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

Factual Questions
81

Just as a side note, re the “2x4” comment - again, something I read long ago funnelled through a police spokesman, but…

2 guys who worked in a bank stole a large amount of money, then concocted some story about thieves who hit them over the head and robbed the place while they were unconcious. The police mentioned they disbelieved the sotry, and eventually got a confession - because a person hit over the head, unlike the Hollywood movies, does not lose consciousness for more than a minute or so, unless they have ended up with very serious brain damage. Also, unlike the movies, it is very difficult to actually just knock someone out with a blow to the head; like our mythical east european gas, you are more likely to either annoy the person or seriously injure them.

Of course, I have not had a lot of exposure to situations where this has been put to the test… Anyone know if this is true?

The general comment being that any mythical ‘put them to sleep’ technique is just that - myth. Even alcohol carries it’s own set of risks, variable dose tolerances, and easy detection mechanisms, and still needs to be ingested.

82

Just noticing that another way of writing this might be
“..somebody who drives internationally for a living and therefore does not risk his job by admitting to drinking or taking drugs…”

(On preview, SciFiSam made this point, too)

83

You’re quite right, trying to render someone unconscious with a blow the head is very, very difficult and usually only lasts a few minutes.

My point wasn’t that hitting someone with a 2 x 4 was a good way to knock them out during a robbery. My point is that it’s safer, easier and more effective than trying to render someone unconscious by burning Aldicarb. That still makes it pretty damn crappy, but it has the advantage that it does actually render them unconscious, a opposed to Aldicarb, which would wake them up, and it also has the advantage that it won’t kill both the user and the victim, which burning Aldicarb probably would.

Of course there is no simple, safe method for putting someone safely to sleep. If there was then hospitals would use it and save themselves fortune in aneasthetist’s salaries. If it could be achieved with a blow to the head, surgeons would have used it. This is one of the biggest flaws with these gassing stories: the fact that nobody has ever either died or woken up halfway through.

One point of clarification: you are unlikely to *just *annoy someone by hitting them over the head hard enough to render them unconscious. Stun them without rendering them unconscious, sure, but you won’t just annoy them. I suppose if you had no idea at all how hard to hit someone (basically as hard as you can) you might just annoy them, but with even the minimum experience you are going to stun them long enough to hit them again, and again, and again…

84

In post 74 you said that breaking the window was difficult and noisy.

In post 74, you said that the thieves broke the windows noisily. Then you said that they didn’t break the windows after all, that it was the other drivers. You ‘suspect’ that the thieves must have tried to break in, but been unsuccessful due to the driver’s chains on the door. I think you must have made a few typos or something, because at the moment you’re saying the criminals didn’t get in at all.

Post 74 also doesn’t answer my question about whether your friend went to hospital.

85

My mistake, the story as related to me is in post #69.

Please remember that I originally repeated the story as I remembered it from a few years back. I then requested that the person whose father it was clarify the details for me, these are quoted in post 69.

86

A coworker was robbed on a train from Vienna to Prague. He fell asleep in a second class carriage, not a compartment in a first class carriage. His money and passport were removed from a pack strapped around his waist (fanny pack on backward)

Because he was not in an enclosed space, gassing was never suggested, yet I have heard this claim many times regarding first class compartments…enough that, to my shame, I was once guilty of repeating it.

Pickpockets are able to rob people who are wide awake and alert. (though paying attention to the wrong things) Yet people imagine gas is required to rob someone who is already sleeping through the noise and motion of train travel.

Swat teams don’t use “knock out gas”. This is because gasses that render people unconscious kill them at just a little higher dose…ask the Russians about that. Apparently thieves have access to better technology than medical science, the police, and the well funded russian military.

87

Ah, it was the textspeak that defeated me. :smiley:

From that anecdote, it actually sounds more like someone just trying to break in, or, at best, like someone who’s heard the gassing myth trying to incapacitate someone by feeding some lighter fuel in (I don’t think that’s very likely, but it’s possible) and failing. But there are very good reasons why it wouldn’t have worked; it’s not an example of robbers gassing their victims.

88

After looking up the use of xenon as an anaesthetic, I came across one of the properties by which anaesthetics are measured, the minimum alveolar concentration: this is the concentration in which an anaesthetic gas must be present so as to inhibit movement in 50% of test subjects who receive a painful stimulus (e.g. surgical cutting). For xenon, the value is 72%, i.e. the gas in your lungs must be significantly above 72% xenon in order to reliably keep victims incapacitated.

How much gas are we talking about? I’m not an anaesthesiologist, but I’ll do some back-of-the-envelope calculations.

Consider a bedroom, 12 feet x 12 feet by 8 feet high. That’s 1152 cubic feet of airspace. If 72% of that is xenon, we’re talking about 829 standard cubic feet of xenon. Looking at Airgas’ website, I see that a high-pressure steel gas cylinder, 55 inches tall, holds about 280 standard cubic feet. In other words, a mad gasser would have to haul three of these massive gas cylinders to a job site with him in order to just incapacitate the occupant(s) of a single bedroom.

Want to shut down a 1500-square-foot house? Now you’re talking about thirty cylinders of xenon. The logistics of an operation like this make xenon an unlikely choice for anaesthetic burglary at any price. Moreover, if the xenon isn’t supplemented with oxygen as it’s introduced, then the occupants will probably die of hypoxia.

MAC for ether (according to Wikipedia) is 3.2%. Want to incapacitate one bedroom? That’s 37 standard cubic feet of ether vapor; at 0.195 pounds per cubic foot of vapor, you’d need 7.2 pounds of it, or 1.2 gallons of liquid. In other words, you aren’t just buying a dinky little spray-can of starter fluid from the auto parts stores; you need a couple of gallon jugs of the stuff - for a single bedroom - and you need some way to atomize it all so that it vaporizes in a timely manner. And again, that’s just for a single bedroom.

