Blur’s Dave Rowntree against UK laws on assisted dying
Dave Rowntree, drummer of Blur spoke for the first time about the assisted death of his ex-wife Paola Marra. Marra, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2017 and terminal bowel cancer in 2020, decided to end her life at Dignitas, a Swiss non-profit organization specializing in treatment options for end of life and assisted dying.
Marra decided to resort to medically assisted dying because of the uncertainty and pain of dying from bowel cancer, as well as her allergy to powerful painkillers. She passed away at Dignitas in March this year, aged 53.
Now, Rowntree has called end-of-life care options for people in extreme pain “brutal”, adding that the criminalization of assisted dying has made him “bloody angry”.
He made the remarks ahead of a bill to be published next month calling for the legalization of assisted dying in England and Wales – under strict conditions. “It’s a psychopathic situation we’re in, because the point of all this should be to try to make things easier for the real victim of this situation: the terminally ill person,” he told The Guardian.
Asked whether assisted dying laws could lead to “state-sanctioned killings”, Rowntree (a former lawyer who stood as a Labor candidate in the last parliamentary election) replied: “I certainly wouldn’t support any law that would allow someone to kill someone else.”
He added that current laws for terminally ill adults who want to control their own death make them “pariahs,” continuing: “If you are thinking of taking your own life, you have to do it alone and isolated, and anyone who is even suspected to help in any material way can be arrested and you can get 14 years in prison.” “It’s absolutely brutal for the patient – he continued – because anyone who tells him is potentially at risk of arrest, so he has to walk around like a criminal. Not only that, but when the time comes, if they decide to die with dignity and to end their life at a time and in a way of their choosing, they must do so without anyone’s support, alone, without being able to hold the hand of no one, without being able to hug someone and say goodbye.”