for younger guys into older. Like Michael in the current book, “The first time I had to be dragged kicking and screaming, the notion of all that dust, heat and all-night raves,” Maupin admits of Burning Man.
However, he was a fast convert. Maupin found it “the most extraordinary visual experience, like a ‘Fellini carnival on Mars,’” he says, quoting what one character calls it in the book. “It’s completely otherworldly. It’s perfect for Tales, because it’s a week of nothing but serendipity and coincidence. They’ve perfected the hippie ideal. You can’t have a cell-phone. You let the world happen to you. It’s two miles across, you can see it from space, yet you feel completely alone. The people there genuinely seem to be making an effort to be sweet to one another.” Earplugs and he and Turner’s RV’s generator kept the all-night-rave sounds at bay.
Maupin’s camp, “Celestial Bodies”, “the gay-bourhood” as he calls it, gave away free Cosmopolitans, which as a mixture of vodka and Gatorade, “hydrated you and got you a bit fuzzy too.” In the “Comfort and Joy” tent were gay men enjoying “cuddling to out-and-out sex,” while at the “Astropups” camp men shower together outside.
“I liked wandering round the backstreets of the playa, stumbling across various adventures,” says Maupin, amazed that 60,000 people attended the event. “It’s a challenge to convey the phantasmagorical nature and size of it.” He was particularly taken by a giant octopus breathing fire and rolling its eyes and Dr. Scrote’s Circumcision Wagon and Calamari Hut: “I didn’t actually visit it. As an uncut person of English extraction, I found it off-putting.”
The Days of Anna Madrigal really is the last Tales novel, Maupin insists. “I’ve been accused of ‘Cher’s last tour’ syndrome, and there’ll be another. But there really won’t.” However, it won’t be the full end, he reveals to me. After nine books, the TV mini-series (which saw the first three books made), a musical (with songs by Jake Shears of the Scissor Sisters) and a BBC Radio 4 play, Maupin reveals he has just met with a TV executive in Los Angeles keen – finally – to make the remaining Tales novels into a television drama. “In (the non-Tales) Maybe The Moon, I wrote that in Hollywood you can die of expectation,” says Maupin, seeking to quell the fever of fans. “Nothing has been finalized yet.” Too late: we are excited.
Maupin grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, and became a writer after reading English at university and serving briefly in the military. “My father wanted me to be a lawyer,” he told me once. But the author preferred Fellini double bills and moved to San Francisco in 1971. “I whitewashed my family’s supposed so-called acceptance of me,” Maupin has said. “That notion they ‘forgave’ me but never accepted me.”“I autograph books for people who are blubbing so seriously I have to hold them in my arms.”
The Tales characters are not based on real people but “inner drives and aspects of myself”, he once said: “Mary-Ann my ambition, Mona my world-weariness. Michael was a romantic, Brian the sexual predator. Mrs. Madrigal was the wiser me.” Where Michael is HIV-positive, Maupin is not. “It was hard losing so many friends, it’s been heartbreaking, but I don’t think I have any survivor’s guilt,” he says of AIDS. “I strongly support anything that supports and honors our tribe, because so many of us aren’t here any more.”
Maupin is a proud radical, and goodness knows how many gay people he helped come out and feel comfortable about themselves. But his characters have always spoken as humans, not pamphlets, and on top of that experienced the kind of soapy tribulations – long-lost children, cults, a clip-on tie that spelled certain death - to make Dynasty look tame. He was way ahead of the pack writing about homosexuality, transgender issues, AIDS, feminism, race, celebrity culture, drugs, ageing, and the closet – but if that sounds a dry do-gooding list, the issues emerged from his characters first. They were also horny, flawed, and relentlessly imperiled. In 2012, Maupin was the deserved recipient of the Lamda Literary Foundation’s Pioneer Award.
