This is a story about a peaceful death...

Try this at home if you like: it's impossible to hold your breath until you pass out. Even if it were possible, your conscious decision to hold your breath would then be overridden when you were unconscious, so you would start breathing again.

Don't try this at home, because it's dangerous, but it probably won't kill you: if you take a plastic bag with no holes in it, and tape it around your neck so that no air can get in or out, pretty soon you'll start to hyperventilate. You're going to panic, and you're going to know that the plastic bag is stopping you from getting the fresh air you need, so you're going to tear a hole in that plastic bag. It's possible you could control that urge until you passed out, and then you'd soon die of asphyxiation, but if you remain conscious you'll find that the urge to take a breath of fresh air is overwhelming.

You'd think that it was a lack of oxygen that was causing this panicked desire to take a breath of fresh air, but you'd be wrong. What governs your overwhelming desire - panic - to take a breath after you've been deprived of fresh air, is something called the hypercapnic alarm response. It's actually elevated levels of CO₂ that are causing your brain to say "oh, shit, I'm about to suffocate".

If you were going to gas people to death, you could use chlorine. Chlorine gas will burn the lungs from the inside, when inhaled. The chlorine will combine with water in your lungs, to make hydrochloric acid, which will cause fatal internal chemical burns - your lungs will be so damaged, they're rendered useless. The pain would be excruciating, as the chlorine attacks your lungs, throat, larynx, eyes and other parts of your body that have some dampness. Death would be slow and painful, as you struggled to breathe with lungs that were being disolved by acid.

If you were going to gas people to death, you could use a nerve agent, like sarin or venomous agent X. These potent nerve agents interfere with muscular control. Without control of the muscle of your diaphragm, you are unable to breathe in and out. Dying with a nerve agent, you would be fully conscious of the fact that you couldn't breathe: that is to say you couldn't actually suck any air into your lungs, even though you desperately wanted to. You may lose other muscular control, and drop to the ground, twitching, but you would be fully conscious until you asphyxiated. More of a painless death than chlorine, but pretty awful to be unable to breathe in and out, even though you want and need to.

If you were going to gas people to death, you could use pure nitrogen. The air we breathe is 78% nitrogen, which is inert and innocuous. Food manufacturers fill your bags of crisps with pure nitrogen. So, if we breathe nitrogen all the time, how can you use it to gas people to death? Well, obviously in a room that's filled with 99% nitrogen, there's hardly a trace of oxygen - certainly not enough to keep you conscious and alive. Worryingly, the brain has no way of knowing that it's not getting enough oxygen, so you'd just pass out and asphyxiate rather unexpectedly. You'd start to get confused as your brain was deprived of oxygen. Your ability to think would be so impaired, you'd never figure out - through logic - that you were suffocating, before you passed out and died. In a way, you'd die stupid and ignorant.

If you were going to gas people to death, you could use carbon dioxide. CO₂ is readily available in the form of fire extinguishers. An over-zealous demonstration of a fire extinguisher in a small unventilated room, could leave you gasping for air, which is the effect intended on a fire: to deprive it of oxygen. You might unwittingly deprive yourself of oxygen. In a death chamber filled with CO₂ you would be hyperventilating - gasping for breath - until you eventually passed out and then finally asphyxiated after a few minutes. This to me, is the very worst kind of death. With the nerve gas, you'd want to gasp for air, but you wouldn't be able to. With nerve gas the other effects on your motor functions would be a distraction, as you twitched uncontrollably on the floor. However, with the CO₂ you'd be hopelessly sucking in lungfuls of gas, but feeling a rising sense of panic as you were acutely aware that you were in the process of suffocating. For most people, it would be the worst two or three minutes of their life: a terrible torturous way to die; cruel and unusual.

I've spent plenty of time in the high Alps and been to the summit of many mountains over 4,000 metres, which is about 13,000 feet. This altitude is classified as being "very high" which is the grade below "extreme". At the summit of Mont Blanc the percentage of available oxygen drops from 21% to 11%, which is roughly half what you normally breathe. You can breathe twice as fast to try and compensate, but there's a limit to the speed with which your body can absorb a lungful of oxygen. If you're breathing twice as fast, your body has half as long to absorb the available oxygen from that air. I know what it's like to be gasping for air, when my muscles were burning with lactic acid because they've not been able to get enough oxygen. I know what it's like to be slightly lightheaded and giddy, because my brain is not getting all the oxygen it needs. However, if you sit still and calm, lower your heart-rate and your respiration rate, you can soon get the oxygen levels in your blood back up to a safe percentage.

