Nine years ago, 58-year-old Steve Guest was dying from oesophageal cancer, and in intolerable physical and psychological pain. In July 2005, he took his own life with an overdose of a barbiturate used by veterinarians to kill animals. What has not been known until this week is that Mr Guest was supplied with this lethal drug by Dr Rodney Syme, a Melbourne urologist and campaigner for voluntary euthanasia, who had visited the terminally-ill man at his Point Lonsdale home in the weeks before his death. We know this because Dr Syme himself told The Age on Monday that he had done so.
