If you’re looking for a way to kill yourself slowly, you can plan a trip to, say, Boca Raton, Florida. But if you’d like to get things moving a little more quickly, we’d suggest heading to Tijuana to purchase what some are calling “Death in a Bottle.” No, not Axe Body Spray. Pentobarbital:

The drug, pentobarbital, literally takes a person’s breath away. It can kill by putting people to sleep, and it is tightly regulated in most countries. But aging and ailing people seeking a quick and painless way to end their lives say there is no easier place on earth than Mexico to obtain pentobarbital, a barbiturate commonly known as Nembutal.

Once widely available as a sleep aid, it is now used mostly to anesthetize animals during surgery and to euthanize them. Small bottles of its concentrated liquid form, enough to kill, can be found not on the shelves of the many discount pharmacies in Tijuana but in its pet shops, which sell a wide variety of animals, as well as medications and other supplies for them.

Not everyone discovers this after particularly ill-fated donkey shows. Some learn about it in a book:

“It is Mexico where Nembutal is most readily available,” says “The Peaceful Pill Handbook,” a book that lays out methods to end one’s life. Co-written by Philip Nitschke, founder of Exit International, an Australian group that helps people who want to end their lives early, the book is banned in Australia and New Zealand. In the United States, though, it is only a few mouse clicks away online.

The drug is readily available on the streets and in veterinary clinics, says the book, rather helpfully. It is illegal to bring the medication back into the United States, though, and the recent controversy surrounding the drug has also created a dialogue about assisted suicide in Mexico:

Assisted suicide has emerged as an issue in Mexico, where the Senate voted in April to allow doctors to withdraw life-sustaining medicines from some patients but not to actively take steps to cause death. Euthanasia is also strongly opposed by the Catholic Church.

“It’s awful to me,” Mr. Velazquez, the Tijuana veterinarian and pharmacy owner, said of euthanasia. “I think people should live as long as God decides.”

All the publicity over the unauthorized use of pentobarbital has made it somewhat harder to find along Mexico’s northern border. “Oh, no, we don’t have that,” said a clerk at El Grano de Oro, the answer given by workers approached at six veterinary shops in Tijuana’s tourist zone on a recent afternoon.

At the seventh shop, however, just a few blocks off Avenida Revolución, the clerk said the drug was in stock. She reached up to a shelf behind her and pulled down a box of Sedalphorte, one of the brands Mr. Nitschke recommends. The package bore photos of a dog and a cat and said in bold letters that it could be sold only with a prescription.

Asked if she would sell it, the clerk gave a confused look. “Of course,” she said, ringing up a bottle for $45.

Life. You grow up, get a job, visist an ill-fated donkey show in Tijuana - and then you die.

In Tijuana, a Market for Death in a Bottle [NY Times]