Dangerous Japanese 'Detergent Suicide' Technique.....

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Dangerous Japanese 'Detergent Suicide' Technique Creeps Into U.S

A suicide technique that mixes household chemicals to produce a deadly hydrogen sulfide gas became a grisly fad in Japan last year. Now it's slowly seeping into the United States over the internet, according to emergency workers, who are alarmed at the potential for innocent causalities.....

,,any potentially successful suicide method is by nature dangerous. There's got to be a better way to go.

That is a nasty one, I can not recall quite how H2S kills you but I am aware that the nose soon loses the ability to smell H2S. So the smell is not as good a warning as you might think.

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Diagnosed under the DSM5 rules with autism spectrum disorder, under DSM4 psychologist said would have been AS (299.80) but I suspect that I am somewhere between 299.80 and 299.00 (Autism) under DSM4.

Um, yeah, that would be dangerous for emergency services workers.

"Detergent suicide" reminds me of a joke that was going around when I was a kid. A girl drinks an entire bottle of Lestoil (a cleaning fluid) and dies. When she gets to the pearly gates, St Peter asks her how she got there and she sings the jingle "It's so easy when you use Lestoil".

Let us take the term "grisley death" to mind here. Ok I just read some brief paragraph about how it "paralyzes the scence of smell", causes uncontiousness because of brain damage (do I really need to know how?), and also causes fluid to be in the lungs. It says this gas can come from disturbed liquid poop! eeewww...

*sarcasum* Let's go drink toxic waist and #$% while we are at it.

there are so many cooler ways to commit suicide...









and the list goes on...

The Japanese are constantly on the lookout for new and improved ways to kill themselves. I'm surprised their society has lasted 2000 years, with all the Japanese offing themselves they should have depopulated the archipelago a LONG time ago. They may yet do so, especially with Japanese birth rates far below replacement rate, and immigration not an option.

Japanese society is extremely weird-other Asian cultures allow for suicide in cases of EXTREME failure, such as ruining a huge corporation or becoming unable to feed your family, but the Japanese do it over just trivial stuff. Any little oops is a good reason to do yourself in. Maybe they got inbred from 1700 years in isolation, and they have no perspective. Ever since the economic collapse of 1990 in Japan, suicide has been accelerating at an alarming rate.

This is especially dangerous, since as the article noted the gas can be deadly to unprotected emergency personnel. So the guy is dead inside an old Chevy, and the paramedics break the windows, and immediately collapse. It's like that X Files episode where the blood of the half-alien mutants was toxic, and if they got cut and were bleeding anybody nearby was rendered unconscious, although Chris Carter didn't go so far as to kill them.

In the US the general attitude is that if somebody is really bent on killing themselves they WON'T clue others in, so there's really nothing anybody can do. Usually here anybody who threatens to kill himself ends up in a loony ward for 3 days, just to insure that they DON'T do it, sort of a cooling off period. There isn't any real effort made to treat them, since there's no followup because we don't have govt health care. They're just locked up until the immediate threat passes, then they are freed. They could go right to the freeway and jump off an overpass, but the general attitude is that it's not the bin's problem.

However, anybody who kills OTHER PEOPLE in the course of killing themselves, especially if it's somebody innocent like a paramedic or a next door neighbor, is reviled. Every so often somebody will fill their house with natural gas and light a match, which causes plenty of destruction but usually doesn't kill anybody unless it's from flying debris. THOSE people are hated, because the right to own and use property is sacred in most of the US. When you blow up a row of houses to kill yourself, you're more hated than a guy who gets in a gunfight with cops for the same purpose.

M-m-m-MONSTER KILL!

I'm somewhat puzzled as to the chemical basis of this. They only way I can think of that one might produce H2S from a detergent if one were to use an anionic detergent, which are generally the salts of long chain sulphonic acids (R-SO3[-] M[+]). That gives you your sulphur, but it's going to be a pretty non-trivial matter to convert that into H2S - you've got to cleave the carbon-sulphur bond somehow, and reduce the sulphur down to the -2 state. That can be done, I'm sure, but would require a rather involved and in-depth synthesis requiring many steps - it would be much more practical to just forget about using a sulphonic acid as your starting material and instead use something a little simpler, such as the alkaline disproportionation and subsequent acidification of elemental sulphur (which I have done myself on many occasions, except I obviously take considerable pains to avoid getting acid anywhere near the resulting solution, as I prefer to experiment with ionic sulphides rather than deadly poison gas).

It seems likely they're using the term 'detergent' to mean something completely different (presumably for the purposes of avoiding giving people information on killing themselves); as it is quite improbable that there exists a simple way to convert sulphonic acids to H2S that anybody with no knowledge of chemistry could easily do.

Here is one reaction:

ZnS + 2HCl -> H2S + ZnCl2

Its a test used to identify sulfide minerals, if a few drop of dilute HCl causes a stink, its a sulfide ... in this case Sphalerite or Wurtzite. Not sure where you can get ZnS though, apart from a rock shop.

Last time I checked ZnS wasn't a component of detergent.