Legal and ethical issue of assisted suicde

Situation A
A first-year medical student in California whose personal blog is hosted by a large weblog content provider posts explicit directions on facilitating an assisted suicide in the interest of “serving the rights of competent, terminally ill adults.”  Is this legal? Is it ethical? A teenager in another state who is being treated for depression reads the post and succumbs to a fatal, self-administered overdose of drugs, crediting the blogger for “helping her do it right” in her last note to her family.  Who is responsible for the tragedy?  The teenager herself? The medical student? The weblog content provider for allowing the blog content to be posted? The parents for not monitoring their emotionally fragile child’s Internet access closely enough? What, if any, crime has been committed and who can and should be prosecuted?

Comments:

The assisted suicide is not legalized in California, so if the medical student is judged as "assisting", it's not impossible that he would be found guilty.  But was he really assisting? In the case of "assisted suicide", the "assist" is defined as the consensual help that one offers in response to the suicidal person's request. If the teenager asks medical student for the drug prescription and he consented, then he is assisting. We can imagine another scene; the teenager was searching the keyword "suicide drug prescription", and the blog of the medical student is the first result he saw and tried. In this sense, we can joke that the legal responsibility of the medical student depends more on his karma. This scene is of course just one of many possibilities, but the point is clear:  it is not the information-provider's fault if someone takes the information and uses it for a different purpose. It's the similar reasoning as the maker of a sword cannot be found guilty because the sword is used by someone else as a murder weapon. The medical student is protected under Free Speech Law.

The web provider cannot be blamed either, because the web provider does not hold the responsibility for the individual's act. As it is virtually impossible for parents to monitor everything of his children, parents are not to blame, either.  

It's almost impossible to tell whether medical student's act is ethical. The ethical issue of assist suicide has been hugely debated, and each side has sound reasons, so I would not elaborate on this topic. But I would suggest this medical student and people alike to take account of the potential risk and be careful with the information they provide.