Do burglars really use gas to put the occupants to sleep?

Factual Questions
61

I did Google it, and I find nothing at all.

Temik is just a brand name for Aldicarb, a widely used pesticide worldwide, including in the US. It is the same class of pesticide with the same mode of actions as the Bendiocarb that was used in “Raid” aerosol fly sprays up to the 1970s. Aldicarb has a lower LD50and a faster mode of action, but it’s not some sort of magic potion. It’s just an insecticide.

You can’t readily vapourise Aldicarb as you suggest. It’s not a simple matter of heating it, and even if was, how exactly are you going to poison the inside of a house from outside, when you are standing outside, without poisoning yourself? And how are you going to enter the house when it is done? Aldicarb has a half life of about 30 days, so enough to render an occupant unconscious will still knock out anybody entering the house the next day.

Carbamates notoriously cause excitation, nightmares and insomnia, not unconsciousness. In fact Carbamates have been used in several stimulants to *prevent *sleep. Aldicarb would be the very, very worst thing a burglar could apply to a house he wanted to burgle. It would ensure that every single person in the house was alert and unable to sleep. He may as well enter the house banging on a bass drum. It couldn’t be any more harmful than administering a dose of Aldicarb.

Unconsciousness is the very last symptom of carbamate poisoning prior to death. If you administered enough as an aerosol to render the largest person in a house unconscious, you would first wake up the entire household, then cause them to suffer irreparable brain damage and then kill every other member of the household aside from the largest.

As a candidate drug for knocking people out during burglaries, Aldicarb is worse than useless. As with all of these gassing myths, the process is more expensive, more dangerous and less effective than simply hitting the occupants over the head with a lump of 4 x 2.

A Google search returns no evidence to support the use of Aldicarb for gassing people. Plenty of accounts of guard dogs being poisoned with solid baits, but that is SOP for burglars and has been worldwide for a thousand years. In Australia in the 1960s the preferred poison in fluoracetate, in England in the 1920s it was strychnine, in India today it is phosphine. There’s nothing special about the use of Aldicarb in Africa. I assume it’s used because, like all the others I listed, it’s the most readily available dog bait.

The only connections between Aldicarb and gassing people that Google returns are unconfirmed, ludicrous and frankly racist stories about “those Blacks” gassing “Us whites” using magic formulas brewed up by Witchdoctors (no seriously, they all use the term Witchdoctor). There is no evidence given to support such stories, just the same sort of “I can’t explain how I slept through it” stories seen so often in this thread. None of them actually implicate Aldicarb as the substance uses, they simply point out that if “those Blacks” are willing to poison the dogs of “Us Whites” using Aldicarb then surely they would be willing to gas us using the magic potions of a Witchdoctor.

But hey, Dufus, if you have any evidence that burglars gas people in Africa, or that they have used Aldicarb to do so, then by all means post it here.

62

No, I mean if the cause of the unconsciousness was gas, wouldn’t the door being open all night (after the theft) have dissipated the gas enough that he’d have woken up before the other drivers found him?

To me, it makes more sense that one of the cook staff was in with a bunch of thieves and occasionally roofied some guy who was going to be sleeping at the truck stop, rather than that a bunch of thieves took the time, equipment and trouble to gas him with an unknown-to-science gas that left no trace, and presumably fairly near the other two drivers, who could have woken up and spotted them at any point during the whole long process. Occam’s Razor and all that.

63

Not knowing how gas works, I still doubt that once a person has been knocked out he needs gas to keep him knocked out. He will probably stay knocked out for a few hours. I could be wrong though.

In reply to others, I have no real intention of going to the mat defending this story. I’m sure if I wanted I could also play devils advocate and suggest alternative scenarios that would explain what happened, but I know the family and I am very willing to accept any story from them at face value.

But I do not know enough details to defend anything. For the hell of it, I have just sent an email to my friend asking her to clarify the whole story and what actually happened. I will post what she replies with, whether it offers any insight or not. (Probably not ;))

64

You’re absolutely right! Timik is a simple insecticide like “Raid”. Farmers here in my area are not killing coyotes by the hundreds with it! Anyone who says otherwise is liar and a racist bigot!

No one in South Africa is killing rhinos and lions with it! God only knows what someone who said that would be classified as.

You are right. There is no longer any mention of burglars poisoning home owners on the internet. I’m wondering if it was removed because any reporter of it was branded a racist bigot?

