New Zealand Censorship Board

Bans The Peaceful Pill Handbook

 

By Joshua B. Good

Sunday, June 10, 2007

 

            The New Zealand censorship board banned The Peaceful Pill Handbook, a guide to assisted suicide written by a pair of Australian doctors. The decision comes four months after Australia banned the book there, too.

            New Zealand’s Office of Film & Literature Classification board published its decision Sunday (June 10, 2007) on its web site. It classified the book as "objectionable," meaning it is totally banned in New Zealand. Bill Hastings, New Zealand’s chief censor, cited the book’s detailed instructions for making or smuggling drugs that can be used to commit suicide and tips for cleaning up the scene of a suicide in order to protect people who assisted.

            The censorship board wrote that the authors “…provide practical detail on how to commit crime and get away with it,” the 13-page report reads.

            Dr. Philip Nitschke said he and fellow author Dr. Fiona Stewart of Exit International plan to revise the book and resubmit it to the New Zealand censors, which could mean a New Zealand edition of the book with pages blacked out.

            “We now have to start collecting books for destruction - although the detailed nature of the statement makes possible

for the production of a "NZ Edition" to be printed with a number of sections and pages blacked out,” Nitschke wrote in an email to bannedmagazine.com. “We'll be forwarding Hastings a modified "blacked out" edition for assessment in the next week.”

            Nitschke said he heard the “religious right” planned to ask the New Zealand censorship board to ban The Peaceful Pill Handbook, so Nitschke and Stewart submitted the book for review. The ban prohibits the sale and distribution of the book in the south Pacific nation.

            Nitschke is correct that religious leaders objected to the book. The report says Ken Orr, a leader of New Zealand’s Right To Life organization objected to the book.

Orr “submits that his organisation is opposed to euthanasia and believes that the book should be prohibited in New Zealand. He submits that the book “promotes, incites or instructs in matters of crime”, citing the decision of the Federal Court of Australia in Michael Brown & Ors v Members of the Classification Review Board of the Office of Film and Literature Classification [1998] 319 FCA (24 March 1998) that upheld a decision to refuse classification of a student newspaper in Australia because it instructed in how to shoplift,” the report reads.

The police in New Zealand also objected to The Peaceful Pill Handbook.

Inspector Alistair Murray, identified as a senior police legal advisor, wrote a report stating that the authors and those who use the book could be charged with a crime in connection with an assisted suicide.

“Liability would not necessarily be restricted to the authors … Distributors or others associated with the delivery of the book to the end user could be criminally liable if they have the necessary intent,” Murray wrote, according to the censorship board’s report.

Maria Cotter, a bureaucrat with New Zealand’s Ministry of Health, asked that the book be banned because it could convince women to commit suicide.

Cotter “also states that the book’s rating of suicide methods by ‘reliability’ and ‘peacefulness’ will have the potential to increase fatal attempts in some population groups, such as women, who have previously been less likely to use more lethal methods of suicide due to perceived violence or pain associated with them…”

Jack Jones of New Zealand’s Voluntary Euthanasia Society asked that the book be allowed, with the only restriction being that young people not be allowed to buy it, according to the report.

New Zealand does not have an absolute right to free speech. New Zealand’s Bill of Rights says everyone has “the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.” However, New Zealand laws also allow “reasonable limits prescribed by law…”

Nitschke said his book is up for censorship review in the United Kingdom, too.

 

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