Here we have it, the denouement of a sordid little morality play. A Canadian, Kenneth Law, stands accused of selling a poison, a nitrate compound, to vulnerable souls across the globe, many of whom used it to end their own lives. And now, the British authorities, with that peculiar blend of righteousness and theatricality, have secured an extradition order. The man will face “British-style justice,” a phrase that sounds less like a legal process and more like a threat uttered by a headmaster with a cane. One can almost hear the collective tutting from the Home Counties.
Let us not mince words. Law is not a doctor, nor a saint. He is a grubby profiteer of despair, a man who allegedly saw a market in the final, desperate act of the lonely and the ill. He sold a powder and a vial, and people died. That is the bald, ugly fact. And for this, the British state will try him, and likely imprison him for a very long time. Good. There is a certain clumsy, necessary justice in that. The state says: you will not sell death like tinned beans. The state says: we, and we alone, hold the keys to the final door. It is a brutal hypocrisy, of course, given the state’s own historic monopoly on state-sanctioned killing, but let us not dwell on that.
But there is a deeper, more unsettling current here. The vultures who gathered in the comments sections of the news articles, the “free market” libertarians, the euthanasia activists, they all whine about paternalism and the right to die. They miss the point. This is not about the right to die. It is about the spectacle of a man who placed himself between the agony of others and the only relief they could imagine, and took a fee for the privilege. He was a middleman for oblivion. And the British legal system, with its wigs and its archaic terminology, is going to make an example of him. They will dress him in a suit, put him in a box, and tell a jury of his peers that he was not a merchant of mercy but a purveyor of poison. They will be correct.
And yet, I feel a faint, almost indecent flicker of sympathy. Not for Law, but for the wretched souls who bought his product. They are the true ghosts in this tale, the ones we do not see. They wrote emails, they paid with credit cards, they received a small brown package in the post. And then they did what they felt they had to do. We live in an age of unprecedented material comfort, yet we are also an age of unprecedented spiritual misery. The atomisation of society, the collapse of community, the hollowing out of meaning: these are the real killers. Law did not create that misery. He merely exploited it. He is a symptom, not a cause. To focus solely on the man is to miss the rottenness of the culture that produced him.
A far more interesting question: why did the British authorities pursue this extradition with such vigour? Because they can. Because it plays well in the tabloids. Because it allows them to appear strong and decisive in a time when the state often seems weak and adrift. And because, deep down, they too are terrified of the void that their own policies have helped to create. They cannot fix the broken hearts, so they punish the man who sold the rope. It is a timeless strategy, as old as the Roman practice of making scapegoats of the villified. The crowd roars, the state nods, and the system lurches on.
So let the trial come. Let Law be convicted. Let him rot in a cell while the pundits and the politicians congratulate themselves on a job well done. But do not mistake this for a moral victory. It is a gesture, a piece of theatre in a tragedy that has no final act. The despair that drove those people to seek out a poison seller is still here, lurking in the void between our Wi-Fi signals. It will not be extradited. It will not be tried. It will wait, patient and silent, for the next man who dares to sell it a solution.