Sorry, I don’t remember the details of how it was used to poison the occupants of a house. Therefore, you are absolutly right. It has never been used, will never be used and cannot be used for that purpose and I am a lying racist bigot for even reading reports of such in the past.

65

It smacks to me like people unwilling to admit to anyone that they slept through a robbery. Most likely the only chemicals involved in these stories are the ones the victims ingested recreationally and willingly before the incident in question.

66

Yes, almost by definition, in many jurisdictions.

Burglary is breaking and entering an unoccupied premises. If they are occupied, it is robbery, not burglary. And that’s a more serious crime.

67

ALDICARB

Health Hazard
Aldicarb is a carbamate pesticide. It is super toxic; the probable oral lethal dose for humans is less than 5 mg/kg, or a taste (less than 7 drops) for a 150-lb. person. It is extremely toxic by both oral and dermal routes. (EPA, 1998)

Fire Hazard
When heated to decomposition, it emits very toxic fumes of nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides.

If I was a robber/voodoo/witchdoctor living in a country where people leave their windows open and use only a window screen to let the breeze in, and Temik/Aldicarb, the baddest shit known to my village, regardless of what Blake says, is sold on street corners…you’re damn right I’d try fogging a pan of it under the homeowners bedroom window.

But that’s just me and some reports that I read on the internet one time.

I can’t find those reports now, apparently they’ve been removed, but I’m gonna register on some African forums to ask, even tho whatever I find out will most likely be construed as lying racist bigotry.

68

You could well be right on staying knocked out. I know nothing about this.

I’d easily believe that he believes he was drugged, and going by what you say it sounds like there’s a high probability that he actually was (Blake’s idea about him happening to have a once-off fainting fit right before a couple of thieves happen to check out his cab has too much coincidence for me), but I just don’t see any reason at all to think it was gas. Interested to see the daughter’s details, though.

I told my husband the story and he instantly said a brasser robbed your man and he needed a cover story. But it sounds like you know this guy well enough to say that’s out.

69

Time to cover your ears, we have a high incidence of txt spk on the way.

My friends response, copied and pasted from facebook messages.

Make of that whatever you wish. I replied with this,

Lets see what she says.

70

This I just don’t get. If this family told you that they had seen a dragon, would you believe that too? I can’t see why knowing somebody well means that you should uncritically accept anything they tell you. Humans aren’t infallible. We all make erroneous leaps of logic at times. Nobody is suggesting that these people are lying to you. All we are trying to determine is whether the event they posit is consistent with the facts as they know them.

At this stage I can’t see any reason why “burglars gassed me” is any more plausible than “aliens abducted me” as an explanation why a vehicle was broken into and the occupant can’t remember several hours. Once again, this isn’t a slur against the teller of the tale. It’s simply that both tales are equally extraordinary, equally lacking in evidence and can be equally explained by much more mundane means, means that we know do occur regularly.

A few points:

This person claims that they “broke the door door seal to put the gas in”, so the cab remained airtight. This means that robbers must have been carrying gas masks if the intended to enter the cab. Does this seem plausible?

He says that the made a lot of noise and woke up an occupant sleeping in an adjoining cab. So these thieves had this brilliant plan involving compressed gas cylinders full of aneasthetic gas, hoses and gas masks.

Yet they couldn’t come up with a device to break a window quietly (the aforementioned molasses and paper for example).

And they didn’t take the time to gas the occupants of the surrounding cabin. Think about this for a second. These thieves have a very elaborate plan. They have a gas that is obviously basically free, since the chances of making more than $100 on any robbery of a truck driver is slim, and in many cases the driver will have only pocket change. Yet, knowing they will have to make noise breaking in, they don’t bother to also gas the occupants of adjoining cabs.

Does this make sense to anybody?

The victim was taken to hospital whiel stil unconscious, so the poison was still in his system. When a victim is taken to hospital suffering from poisoning, the first thing the hospital does is bloodwork to determine what the poison is. This i absolutely critical in keeping the patient alive and preventing longterm damage. In a first world country like France this is SOP. So the victim should have a medical receipt showing what the poison used was. With such clear and incontivertible proof of gassing, why didn’t this make international news. After all, events with no evidence at all made theinterbnati0onmal news.

We are right back where we started. The events make no sense at all logically,and there is still no evidence that this man passed out for anything but natural reasons, and was robbed by an opportunist.

So why not apply Ockham’s razor?

71

This from the Roberto Mancini article gave me pause:

That is pretty much saying ‘someone vaguely connected to the police said this.’ And that’s if they’re not just making it up wholesale. It is not an official police statement.

