was caught up in the debate. When the Dutch medical journal, NTvG, published a series of articles arguing against the use of the lethal salts as end of life agents, they focused on sodium nitrite as much as sodium azide.
‘The mechanism of death is suffocation’, they wrote. This produces, ‘unbearable symptoms’. They concluded that sodium nitrite was ‘an extremely unsuitable suicide agent’.
Unfortunately, these claims were based on two incomplete case studies that contained no evidence to support the statements made. In the accompanying editorial, it was written that the CLW had ‘difficulty with the ideology (of suicide): This is self-determination in the form of a dictatorship, in which no one is allowed to restrict another person from making decisions about himself’.