Briquettes are out, hydrogen sulfide in as latest suicide method
“Generating poison gas. Don’t open.”
Such was the notice on the bathroom door, posted on March 27 by a 27-year-old Kobe man testing a new suicide method he’d found on the Internet.
The man’s parents were asleep on the second floor. Suddenly, relates Yomiuri Weekly (April 27), they were awakened by a strange smell. The odor led the 64-year-old father to the bathroom door, where he saw the notice. Frantically he kicked open the door. Immediately the gas overcame him.
His son, of course, never lived to know that in killing himself, he killed his father.
This is not an isolated case, as Yomiuri Weekly makes clear. A week later, a 23-year-old Osaka woman took her life in a similar manner. Three family members who attempted a rescue had to be hospitalized; fortunately they survived. On April 8 in Hikone, Shiga Prefecture, a 31-year-old temp employee committed bathroom suicide, as did, on April 9, an 18-year-old girl who had just graduated from senior high school.
Internet sites purporting to facilitate an easy, painless end to it all gained national attention several years ago during a wave of suicides in locked cars. The deadly medium was fumes from charcoal briquettes. Hydrogen sulfide apparently offers a smoother passage. Its first known use was in March 2007, by a Takamatsu university student. Word spread through cyberspace. Suddenly briquettes were out and hydrogen sulfide was in.
Everyone knows the smell of hydrogen sulfide. Generally described as a “rotten egg” smell, it’s a familiar feature of many hot spring resorts. In moderate doses, it’s a heady odor, pleasantly unpleasant, suggestive of health-giving properties. In mild excess, it causes dizziness, headaches and clogging of the respiratory passages. In extreme excess, it is potentially fatal. In December 2005, four bathers at an Akita Prefecture outdoor hot spring died after breathing hydrogen sulfide fumes trapped in snow.
Heavier than air, hydrogen sulfide lingers close to the ground and is not easily dispersed. Rescuers who crouch to attend to stricken victims are particularly vulnerable. Prefectural police forces in Okayama and Shiga prefectures distributed gas masks to all their officers after two Okayama policemen were sickened in March trying unsuccessfully to save a 42-year-old male suicide. Elderly parents of young victims, beware, warns Yomiuri Weekly. The appropriate rescue procedure is not to struggle to drag the victim away but to fling open the windows and get all available fans going.
What makes hydrogen sulfide so tempting to would-be suicides, and such a nightmare for authorities trying to cope with the problem, is the ease with which the raw materials are obtainable. Toilet cleansers and bath salts are not controlled substances.
“We’ve been marketing our product for half a century,” says a spokesperson for one manufacturer. “It’s absolutely harmless by itself, and the container bears a label warning against mixing it with other cleaning products. The trouble is, if you amplify the warning by specifying which cleaning products not to mix it with, you’re in effect telling would-be suicides how to go about it.”
It’s a dreadful dilemma, concludes Yomiuri Weekly. “There are no obvious measures to take—and yet doing nothing is not an option.”
marking the seventh consecutive yearly drop and the first fall to the 5,000 level since 1953, a government paper reported Tuesday. Out of the total death toll, people aged 65 or older accounted for 47.5%, according to the annual white paper on traffic safety, endorsed by the Cabinet Tuesday morning.
