Australia's Dr. Death Spreading the assisted-suicide gospel.(Dr. Philip Nitschke)

There is an old folk wisdom: "You are known by the company you keep." As is true of most folk wisdom, the saying has much to recommend it. To use an extreme example, if you hung out with and financially supported a known terrorist, most people would reasonably think that you were a terrorist too.

Which brings to mind the Hemlock Society of the United States, perhaps the world's largest assisted-suicide advocacy group. No, its members are not terrorists. But the organization's close association with and financial support for Australian suicide fanatic Dr. Philip Nitschke exposes how radical Hemlock really is.

For those who haven't heard of him, Nitschke is as notorious in Australia as Jack Kevorkian is in the U.S. (The convicted murderer Kevorkian is another Hemlock favorite despite his oft-stated goal of using assisted suicide to open the doors to "obitiatry," e.g., medical experimentation on people being euthanized.) While Nitschke doesn't publicly assist suicides and dump the bodies of victims at local hospitals the way Kevorkian did, he does travel Australia and New Zealand giving well-publicized how-to-commit-suicide classes. He also manufactures plastic suicide bags--"the Exit Bag"--for distribution to members of an Australian euthanasia advocacy group. Nitschke also hopes to purchase a suicide death ship to take past the Great Barrier Reef into international waters where he would engage in the mass euthanasia of sick and disabled people who wanted to die.

As surreal and macabre as all of this may sound, it is actually pretty conventional assisted-suicide-advocacy fare. What makes Nitschke stand out from the pack is his desire to give troubled teenagers access to a suicide concoction--the so-called "peaceful pill"--that Nitschke is formulating from generally available household products.

Nitschke's promotion of suicide for troubled teens first came to light in a 2001 interview on National Review Online. At one point, NRO's Kathryn Jean Lopez asked Nitschke who would qualify for access to his suicide pill. His response was as chilling in its candor as it was for its utter disregard for the value of human life.

This difficult question I will answer in two parts. My personal position is that if we believe that there is a right to life, and then we must accept that people have a right to dispose of that life whenever they wantE. I do not believe that telling people they have a right to life while denying them the means, manner, or information necessary for them to give this life away has any ethical consistency. So all people qualify, not just those with the training, knowledge, or resources to find out how to `give away' their life. And someone needs to provide this knowledge, training, or resource necessary to anyone who wants it, including the depressed, the elderly bereaved, the troubled teen. If we are to remain consistent and we believe that the individual has the right to dispose of their life, we should not erect artificial barriers in the way of subgroups that don't meet our criteria.

In other words, assisted suicide should not be restricted to one "subgroup" of people with terminal illnesses.