When Gary Powers, the CIA’s U-2 pilot, got shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960, he had a suicide pill with him that he chose not to take, IIRC. I’ve also read that the Apollo astronauts took suicide pills along with them, just in case they got stranded in space and didn’t want to suffer a prolonged death (maybe it’s just an urban, or space, legend).
However, Dr. Kevorkian administered several drugs to kill his “clients,” as I recall. And many executions use the three-drug combination described in this article. Do we really have a single, quick, painless suicide pill? Why don’t we use them for executions?
To clarify, I don’t want a debate on either executions or suicide. If I did, this would be in GD.
Those in Hitler’s bunker who ended their lives used cyanide pills. Frau Goebbles gave one to each of her children before killing herself in the same fashion. Hitler supposedly bit down on one of them while shooting himself-- just to make really, really sure, I guess.
I would imagine if the “suicide pill” exists (and was issued to US personell, it would be a cyanide tablet. As I understand, though, while it may be quick, it’s not exactly painless.
The suicide pill probably isn’t a commonly prescribed medicine. The three drugs generally used in lethal injection (Pentothal, Pavulon, and potassium chloride) have legitimate medical uses and are available as pharmaceuticals. It’s probably harder to find suicide pills.
NASA has always denied that they gave suicide pills to astronauts, and no astronaut has ever admitted it. But lots of smart people, including Carl Sagan, were convinced that it was true.
Another smart guy (I forgot who) theorized that NASA puts suicide pills in a secret hidden compartment on the spacecraft, and would only inform the astronauts about them in the event that they were marooned. But I find that a bit dubious.
According to this transcript of an episode of PBS’s History Detectives, Francis Gary Powers carried not a suicide pill, but some kind of a pin tipped with poison. His Soviet captors discovered the pin on his person, and stuck it into a dog to see whether or not it was a suicide device. The dog was dead in three minutes.
Along with that, it might be against the Hippocratic oath to administer a known poison like cyanide to someone, whereas a cocktail of nonlethal drugs that become lethal when combined might be okay under some sort of technicality. IANAMD or anything though.
Plus, from what I’ve heard, cyanide is incredibly painful and takes a few minutes to work. The current death penalty is not instantaneous but it is not painful either.
What Fear Itself said. I once asked the warden of the Walls unit in Texas (we’re tight, the warden and me) who administers the injection, and he said it’s contracted out to a private company whose identity is kept secret. Most likely they’re phlebotomists. We had an intersting thread a while back about where they get the drugs from, I’ll see if I can find it.
Why would astronauts need a suicide pill? All they would have to do would be to open the door and it would be over pretty quick. Or they could just wait a while until they were overcome by carbon dioxide, which I think is not too bad a way to go.
I don’t think their blood would boil. The blood, being contained entirely within the skin, would not be exposed to the vacuum. I suppose any water in your mouth might boil though. But death would come from a lack of oxygen to the brain, and it would not take very long to go unconcious, after which the time it takes to actually die is irrelevant.
That’s kind of like drowning but worse in every respect. Why would you choose that over a suicide pill? I mean, worst case astronauts have guns on board, and they’d get to contribute three important factoids to modern scientific knowledge before dying: a) Do guns fire in microgravity b) What happens when they do c) How do the other astranauts react to a rapidly decompressing space ship (exit hole) full of brain fragments and blood.