The books began as columns in 1976, first in the alternative weekly newspaper Pacific Sun, then the San Francisco Examiner. “They were intimate from the very beginning, readers bought their imaginations to them every day,” Maupin says, who was motivated by the Wilkie Collins maxim: “Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em wait.” He had no idea “where I was going every day, I was flying by the seat of my pants. I came out in the character of Michael Tolliver.” Maupin’s mother noticed the characters kept reaching across tables to pat another character’s hand: “Me looking for reassurance that I was OK.”
With Tales such a radical salvo in itself, documenting the homophobia and gay milieus of another time, Maupin feels “exhilarated” where the fight for equality is now. “I wept at the Grammys wedding sequence. I was born when homosexuality was midway being a crime and mental illness. I’m pretty sure marriage equality will be a nationwide reality very soon. The radical Right can’t claim support any more for the idea that gay love isn’t equal to straight. Now is the time to help others elsewhere in the world like Nigeria and Russia, persecuted and driven to suicide by the nature of their love.”
Transgendered people are the next target of the Right, Maupin believes, “and they need our support. Mrs. Madrigal was me putting a transsexual in charge of Barbary Lane, challenging everyone’s notions of gender, to make people realize it is our hearts that make us, not the make-up of our bodies.”
The new book majors on mortality, and not just with Mrs. Madrigal. “It’s present,” Maupin says evenly of his own. “It just happens as you get older. I’ve always written about what I see happening around me. That’s pretty unavoidable. It wasn’t difficult to imagine how, as Anna puts it, to “leave like a lady.” He is happy to be turning 70, as “69 was always a number that made everyone chuckle in my high school class.” Maupin told me once a moving story of kissing his dying father on the forehead, reminding him he used to do the same as a boy after they watched Gunsmoke together, before he would go to bed. His father connected with Turner, Maupin told me, and said, “Take care of that boy,” which, Maupin said, was “an odd thing for a 92-year-old to say to a 34-year-old about his 62-year-old son.”
There’s a major health-related incident in the book, which echoes Maupin’s own life, but he reveals he is in good health now. “I hope to be here for many more years. I have the usual aches and pains. I remain deliriously in love with my husband, who celebrates being with an older man. I like my life very much. I feel blessed. I’ve made it this far and so many of my friends did not. I cannot complain about anything when so many others didn’t have the opportunity to live the rest of their lives.”
He still enjoys marijuana and sex. “It helps that I live with an expert,” says Maupin of the latter. “The intensity of sex is wonderful when you’re with someone you love and you become expert with each other.” He and Turner, whose devoted relationship is “very deep and loving,” are not monogamous. He laughs that he heartily concurs with Aunt Augusta, from Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt: “I have always preferred an occasional orgy to a nightly routine.”
The men married twice, once in Vancouver, and then in the garden of their friend Amy Tan’s home in Sausalito in 2008, before Proposition 8 passed and bought the shutters down on gay marriage in California. Maupin was glad he and Turner would be one of those couples who remained a legislative thorn in the side of those seeking to ban gay marriage, until ++Proposition 8[ http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jun/26/news/la-pn-prop-8-supreme-court-ruling-20130626]++ was finally struck down in 2013 and gay marriages resumed.
“God was not involved,” Maupin laughs of the men’s vows. “We tried to learn a lesson from every bad wedding we’ve been to. Everything was finger food and ice cream sandwiches.” He is proud that he and Turner have “created our own rules,” while also happy that – with the striking down of Prop 8 - Turner is “properly” protected under the law.
Both he and Turner have Republican family members, who love the men, while “feeling conflicted” because of the homophobia spouted by the party itself. “Many Republicans wish the issue would just quietly go away, our families among them.” Maupin will soon accept an honorary doctorate from the University of North Carolina, his home state rife with Tea Partiers. “I’m not sure they’ll let me give a speech, but it’s pretty symbolic in itself.”
Maupin and Turner left San Francisco in 2012, and moved to a village, five miles north of the “sort of funky and atmospheric” Santa Fe. Maupin misses the city, but still visits. He’s enjoying “living in this adobe house in the middle of the desert.” There’s no street life, he says, noting on his first visit to the main shopping area, he exclaimed, “Look, they have drag queens,” of the people in “buckskin, cowboy hats and lots of turquoise.” A friend corrected him: “Those aren’t drag queens, they’re Texans.” Shirley MacLaine lives on a nearby ridge, Ali MacGraw pops into their post office, “and we occasionally see Sam Shepard at the dog washing place.”