Want to do a whole house? Repeating my earlier math, we arrive at approximately 12 gallons of ether, plus a system for rapid atomization/delivery to the entire household. And as you’ve noted, this presents a substantial hazard of an earth-shattering kaboom. And ether sells for about $100/gallon.

Halothane MAC = 0.75%. One room? Rough estimate, one quart of liquid. One house, 2.5 gallons. You can get 250 ml for the low, low price of just $105.29. Price to shut down one room, $420. Whole house? $4200. A bargain for an upwardly-mobile mad gasser.

In all this time, with all these gassings going on, we’ve never heard of a single incidence of fatal overdose or explosion. Even a professional anaesthesiologist working in a hospital setting with complete instrumentation and careful monitoring manages to lose a patient every now and then. These mad gassers, then, are to be praised for their incredible skill and their concern for the safety of their victims, as manifested by their zero-fatality/zero-explosion rate.

89

I registered on a couple of African forums to try to chase down the story of gassing robbery victims. So far, none of them can verify the use of Temik except to say that’s it’s being used to kill the guard dogs.

They said a starting fluid which has the characterists of cloroform is known to have been used on sleeping people. Apparently, it’s sprayed onto a rag and clamped against the victims face until they lose consciousness.

This has been an interesting thread. It seems the only “correct” answer to the thread is “NO” and anyone who questions that meets a snow avalanche.

90

Well, I think it would be more accurate to say that so far, the only evidentially supported answer to the question in the thread title is “No”.

91

That would be ether. (Diethyl ether, to be specific)

92

Because members of the Straight Dope have enough clout to bury evidence of gassing robberies across the entire Internet, and enough influence to stifle any dissenters. I couldn’t be that gassing robberies are unsupported stories that always seem to happen to a friend of a friend.

And if you believe that, I have a very large treadmill to sell you.

93

Since the original news report that I saw originated from Africa, I have been asking the question on some African forums.

I was totally unaware of the extent of the genocide that is occuring there right now. It seems that little news item has been successfully stifled in the U.S. I don’t know if it’s being blacked out in other countries or not. Get as snooty as you want.

One of the replies to my question was that if murderers over there have AK47’s, R5’s, RPG’s and anti-aircraft machine guns, what else might they have in their arsenal?

My initial thought was “SD’rs are not going to take kindly to this!”

94

Does it come with a plane? :smiley:

95

Gee, and what did I say?

That would be the diethyl ether that has been mentioned at least 5 times already in this thread. This doesn’t constitute gassing in any sense of the word.

If this is being done then there should be very clear police reports with evidence. Do you have such evidence or is this another story from the unsubstantiated rumour mill?

As noted earlier in the thread: “Ether is an extremely pungent agent and a relatively weak anaesthetic by modern standards and has a very irritant affect on the air passages, causing coughing and sometimes vomiting. It takes some time to reach unconsciousness, even if given by direct application to the face on a cloth… The smell hangs around for days and would be obvious to anyone the next day.” None of that means it hasn’t happened, it is at least physically possible, unlike your idea of using Aldicarb. But it does mean that using ether soaked rags isn’t going to be easy, quick or undetectable.

Requests for evidence for outrageous and physically impossible claims is “snow”?

Curses. Yet another widespread atrocity committed by “those Blacks” that the all-powerful SDMB had been hiding until the intrepid investigation of Dufus blew the lid off it.

Well I’m going to go out on a limb.

AK47’s, R5’s, RPG’s and anti-aircraft machine guns are all well described by modern science and invented by western industrial scientists. So I’m going to say that whatever they have, it isn’t going to be some magical gas, brewed by witchdoctors, that is totally unknown to modern science.

Why in the world would the fact that somebody has mundane, obsolete weapons make you think they might also have magical potions unknown to the rest of the world?

Kindly? I think this is the most amusing shit I’ve read all year. Please keep it coming.

96

Which is tragic, not unknown to us, and completely irrelevant to whether anyone is using any type of poison gas to knock out people and burglarize their homes. I, for one, am glad you are educating yourself about what is happening on that continent and not relying merely on mainstream news sources.

97

Unfortunately, none of the education is coming from the hallowed “fighters of ignorance”.

The thread went 89 replies before diethyl ether was mentioned. Isn’t that a gas? Could that be the basis of the original rumor?

Mr. Blake I already know your answer…“It can’t be used, you’re a fool for mentioning it!”

98

No. It was first mentioned in post 26.

It’s use was seriously questioned in post 35.

It’s use was totally discredited with impeccable references in in post 49

Are you actually reading this thread?

In the same way that water is a gas, yes. It’s a liquid at room temperature.

No.

Ether is an extremely pungent agent and a relatively weak anaesthetic by modern standards and has a very irritant affect on the air passages, causing coughing and sometimes vomiting. It takes some time to reach unconsciousness, even if given by direct application to the face on a cloth, and the concentration needed by some sort of spray administered directly into a room would be enormous. The smell hangs around for days and would be obvious to anyone the next day.

:smack:

99

Yeah - I’m old enough to have been under ether several times (late 1960’s/early 1970’s); I remember the smell vividly, and vomited afterwards as soon as I tried to eat. It’s not something that would leave no indications afterwards, based on my personal experience (and it required direct application to my face)

100

I think a better question is, if you have all that firepower and intend to rob someone, why are you trying to use knockout gas instead of just kicking the front door in and informing the residents that you will be relieving them of their valuables?

(Hypothetical “you”, not accusatory “you”)