Deep sea divers know that to panic could be deadly. Panic is a fight-or-flight mode where your heart-rate and breathing increase, getting your blood full of oxygen so that your muscles can use it if you have to make a run for it. However, with only a finite amount of compressed gas to breathe and the necessity to ascend to the surface slowly, it's imperative that divers maintain a relaxed metabolic state, to preserve the precious oxygen in their tanks. To swim like crazy to the surface might mean you can take as many deep breaths of fresh air as you like, but bubbles of nitrogen in your bloodstream will have nucleated, and they will cause excruciating pain as they work their way through your body and can even kill you if they reach the brain - this is called "the bends".

I just found out that in Denmark, where most of our bacon comes from, they euthanise pigs using CO₂ which I find distressing, thinking that pigs have the same hypercapnic alarm response that we do. The pigs spend 4 minutes in a chamber filled with CO₂ and then they are unconscious or they have asphyxiated. They don't feel their throats being slit, which causes a massive drop in blood pressure, immediately rendering the brain as good as dead. However, I want to know if those pigs spent some of those 4 minutes, hyperventilating, panicking, trying to breathe in and out enough to not suffocate... hopelessly.

Genocide, ethnic cleansing, euthanasia and to some extent, animal slaughter, all raise questions about the suffering in the final moments before death. If I was going to rank the ways I'd choose to die, this would be my choice:

1. Massive laceration to the carotid artery - the drop in blood pressure would cause instant unconsciousness, and death would swiftly follow
2. Diamorphine or fentanyl overdose - while this effectively kills through respiratory arrest, which is the same as asphyxiation, you would almost certainly die quickly and painlessly, unconscious
3. Nitrogen (or other inert gas - e.g. helium) - to breathe this gas until you lost consciousness would require a certain amount of steely resolve, to not tear off the bag or mask. Completely painless, but requiring 2 or 3 minutes that would be psychologically unpleasant.
4. Potassium cyanide - this would produce a relatively swift and certain death, but there may be some minutes of pain and discomfort

The poisons arsenic, ricin and strychnine, along with the nerve agents botulinum, sarin and venomous agent X, would all have undesirably slow or indirect ways of killing you - for example, inhibiting your ability to breathe. To die by these deadly agents would be most undesirable, given the suffering in your final moments.

Point blank gunshots to the head can miss major blood vessels and parts of the brain that control your vital organs, and as such, very many people have survived attempted suicide using a gun. This is probably largely to do with Hollywood portrayals of suicides being committed by putting the gun in your mouth: liable to result in the bullet missing the spinal cord and anything else important, and just leaving a hole in the back of your head/neck. Painful, but not fatal.

Therefore, without the assistance from a person with anatomical and surgical knowledge, to sever your carotid artery, and without the access to the controlled (illegal) substances of diamorphine and fentanyl, your best option is to obtain a canister of wine preserver gas, a large plastic bag and some duct tape. Filling the bag with the gas, you would place it over your head, top up the gas as much as possible and then tape it airtight around your neck. You should lose consciousness within minutes and die soon after that - completely painlessly. A home remedy to euthanise yourself.

Many dentists who commit suicide breathe nitrous oxide - laughing gas - through a mask until they lose consciousness and asphyxiate.

The problem with a home made pill cocktail - opiates to stop your breathing and benzodiazepines and Z-drugs (zopiclone, zolpidem) to keep you unconscious - is that your stomach needs to break down many many pills and for their contents to enter your bloodstream rapidly, without you vomiting. Augmenting with alcohol may increase the ability of the opiates to stop you breathing, and assist in keeping you unconscious, but there is a fairly big time window where you might be discovered and there are a number of variables that make the result more unpredictable than is acceptable, if you've made the final decision to euthanise yourself.

As you can see, those who are thinking about ending a life have much to consider, even if it's just a pig to make bacon out of. I would prefer my pigs to be killed with pure nitrogen gas, than pure CO₂. In actual fact, even though the halal practice of slitting an animal's throat looks barbaric, it's very humane, for the reasons explained above - it would be my first choice, for myself.

Gas chambers, animal and human euthanasia - you're welcome.

Tags: #suicide