As for San Francisco, the city he loves and whose spirit he enshrined, Maupin says, “I feel, as most San Franciscans feel, that the tech industry has changed the city. There are high-rises and luxury condos on Market Street towards Castro. It’s becoming a city for rich people. Artists are being driven out at an alarming rate. Filmmakers and visual artists have long since left for cheaper climes. I feel a certain melancholy about the fact, but there’s not a whole lot you can do about it, and I don’t want to become that old fart complaining about change.” He and Turner may buy a pied-a-terre there, he says.
Most of all Maupin feels “blessed to be have been able to tell the same story for forty years. When people come to my signings, I autograph books for people who are blubbing so seriously I have to hold them in my arms. One woman told me that her dead brother had been buried with my books. It’s very hard to process that. Somehow my work has intersected with people’s lives at certain points and it’s deeply personal for them. It’s extremely gratifying and humbling. There’s nothing one can say about it that doesn’t sound pompous.” There was a time when he felt bitter, “like other writers that I hadn’t won a Pulitzer. But what I’ve been given is much stronger, forming a personal connection with people I don’t know. I try so hard to feel every moment of it.”
Next, Maupin is keen to “escape the discipline of writing. The notion of another two years, tapping two pages at a time, is abhorrent to me. I’m not driven that way. I like having written a book, I don’t like writing books.” That might surprise people, I say, his books are written with such warm fluency. “That fluency takes a long time,” Maupin says. “I spend a lot of time working on it. I can’t spill it out. I hone as I go. It’s an arduous process. I compare it to laying a mosaic on my hands and knees, putting in each color very slowly. I’m not complaining: there are a lot worse jobs to have.”
Away from the page, Maupin wants to perform a one-man show. “I’m remembering Quentin Crisp [the exotically besuited and coiffed writer, most famous for his book The Naked Civil Servant] in his old age and how much fun he had doing that. I like the idea of a dog-and-pony show. Chris and I are amused by the idea of buying an Airstream trailer and trying out material. There’s a long tradition of this with ageing writers. Dickens and Twain did it.”
They were desperate for money, says Maupin, but his journeying sounds more congenial: he and Turner will take Philo, their six-year-old charcoal-grey Labradoodle with them: “a devoted traveller,” says Maupin.
More stories tumble, like the time he met Bette Midler at a gallery in Santa Fe, expressing shock about Full Service, Scotty Bowers’s dishy book about being a Hollywood pimp. “I don’t believe it,” said Midler. “Well, I do,” Maupin shot back. “Thank God I’ve got a Kindle so no-one can see what I’m reading on a plane,” said Midler. “You’re such a prude,” Maupin told her. ‘I AM,” said Midler. “She IS,” her husband interjected. “I KNOW,” said Maupin.
Other stories unfurl with giggles and exclamation, but really, read Maupin, or see him on tour. He tells his stories so much better. He always has.
The Days of Anna Madrigal is published by Harper
Photo by Gary Waters/Getty
World News
02.03.14
The Dutch Debate Doctor-Assisted Suicide For Depression
A
controversial new clinic that helps the chronically depressed end their
lives has The Netherlands wrestling with state-mandated euthanasia.
But recent revelations about the way euthanasia is practiced by one group in The Netherlands, especially for those suffering from psychiatric illnesses, is making even the Dutch feel uncomfortable. The new debate raises questions about the way appointed commissions judge these life-ending practices, and echoes the kinds of ‘slippery-slope’ criticisms often made by right-wing and religious parties in the United States.
Under the Dutch law, the patient must ask repeatedly to die, a second doctor has to agree in writing that euthanasia is justified, and the post-mortem panel made up of a doctor, a jurist and an ethical expert have to confirm that the legal requirements were met. Although the 2002 law always left open the possibility that psychological pain could be sufficient justification for euthanasia, the focus was on those suffering from terminal cancer and similar excruciating physical conditions.
