Better Off Dead Season 1: #3 The 80-Year-Old Outlaw

According to Canadian anti-euthanasia campaigner Alex Schadenberg, Melbourne doctor Rodney Syme is a threat to society: a ‘cowboy’ and ‘the worst of the worst’.Why? Because for over a decade now, Syme has been publicly assisting terminally and chronically ill patients to die – despite the threat of jail for doing so.How did a respectable 80-year-old urologist come to be a law-breaking cowboy?

It began 40 years ago, with a patient of his who was dying of kidney cancer. Her name was Betty. Syme could hear her screams from the foyer of the hospital. He didn’t know how to help her – but his conscience was pricked.

Syme knew that, as a doctor, if he were in the same kind of pain, he could find drugs – or help from other doctors – that would mean he didn’t have to suffer like Betty.

He began to wonder: why should he have access to this help, but not his patients?

Over the last two decades, Rodney Syme estimates that he’s helped more than 100 people to die. Assisting a suicide carries a maximum five-year jail term in Victoria. But, despite publicly challenging the police to charge him, no charges have yet been laid.

In late 2015, on national television, Syme admitted that he had helped Point Lonsdale man Steve Guest to die.

He continues to provoke the law in the hope that a new and more compassionate one can be written: one that allows people with unbearable and untreatable suffering to request assistance to die.

Know more

• Video: ‘More Australians importing illegal euthanasia drug’ – Lateline, 13 September 2013

In this episode

• Liz
• Rodney Syme

Our theme music was composed by Zig Zag Lane for Zapruder’s Other Films, and edited by Jon Tjhia. Music used in this episode includes ‘Paris, Texas’ (Ry Cooder), ‘Another Routine Day Breaks’ (Brokeback), ‘Space Kay’ (Daniel Lanois), ‘Boga’ (Amiina), ‘Reach for the Dead’ (Boards of Canada), ‘Good Times’ (Jim O’Rourke), ‘Up to Pizmo’ (Labradford), ‘Plastic Energy Man’ (Papa M), ‘Ten Day Interval’ (Tortoise), ‘White Mustang II’ (Daniel Lanois), ‘Moving Thought’ (Lori Scacco feat. Tim Delaney) and ‘Forty-Eight Angels’ (Paul Kelly). Additional original music and sound design by Jon Tjhia.

Your stories

If you’re suffering, or someone you love has died badly – in a hospital, in palliative care, in a nursing home, or at home – add your voice and tell your story here.

Further information

Better Off Dead is produced by Thought Fox and the Wheeler Centre.

Executive producers Andrew Denton and Michael Williams. Producer and researcher Bronwen Reid. For Better Off Dead, the Wheeler Centre team includes Director Michael Williams, Head of Programming Emily Sexton, Projects Producer Amita Kirpalani and Digital Manager Jon Tjhia. This episode was edited and mixed by Jon Tjhia.

Thank you

Liz and her family, and Rodney Syme. Thanks also to Paul Kelly and Sony ATV for the use of his song ‘Forty Eight Angels’.

The series

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