Assisted suicide on TV?

This artical has also hit home to me. They say assisted susicide is illegal in most states but I can prove to all that it happens every day. My best friend suffered from terminal neck cancer for 4 months before the cancer or the way we decide to treat the sick took his life.
Most of you are aware of Hospice, an orginization that helps terminally ill people pass on to tne next realm peacfully and with out pain. This is in a way assisted suicide. We quit giving nutrition and water and the body no longer can maintain the stress it's under and the heart stops. I believe in most cases this is truley the best and most humane treatment for those who are suffering and have no possible positive outcome. 


In most places, and in the U.K., you run the risk of prosecution – and possibly prison – if you help a loved one to take his or her own life.
So a curious branch of the tourist industry has opened up, where those who want or need help to kill themselves travel to a house on an industrial estate just outside Zurich. The authorities won’t allow it in a residential area.
Switzerland has permitted assisted suicide under certain criteria since 1940. Those who want to take the final step can make their last journey to the Dignitas clinic there and for a fee, they offer what they call a “dignified death,” medically-supervised, counseled, and legal.

So it was to Dignitas that Peter Smedley traveled, and was filmed ending his life just a few days before Christmas last year. He would have preferred to die at home, but that choice was not open to him.

It was hard to watch, more so because, for much of my life, I have lived with the painful knowledge that my own grandfather killed himself. It was a story whispered to me as a teenager by my mother. My father never spoke to me about it, but in all his conversations about his own father he spoke of a decent, upstanding man – someone who, these days, we’d say had a strong “moral compass.”
One night, 80 years ago, he left his wife asleep in bed, went down the stairs, and quietly took his life by his own hand.
He was alone, and told no-one. He left only a note, which I found a couple of years ago in an archived newspaper report of his death. It makes hard reading.
It tells of a man struggling with nerves and a painful illness, who had recently lost his only daughter. He was worried for his job. A doctor had diagnosed “neurasthenia” – a condition no longer in scientific use – “exhaustion of the nervous system.”
“My nerves are all shaking as I am writing this,” he says in his final words to his wife and two sons. “This will break your heart, and I have tried not to do it, but I am a beaten man.”
The coroner recorded a verdict of suicide while of “unsound mind.” But he added kindly: “Instead of saying anything against his memory, one ought to feel very sorry he has been impelled to do this…I expect he thought it was the best way to end his trouble.”
These days my grandfather would likely have lived. His medical condition could have been treated and his mental state – depression – correctly diagnosed and addressed. I like to think he would have wanted to live, and I could have met him.
But even with modern medicines and treatment, there are those today for whom life seems to lose its worth. Do they, like my grandfather did, have the right to end it?
Should their loved ones face punishment if they help? Must they die alone? Must they die at all?
For Peter Smedley there was only one answer.
And so, as snow fell and covered the distant Alps beyond, he thanked his wife and those helping him to die, and drank from a plastic cup in a clinic far from home.