Mexico tourists seek out veterinary pentobarbital

MEXICO — Armed with a book called "The Peaceful Pill," foreign tourists are heading to Mexico to purchase pentobarbital from veterinary-supply stores and backstreet pet shops near the U.S. border.

While American veterinarians say buying pentobarbital on the street in the United States is highly improbable, the fact that it is happening in Mexico raises several issues.

"Euthanasia is a very controlled subject in this country," says American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) President Dr. Gregory Hammer. "I just can't imagine they could purchase Class II or Class III drugs in Mexico and bring them across the border. It's illegal. It's a really serious situation, if it is really true."

If published accounts and blog conversations among people who say they have purchased the drug are any indication, it is happening and becoming popular.

The cost of liquid pentobarbital, advertised as causing "a painless death in humans in less than an hour," is between $35 and $50. Right-to-die campaigners call it "the Mexico option." Tourists from Australia and the United Kingdom cross the U.S. border to Mexican cities like Tijuana, Nuevo Laredo or Ciudad Juarez to purchase it.

But the drug has an expiration date and the tourists seem to be buying it more as an option in case they get sick, rather than for immediate use.

Dr. Robert Gordon, of the New Jersey Veterinary Medical Association, understands why it's happening.

"I often said, after seeing my mother starve to death for three weeks with pancreatic cancer, that I would carry my little bottle with me and use it if and when I needed," Gordon says.

Of course, he is a veterinarian and knows about using pentobarbital as a means to end an animal's life.

Dr. Elizabeth Curry-Galvin, AVMA director of Scientific Activities, doesn't worry about this trend taking hold in the United States because of strict regulations governing euthanasia and other drugs.

Physician-assisted suicide is legal in Oregon.