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Controversial Australian euthanasia advocate Philip Nitschke has been accused of assisting a depressed woman who took her own life to smuggle lethal drugs from Mexico.
A national Sunday newspaper has reported that the 68-year-old woman who was not terminally ill killed herself in 2006 with drugs she smuggled home from Mexico after seeking advice from Dr Nitschke.
Details of the Wellington woman's death have surfaced as Dr Nitschke, head of pressure group Exit International, arrived in New Zealand to hold suicide seminars in Auckland, Wellington, Nelson and Christchurch.
Right to Life spokesman Ken Orr told the newspaper he was appalled at the woman's death and it was outrageous that Dr Nitschke was teaching people about getting drugs and getting away with it.
Dr Nitschke told the newspaper it was "arrogant and paternalistic" to review someone else's decision about when to die.
"You're not in her shoes. She obviously made an assessment and decided her life was not worth living any more. You can't simply look at the medical records."
However, he admitted most people found euthanasia more palatable for severely ill patients.
"I don't doubt if we had prevented her to have access to do what she did, she would have gone and done it in a far more common way."
Fifteen New Zealanders have travelled to Mexico on Exit International tours to buy the class C drug, which is illegal to import or possess in New Zealand without proper authority, and others have gone independently.
The woman, 68, was a life member of Exit International and one of its earliest members.
"She joined the organisation not because she was unwell but because she was a person who wanted control," Dr Nitschke said.
The woman suffered osteoarthritis, high blood pressure, type-2 diabetes and an underactive thyroid, called hypothyroidism. She was also on medication for depression for about nine months, which her doctor attributed to her husband's death about five years earlier.
She asked Dr Nitschke for advice about buying the drug in Mexico. Dr Nitschke said he sent her photographs telling her what shops to buy from and what to buy.
The woman was found dead in her inner Wellington apartment on March 26, 2006.
Mr Orr said Dr Nitschke gave advice to a woman who was not in a stable frame of mind and should be held partly responsible for her death.
- NZPA
