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SCHWERZENBACH, Switzerland -- Twice a week, on average, in a nondescript building by the railroad tracks, a foreigner comes to die.
Most are terminally ill. Some are young and physically healthy except for a permanent disability or a severe, debilitating mental disorder.
Drawn by Switzerland's reputation as a trouble-free place for foreigners to end their lives, more than 100 Germans, Britons, French, Americans and others come to this small commuter town each year to lie down on a bed in an industrial park building and drink a lethal dose of barbiturates.
Now the country's suicide practices are under the spotlight after British TV last week showed Craig Ewert, a 59-year-old Chicago man with a severe form of motor neuron disease, killing himself in Switzerland two years ago.
Other countries, including the Netherlands and Belgium, and Oregon and Washington in the U.S., have recently passed laws allowing the incurably sick to seek out a doctor who -- under tightly regulated circumstances -- can hasten their deaths.
But only Switzerland, in a law dating back to 1942, permits foreigners to come and kill themselves, placing few restrictions on the how, when and why. Doctors have relative freedom to prescribe a veterinary drug for that very purpose.
Five minutes after drinking a glass of water laced with sodium pentobarbital, they fall asleep.
Death follows about half an hour later.
Like Ewert, most foreigners turn to Dignitas, one of several Swiss organizations dedicated to the cause. Dignitas' founder, Ludwig A. Minelli, has built the group into a thriving nonprofit operation.
Critics accuse it of turning Switzerland into a magnet for "suicide tourism" and of operating on the fringes of medical ethics and public opinion.
Dr. Bertrand Kiefer, editor-in-chief of the Revue Medicale Suisse, a medical journal, fears that some people are killing themselves not to escape intolerable suffering but to relieve family or society of a burden.
Dignitas says its members' right to self-determination is paramount. The only criteria for assisting a suicide are that the person "suffers from an illness that inevitably leads to death, or from an unacceptable disability, and wants to end their life and suffering voluntarily."
Kiefer also says assisted-groups lack financial transparency.
Dignitas says it charges 10,000 Swiss francs ($8,300) for its services, which include taking care of legal formalities and arranging consultations with a doctor willing to prescribe the deadly medicine. The group says it pays its staff salaries and invests any profit in its advocacy and counseling work, which includes suicide- prevention efforts.
Other such organizations in Switzerland say they are cheaper and do not charge the patient directly, relying instead on membership fees and donations.
"We need to ensure that there's no economic incentive for these organizations to encourage people to commit suicide," says Kiefer.