Ten years passed, and practices evolved. In early 2012 a group called the Life-Ending Clinic went into operation for people whose personal physicians refused to terminate their lives or assist their suicides. The clinic has since tested the boundaries of “unbearable suffering.” Among those it has helped to die: people with chronic depression and those who have signed their own euthanasia declaration in the early stages of dementia.
“We consider it self-evident that someone who is terminal can turn to euthanasia,” Life-Ending Clinic Director Steven Pleiter told The Daily Beast. “Now we are entering a phase in which there will be more debate about patients who are not terminally ill, among them psychiatric patients and those with dementia.”
Last year 749 people came to the Life-Ending Clinic with a euthanasia request, of which 133 were granted. Some of the clinic’s numbers are significantly higher than the national average. In its own press release, the clinic says: “The figures over 2013 show a strong growth of euthanasia in these groups.” Referred to are the clinic’s stats in terminating the lives of those with dementia, which totals 18 times the national average, and the psychiatric patients, which the clinic euthanized five times more often.
None of this has anything to do, directly, with Obamacare in the United States. But it does raise in bold relief the sorts of misgivings played on by right-wing politicians like Sarah Palin, who warned in 2009 that somehow “death panels” would decide who lived and who died under the Affordable Care Act. That is not the case in the United States, and PolitiFact awarded Palin’s distortions “The Lie of the Year” in 2009.
In 2012, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum upped the ante with the outlandish claim that in the Netherlands, old folks live in terror they’ll be euthanized against their will.Among those it has helped to die: people with chronic depression and those who have signed their own euthanasia declaration in the early stages of dementia.
“People wear different bracelets if they are elderly. And the bracelet is: ‘Do not euthanize me,’” Santorum claimed. “They have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands but half of the people who are euthanized—10 percent of all deaths in the Netherlands—half of those people are euthanized involuntarily at hospitals because they are older and sick. And so elderly people in the Netherlands don’t go to the hospital. They go to another country, because they are afraid, because of budget purposes, they will not come out of that hospital if they go in there with sickness.”
The Washington Post concluded its fact-checking article on that statement with the judgment, “there appears to be not a shred of evidence to back up Santorum’s claims.”
Although lawful euthanasia is best known as a Dutch phenomenon, it has been legalized in the surrounding countries of Belgium and Luxembourg as well. Just a few weeks ago, Belgium broadened its existing law to include the possibility of euthanasia for children of all ages. The amendment was made primarily to benefit terminally-ill kids. Their legal guardian has to agree and they have to be ‘of sound mind and judgment,’ but still, many view it as a slippery slope to the River Styx.
The Catholic Church is strongly opposed to the termination of any life, whether after conception, by abortion, or toward the end, through euthanasia. But proponents argue that legalizing the practice only acknowledges and regulates something that people are determined to do in any case.
Take Belgium for instance—according the World Health Organization, it has one of the highest suicide rates on earth, totaling seven daily. Proponents of assisted suicide argue that if there are no mild, medical alternatives, people are forced to find crude and often gruesome ‘solutions,’ leaving family members to face the harsh aftermath.
In the United States, four states (Oregon, Washington, Vermont and Montana) allow some form of physician-assisted suicide while 46 states have deemed it illegal.
Meanwhile, guns, which are widely and legally owned in most of the country, are the favored American means of terminating one’s own life: about 20,000 people a year shoot themselves.
Despite the rational arguments for legal euthanasia as a matter of principle, the questions now being raised in the Netherlands are about practice.
Psychiatrist Boudewijn Chabot, seen as a pioneer of the euthanasia movement after his conviction in 1991 for helping a female patient die, told the Dutch TV program Nieuwsuur that the law “has gone off the rails.”