The bit that might, possibly be an official police statement is this:

That does not say there was any gassing, just this robbery might be connected with others, which isn’t surprising. Adding ‘another police source’ immediately after it gives the second quote the smack of authority without it actually having any.

If drugs are used, in edible form, to poison guard dogs and other animals, that doesn’t mean they can also be used to gas an entire house.

72

Yes, that’s right. From your own post:

Raid was also a carbamate insecticide up tot he 1970s. So you are quite correct, Temik is a simple insecticide like “Raid”

Aren’t they? Well that is good, because doing so would be highly illegal.

It wouldn’t surprise me if some were doing this, because as I said:

[QUOTE=Blake]
In Australia in the 1960s the preferred poison in fluoracetate, in England in the 1920s it was strychnine, in India today it is phosphine. There’s nothing special about the use of Aldicarb in Africa. I assume it’s used because, like all the others I listed, it’s the most readily available dog bait.
[/QUOTE]

No, not necessarily. Ignorant, certainly, but not necessarily a liar or a bigot.

Aren’t they? The BBC thinks they are. Can you provide some evidence that they are not?

A BBC journalist presumably.

Of course. It’s a conspiracy. You told us that we could find evidence for your extraordinary claims by putting four words into Google When we try and it turns out you were utterly wrong, then it must be a conspiracy to make you look foolish.

:rolleyes:

But you did remember the details. You said it was heated outside a window in order to incapacitate the occupants. You also said that evidence of this was freely available with a basic Google search.

Turns out that none of this was true and none of it even makes much sense.

Of course I never said that. I pointed out that there are major problems with using it in such a manner. I pointed out that it would be far simpler, safer, cheaper and more effective to simply hit the occupants over the heads. I pointed out there is no evidence that it ever has been used in such a manner.

I then requested that you provide evidence that it ever has been used in such a manner. I note that no such evidence is available, apparently due to a conspiracy of some sort.

If you say so. I wouldn’t agree. In the past I have read reports of Jews selling white women into prostitution and sacrificing babies. That doesn’t make me racist.

Right, and in contrast I said:

So in short, I said that you can’t readily vapourise Aldicarb by heating it, and you point out that when you heat it enough, it breaks down and doesn’t vapourise.

:dubious:

I don’t doubt you would. But before you do, maybe you should stop and think.

How do you intend to avoid poisoning yourself as you light a fire under a toxic substance?

How do you intend to enter the house afterwards without poisoning yourself?

How do you intend to counteract the well-known stimulant effect of the carbamate, which will wake up the household long before it renders them unconscious?

Did you realise that heating this shit releases sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides? Do you realise how rank these oxides are? Burning feathers and hair release small amounts of sulfur oxides, and has been a tried and tested method of waking people up for millennia. Nitrogen oxide has an even worse odour. How do you intend to stop such a disgusting smell from waking the entire neigbourhood, never mind the occupants of the house?

I don’t doubt for a second that you would do this. The question at hand is whether it has any chance at all of actually working.

Oh well, if you read it on the internet… :smiley:

73

I love threads like these! They often become a veritable Whitman’s Sampler of Crazy.

74

What a load of shite. Of course I wouldn’t believe something obviously stupid, and of course I wouldn’t believe anything uncritically. But when somebody of good character, somebody not prone telling any stories at all never mind fabricated ones, somebody who drives internationally for a living and therefore does not risk his job by drinking or taking drugs, and who has other people to confirm the incident taking place, when he tells me a story I am prepared to accept it as told.

Frankly, I find your claim that he may have spontaneously passed out from some one off brain defect to be far more dubious than that of an outside agency being to blame, but thats just me.

I am also very aware that there will never be enough evidence displayed for you here, so I will not be worrying much about defending this. But still…

Not necessarily. Its a cab, not a tunnel network. Pump gas in a few minutes, wait a few minutes, force the door and grab sat nav or wallet, out again in seconds. I bet any dust mask would be sufficient.

Who knows what they had, I certainly never said what they had?

The windows on a Mercedes Actros are tough, you do not break them neither easily nor quietly, no matter how many molassess you have.

What? You want to know why thieves targeted one vehicle at a time and not dozens? Seriously?

A driver getting robbed in France makes the international news? Good one.

Look, no harm to you Blake, but I don’t really bother playing these games of going round in circles responding to new hypotheticals about what might of happened, or how it really could have went down. I offered the story as I knew it in response to the OP, as it may have been interesting to somebody. I don’t think for a second you will ever believe it happened and I will lose no sleep about that. Hell, if my friend comes back with some vague explanation about how “everybody just knows he was gassed cos thats what happens lol” then I will will be happy to report that and add it to the urban legend pile. But for the sake of my sanity, please stop making up your own details of the alleged incident, fair enough?

