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UK: This is why I want to die Kenny Farquharson The Sunday Times Sunday 06 Jul 2003 Biz Ivol lives in a place called Hope, but she is determined to kill herself. Last Wednesday morning, the multiple sclerosis sufferer was taken to hospital after she was found unconscious in her Orkney home. In her seaside cottage stood the mail-order cardboard coffin she bought for £30 in anticipation of her death. When I met Biz the day before her trial for supplying cannabis began, a bottle of expensive champagne was chilling in the the fridge, ready to wash down the paracetemols she intended to use to end her life. Hope is a village on the Orkney island of South Ronaldsay. Its full name is St Margaret's Hope, so-named because it was here that Margaret, Maid of Norway, died in 1290 while on her way to marry the future Edward II. The ancient stories about her death are full of pity and tears. Biz wants none of that on the day she dies. You might expect a conversation about committing suicide to be bleak and nihilistic. With Ivol it is full of cackling laughter, barbed wit and off-colour humour of the kind that would never do in a family newspaper. She asks that details of her last wishes do not make it into print. She need not worry, as they are unprintable. Let's just say the main one involves a naked young man. Biz - short for Elizabeth - is mercifully free of self-pity. "There are lots worse off than me." She talks about life and death in a matter-of-fact Cornish accent, much in the way she would discuss the weeding or the weather. At 55, she says she is "well past the sell-by date", and ready to call it a day, bringing to an end the pain that accompanies every movement, every breath. She agrees to be interviewed the night before the start of the proceedings at Kirkwall sheriff court, held in a specially converted sports hall to give her wheelchair access. Ivol was accused of being a drug dealer, a dramatic description for what she regards as an act of kindness - providing cannabis-laced chocolates free of charge for people who, like her, are suffering from multiple sclerosis. The court case is only a small part of the campaign she has been fighting for almost a decade - writing letters, lobbying politicians, courting publicity, trying to reform the law to allow the legitimate use of cannabis for medical purposes. The exertion, she believes, has hastened her decline. Eighteen months ago she could still walk a little. Now she is confined to an electric wheelchair, doubly incontinent and wholly dependent on home helps. She describes the court case as her last battle. Whatever the outcome, she says, she intends to commit suicide shortly afterwards. Ivol considered getting somebody to film her suicide - "It would be my final protest" - but changed her mind after realising that whoever agreed to do it could face prosecution for assisting in the taking of a life. But surely she did not want to die on her own? "Might as well," she says with a shrug. "The only thing I'd be sorry for would be the people that would have to find me the next day. "I'm an awkward bugger, and I don't want to give up the fight before I have to. But once I've finished this bloody fight that's it, there's nothing left." Is she scared to die? "No," she says in a throwaway tone. "I was born and brought up a Catholic, but the more I hear about religion the more bollocks I think of it." So, I ask her, on the day you decide to pop the pills and that champagne cork, what will be your thoughts as you settle back down in bed? She sighs as if I had just evoked a blissful moment on a Caribbean beach. "I'll just be glad to go to sleep, and stay asleep. And have no pain. Because the first words when I've woken up every morning for the past year have been: 'Oh, shit.' I want to die because I'm tired. I've got no quality of life now." With claw-like hands she lights a Dorchester cigarette, her 20th of the day. "It says on the packet that they'll kill me. Thank God for that." Ivol's home, Craigflower cottage, is right on the shore next to a beach of perfect skimming stones. Ivol recalls the day she came over the hill when househunting and saw the cottage. "I just fell in love with it. Did you know that all the women that have lived here since 1824, all except one, have been called Elizabeth Jane?" There are good memories here, despite the split with her second husband, whose navy job brought her to the islands in 1989. He left a year after her secondary progressive MS was diagnosed in 1991. The good times include the day when a pod of whales came into Scapa Flow, and had to be herded out by a flotilla of fishing boats. "It was the most beautiful sight - all these tugs and fishing boats trying to get them all out. We sat up on the cliffs; it brought tears to my eyes." In the half-light, the improvised bedroom on the ground floor of the cottage has the look of a death scene. On her hospital-style bed with its metal guardrail is a cheerless floral polyester quilt, covering Biz's thin frame and tucked under the chin of her drawn face with its bright, direct eyes. A marmalade cat called Willie lies at her feet, as if in an Egyptian tomb. On a small table lies a tin box of joints inscribed with the slogan: "Keep off the grass." Adding a faintly surreal edge to the scene are large pictures looking down from the wall - one an antique portrait of Queen Victoria and the other a framed publicity shot of actor Colin Firth, dressed as Mr D'Arcy from Pride and Prejudice. "I wouldn't mind seeing his dangly bits," says Biz with a particular twinkle in her eye. I try to count her blessings. I say to her: "You live in this beautiful place that you truly love, you are great company, you've loads to say for yourself, you make people laugh, you still get pleasure out of