“In the last two years things started happening that made me feel uncomfortable,” he said. Many of the Dutch have living wills stating whether they want to be euthanized or not, if they are no longer able to make the decision. But Chabot argues that a written statement made when one is of sound mind should not be considered “completely valid” for “a seriously demented person who no longer knows what it means.”
Chabot warned that the emphasis on a long-term doctor-patient relationship is paramount when it comes to evaluating psychiatric problems. “There are a 100,000 chronic psychiatric patients” in the Netherlands, according to Chabot, and of those “a large segment struggles with and against a death wish.” If the Life-Ending Clinic wants to take on such a responsibility, he said, then it better “get ready.”
In one highly publicized example last year, the clinic helped a 63-year-old man with severe psychiatric problems to end his life. After a very active career working for government, the patient in question could not face his upcoming retirement. In an interview with the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad the clinic’s psychiatrist, Gerty Casteelen said the man “managed to convince me that it was impossible for him to go on. He was all alone in the world. He’d never had a partner. He did have family but he was not in touch with them. It was almost like he’d never developed as a person. He felt like he didn’t have the right to live. His self-hatred was all consuming.”
The man’s long-term physicians had rejected his request previously. But the clinic’s team evaluated him, read his medical history and decided it was time to close his case— permanently.
Clinic Director Pleiter thinks giving psychiatric patients a chance at assisted suicide is important. “We are dealing with a group of patients that have no other place to go, that are also being ignored by psychiatry,” he said. “We are looking at their requests seriously, we treat them in all fairness. I believe it was a deliberate choice for the lawmakers to offer space legally, to which both patients with physical as well as psychological problems can turn.”
But where does one draw the line? Because these patients are not physically ill, the evaluations of independent psychiatrists are under scrutiny. Does this mean any person suffering from serious depression can shop around until he or she finds someone willing to help with suicide? And euthanasia is not only for old people. How young can you be and still get legal help if you want to die? How far should society go to overcome the biologically inbuilt threshold that makes it hard to take one’s own life by aiding someone to do so?
The controversy surrounding the Life-Ending Clinic’s activities has caused the Dutch press to look at some of the other cases from recent years. In one particularly disturbing case a 35-year-old woman, the youngest to die since the Dutch law was introduced, got help killing herself in 2012. Excerpts of her file were published by Dutch national newspaper Trouw and read like a sad story of clinical depression. But the file also shows an extended period of hopefulness. Not enough apparently. A team of doctors decided there was no cause to wait, and ended her life.
With Christopher Dickey
Photo by Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Politics
02.03.14
10 Poiticians Who Tweet Zingers
From
political gaffes to offensive digs, Hilary Clinton isn’t the only
Washington figure using social media to send out zingers in 140
characters or less.
Hillary Clinton’s Super Bowl tweet went viral Sunday night. The former First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State (as well as presumed front runner for the Democratic nomination in 2016) expressed her delight over not being the target of a FOX broadcast for once.
Chuck Grassley
Justin Amash
Scott Brown
#bqhatevwr? That was a viral trend started by former Massachusetts senator Scott Brown in January, 2013. Brown, who is now mulling a bid to return to the U.S. Senate from New Hampshire, repeatedly tweeted “whatever” in response to Internet critics. But, at one point, his fingers slipped and he wrote “bqhatevwr” instead. Brown later claimed that the since deleted tweets were simply accidental pocket tweets but others have accused the once, and perhaps future, senator of “drunktweeting” instead.
Cory Booker
Jim Himes
Randy Weber
Sarah Palin
Forget political agendas or communicating with constituents, former Alaska governor and reality television star Sarah Palin used social media to invent a word. In a since-deleted tweet in 2010, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee wrote, “Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.” “Refudiate,” you see, is not a word. It soon became one, however, once the New Oxford American Dictionary named it the 2010 “word of the year.”
Claire McCaskill
A two-term Democratic senator from Missouri, Claire McCaskill, has quickly established herself as one of the foremost political personalities on Twitter, using the medium to share a host of goofy thoughts, such as complaining about the variety of Triscuit brands when she just wanted a regular cracker.
Mark Takano
Tom Massie
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