75

So they gassed the driver so that he wouldn’t notice the robbery after they’d noisily smashed the windows of the truck he was sleeping in?

76

I suspect the thieves would never have smashed the windows, the other drivers did that to get access to the cab.

The thieves would have tried to pick/force the door lock, but the driver had security chains on the inside, so they were unsuccessful.

77

But why? Does being a truck driver make it impossible for somebody to make illogical deductions?

So we have a choice between gassing, which medical science says impossible, and spontaneously passing out, which is well documented by medical science.

And think that the impossible is more likely than the possible. :dubious:

Any evidence at all would be enough for me. And so far we have no evidence at all.

Correct me if I am wrong, but at this stage all we actually have is that some guy passed out in his cab, and while he was unconscious somebody tried to rob him.

That is all the evidence we have: correct? So we actually have no evidence at all that gas was used: correct?

So never mind about whether there is *enough *evidence. I would just like to see *any *evidence.

Can you name any gas that would allow this to be possible? Because I can’t think of any gas that would allow it. Dust masks just aren’t effective in any way at all against gas. They are no better than nothing.

No, you friend did. he said that they had a hose. And he said they had a gas that they injected via the hose. And he said that thy intended to break in, so they must have had some.

he did say they had those things, right?

So they couldn’t break the windows silently, yet they thought they could force the doors silently? :dubious:

I never suggested they rob other vehicles.

I pointed out that this gas must be extremely cheap, fast acting, silent and easy to use. Once they realised the doors were chained shut the thieves knew they would have to make noise breaking in.

So at that stage, why didn’t the thieves also apply the gas to the adjacent trucks? They must have known they would risk waking the other drivers forcing the doors. So why not spend the time to also gas the drivers of the other trucks?

This is what makes no sense. They gas one driver so they can silently break into his truck. They discover they can’t silently break into his truck. Instead of then gassing the drivers of the two adjoining trucks so they won;t wake up when they force open the doors, they simply make a lot of noise.

Why? Why not gas the other two drivers? I’m not suggesting they also break into those trucks, I’m suggesting they spend the time to gas them. none of thismakes sense. the whole point of the gassing was so that nobody would wake up duirng the robbery, yet they still went through with the robbery when they knew that somebody would wake up. The obvious course of action is to either walk away, with no loss and nobody any the wiser, or to spend the little extra time to gas the occupants of the other trucks so they don’t wake up.

What you are suggesting is as bizarre as the robbers walking into a house, gassing the occupants of one bedroom, then kicking the door in and waking the occupants of the adjoining bedroom. Why would anybody do that? It’s unnecessary.

We now have 5 accounts of burglaries in Spain and France making international news. Why? Because they allegedly involved gassing. Do you honestly think that an event where we have a toxicology report proving the gassing happened woudln’t be reported worldwide?

Shit, this would be published in medical journals. It’s not something the doctors, police and insurance company would keep secret.

Who is making up details?

Are you claiming that your friend didn’t say they had a hose? And he didn’t say they injected gas through the door seal? And he didn’t say they tried to rob him?

The fact is that your story consists of nothing more than “A man passed out in his cab, and while he was passed out somebody tried to rob him”. That’s it. No evidence of gassing. No cause of the unconsciousness at all. No evidence that the unconsciousness was even linked to the robbery or that the robbers even knew the cab was occupied.
The whole gassing thing is made up outof whole cloth as a hugeleap of logic. It doesn’t even make any sense on so many levels and it defies medical science.

Why the hell would anybody believe it?

78

Your truck drivers there must be of quite a different type than those here in America.

Truck drivers drinking alcohol is not uncommon here. And taking drugs – the use of amphetamine by truck drivers to stay awake to make overextended schedules is a known problem; studies have found about 5% or long-haul truck drivers using amphetamines, while 12% were using other stimulants. (This has decreased with the use of random drug testing, but still occurs.)

79

So the thieves didn’t have to break the window (despite what you said before), but they were also unsuccessful at picking the lock due to the chains? How did they get in then?

Like you say, a long-distance lorry driver found passed out drunk would be in big trouble; that’s a hell of an incentive to lie.

Did he go to hospital?

80

Are you trying for a gotcha here? I quoted my friend saying what happened and it answers these questions, post #74.