people . . . " but she cuts me off. "I hate people. This has been planned for a long time, ever since the symptoms started piling on. And I met a friend, who is almost completely spastic. I said I was never going to end up like him." That friend was Bill Reeve, a fellow MS sufferer on a nearby island. He was sent to Ivol by a doctor who was struggling to find the right medication to stop his severe muscle spasms. Ivol had been smoking joints for a few years on the recommendation of the same doctor, after conventional drugs left her in a zombie-like state in which the slightest touch felt like a red-hot poker, and her spine "felt like it was having barbed wire pulled through it.". The effect of the cannabis on her symptoms was instantaneous and made her feel, at least initially, "that the MS wasn't there any more". She was keen to help Bill, but there was a problem. "Bill doesn't smoke, so we had to figure out a way of getting the cannabis into him, so we made cannabis chocolate." Supplies were not a problem. Having sent away for cannabis plant seeds, Biz had discovered she had green fingers. Thirty plants had flowered in her attic But how to make the cannabis edible for Bill? She discovered that by rubbing the buds of the plants with a metal sieve, she produced a fine powder that could then be mixed with chocolate melted in the microwave. The mixture was put into petit four cases, and a cottage industry was born. Experimentation continued on different strengths and types of chocolate. "Cadbury's Dairy Milk didn't work at all. Belgian chocolate was the best, something about the type of fat." She also tried a rudimentary cannabis patch -- like a nicotine patch -- to deliver a dose gradually through the skin over a three-day period. Ivol now believes cannabis is the answer to one of Scotland's greatest curses - the midge. She discovered this when a tourist from Brazil asked for one of her cannabis leaves to rub on her midge bites. "They just disappeared. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes." Apparently this is commonplace when dealing with mosquitoes in South America. Word got around about her chocolates, and letters began to arrive. For months she sent out a couple of batches of her chocolates every day. Media inquiries came daily, bringing more interest. She appeared in an American newspaper, and received 215 phone calls in response. The first brush with the law came in 1997 when some young offenders were doing community service, cutting her lawn, and the foreman spotted the plants through a window. Biz was raided by a half-dozen officers, charged, found guilty and then admonished. When they came the second time, the charges were to be more serious - supplying controlled drugs. Police officers took her computer files and address books, closing down the operation that had given respite to hundreds of MS sufferers. She believes that she is only in her current legal predicament because of where she lives. "If I was living in London I would have got away with it. But because I live here the police have got nothing better to do. It's because I was too gobby about it. They felt they had to do something." She tells of a friend down south who was caught at a port bringing 1.9kg of cannabis into Britain, but was let off because "it was not a significant amount". Biz is practicsed in her analysis of who's to blame for the politicians' reluctance to decriminalise the drug. "It's all down to politics and big business. Because nobody can make any money from it if people just grow their own. Who will lose money? The drugs companies and the brewers, and they are tough to fight. They're also the ones who give money to the politicians." On the day I talk to her, Ivol is aware that some will question whether she really mean to to take her life (though later events offer their own answer). "Is this just a publicity stunt?" I ask. "Oh God, no," she replies. "I can't do anything I enjoy any more because my fingers are becoming paralysed and my eyesight is going as well. Nothing gives me pleasure. Not even going out into my garden. All I see is weeds that need pulling out and I can't do it any more. I used to love my garden and doing things with my house. I had dogs and I used to walk miles with them every day. That's the only time I cry now - I wake up some mornings crying now because I dream I'm walking with my dogs. They are all buried out the back, in gunmetal cases got from the navy, wrapped in their blankets with all their toys." Ivol's closest friends and neighbours support her in her wish to die, but others keep trying to dissuade her. "Oh, I get letters every day from people sending me religious texts, and quoting verse and chapter in the bible." Could somebody dear to her talk her out of it? "No, they couldn't, no matter who did it. I'm at the stage now where I feel I'm just bloody useless and a drain on resources." It is time for her first joint of the day. Doctors have told her she should take cannabis during the daylight hours as well as at night to ease the pain, but she does not want to. Her life story gives clues to why death holds no fear. She has seen it up close, nursing her father, a former Polish sailor, in her native Fowey, in Cornwall, when he took 18 months to die of spine cancer. "He didn't cope very well with it. He was in an awful lot of pain and just gave up in the end." The sea is in her blood. In the kitchen, a radio scanner is permanently on, relaying the conversation between the fishing boats. "It is lovely company at night-time, listening to them talking out there." The only downside is that occasionally her ex-husband's voice comes on, to be met with a stream of lurid insults from the bedridden patient in the next room. As I write, the champagne is still on ice.
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