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In addi­tion to review­ing mate­r­ial from FTR-117, the broad­cast sets forth addi­tional mate­r­ial from Smith’s book Forced Exit: The Slip­pery Slope From Assisted Sui­cide to Legal­ized Mur­der (hard­cover edi­tion, Times Books, copy­right 1997). Par­tic­u­lar empha­sis is on Peter Singer, a bio-ethicist recently appointed to the fac­ulty of Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity. A cham­pion of the “Right to Die Move­ment,” Singer’s views have been com­pared with those of social philoso­phers whose work paved the way for the Third Reich’s “Aktion T-4″ euthana­sia pro­gram. One of the main texts affect­ing the Ger­man euthana­sia move­ment was Bind­ing and Hoche’s On the Destruc­tion of Life Unwor­thy of Life. In Forced Exit, Smith com­pares the text of a legal deci­sion by Judge Stephen Rein­hardt with key pas­sages from the Bind­ing and Hoche text, a major influ­ence on Hitler’s social phi­los­o­phy. Other high­lights of the pro­gram include: an analy­sis of the dif­fi­culty physi­cians have in diag­nos­ing and treat­ing depres­sion (many “can­di­dates” for euthana­sia are clin­i­cally depressed and, there­fore, treat­able); the dif­fi­culty physi­cians have in accu­rately diag­nos­ing ‘per­sis­tent veg­e­ta­tive states” (many so-called “brain-dead” patients are mis­di­ag­nosed and, in some cases, con­scious but unable to com­mu­ni­cate); and the eco­nomic imper­a­tives being imposed on physi­cians by for-profit HMOs.