Oh, I’d just tell people the story of a long distance couple here who are on the board who just got engaged, they can laugh till their guts rip. If you are laughing you can only feel nice.
You’re right, Cyn, KCl IV push is lethal. I have a close friend, also a nurse, who decided to kill herself when she was diagnosed with MS. (One good thing about being a nurse is you have access to pretty much anything you need.) I will say, first off, that she changed her mind and didn’t do it, but she confided her method to me.
First, she would inject a hefty dose of phenobarb, immediately followed by a hefty dose of KCl. (Another good thing about being a nurse is that you can always find a vein.) This is, incidentally, pretty close to the way they do it with lethal injection. The only drawback with potassium is it hurts your vein like crazy, unless your lucky enough to already have a central line.
A very large dose of Morphine would be pleasant.
My preferred method would be carbon monoxide. I think it would be pretty easy to rig it up to look like an accident in a closed garage. I read about a person who died this way, the car running and the garage door shut; the person had one shoe off and one on. Gee, he was overcome by carbon monoxide while putting on his shoes! I’ve always secretly believed it was suicide.
Another good way would be to get on a highway going 70 or so, wait until you’re headed for a bridge over a deep ravine or canyon, and inject yourself with 40 Meq of KCL.
Another good way would be to drink a liter of Crown really fast, then swim out onto a deserted lake as fast as you can. Eventually, you’d just pass out and drown, but you wouldn’t care.
Failing that, just shoot yourself with the barrel of the gun in your mouth and aimed at your brain stem. Do not, under any circumstances, shoot yourself in the temple: many of these unfortunates survive a while (this is how I found out what a human brain feels like when you wipe it off with a gauze 4x4). Do not put a shotgun in your mouth, and then jerk when you pull the trigger, blowing your face off. That is very messy, and you will survive. Seen it. ~shudder~
The Coward’s Guide to Suicide.
Cecil on Fred Leuchter and the electric chair
As a dialysis patient, all I need to do is eat a lot of bananas (high in potassium) or potatoes or take potassium chloride pills orally. the level of potassium will rise in my blood and, since I do not produce urine, it will go to a lethal level and my heart will stop.
I have not calculated how many bananas or potatoes or dose of potassium chloride that would be necessary.
My obituary might read, “He killed himself by eating a lethal quantity of bananas!”
berdellos- FYI, oranges have even more potassium than bananas. On a more humorous note:
I worked in an ICU at a teaching hospital, where we were always sabotaged by flocks of frightened and clueless residents. One day, the attending stole my bedside table (where I was writing my nursing notes), put the patient’s chart on it, and pulled it over to the waiting gaggle of eager residents. It also helps if you picture that all of these residents were foreign.
“Scree! scree! scree!” Went the wheels of my bedside table, protestingly.
“Hmmm,” the attending said. “It looks like we need some WD40.”
One of the residents piped up, nervously: “WD40? Is that potassium?”
I still wet my pants a little when I think about that.
Right, it’s not truly inert. “Relatively nonreactive” would be a more accurate phrase, but it doesn’t carry the same connotation as the word “inert” (great, the one time I’m not a stickler for these things…)
It still remains that nitrogen or truly inert gases don’t do much inside you except displace oxygen, and unlike CO[sub]2[/sub], they don’t make you feel short of breath. Nitrogen is used in more applications because it’s cheaper than argon or any other inert gas, and in most cases they do the same thing.
A poster stated that when Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad, that only one of the rifleman had a live round. I believe that’s not the case. Actually only one had a blank round. This was to assure the rifleman that any one of them may not have killed the prisoner. Thereby possibly leaving them with a clear conscience.
Whew. John49, I’m glad that, after 11 years, you’ve been able to finally clear that up for us. That’s been a lot of sleepless nights for the board, I tell ya.
You know, there’s a joke in here somewhere, something about killing but not doing a complete job … I just can’t put my finger on it.
Anyway, here’s an interesting sentence from a 1947 Army manual for executions (PDF):
Maybe the joke I’m thinking of has to do with Monty Python.
If I’m to be executed, can I have nitrous oxide please?
Why not something like a fatal dose of ether.
Once I had a pentathol anesthetic and I was out before counting to ten. Then follow it by any poison. Cyanide or even KCl.
While a heroin IV drip overdose would be a very pleasant way to go, it is by no means a sure bet.
If you really want to make sure the job gets done you should combine one of the scarily potent synthetic opioids along with a sedative to make sure you die.
There are some synthetic opioids like the fentynal analogues that are so insanely potent to even work with them without killing themself the chemist must wear full body and air supply protection, AND have a opiate antagonist handy to inject in case of accident. Literally touching a few grains of powder on your bare skin could kill.
Michael Portillo did a documentary called how to kill a human being, where the best and painless and actually rather enjoyable method was death by hypoxia.
Those of us who read as far as post #14, though, only had half an hour of anxiety.
He used this as a marketing ploy against George Westinghouse, mostly. I know Tesla’s the rock star of science on the Internet, and he did in fact invest some of the technology behind AC, but the much more boring George Westinghouse was the primary guy Edison was at war with here.
In fact, Edison went so far as to suggest execution in the electric chair should be called “Westinghousing.”
Isn’t the painlessness of lethal injection being contested?
Re firing squad: Wouldn’t a shooter know if he had a blank by the lessened recoil?
There is a major phycolohical incentive to notice the recoil as that of a blank.
Update/nitpick/additional information/FWIW:
Three people have been executed by firing squad in the state of Utah since 1977, when capital punishment resumed in the USA after a brief SCOTUS-imposed suspension:
1977–Gary Gilmore: Gary Gilmore - Wikipedia
1996–John Albert Taylor: John Albert Taylor - Wikipedia
2010–Ronnie Lee Gardner: Ronnie Lee Gardner - Wikipedia
Sent from my TRS-80 via CompuServe.
I’m surprised the book “Final Exit” hasn’t been mentioned yet, it is written for those who are terminally ill and seeking a death with dignity.
I’ve read it and it recommends inert gas suffocation and also the sedative Nembutal as being the most painless, sure and “safe” recommended methods.
The problem is this might not actually work every time. Potassium chloride takes a significant amount of time to kill you because all it does is stop the heart, while the body can potentially survive for a good while off the blood and oxygen already in circulation. It’s also extremely painful - granted the sedative is supposed to keep inmates unconscious, but research suggests that the sedative might regularly wear off before inmates die from the potassium chloride, leaving them half-conscious and aware of the excruciating pain. Chillingly, the effect of the muscle relaxant would be that even if they were awake and in pain, they wouldn’t be able to move in any way to express it - even their eyes and facial features would be frozen as they slowly died.
The critics’ suggestion is that the point of the muscle relaxant is to prevent spasms and create the appearance of a peaceful death, even though it’s possible some of these inmates could be conscious and suffering.
It may be that most of them really are rendered unconscious and die peacefully, but it’s probably not something you’d want to risk on yourself if you had to come up with a guaranteed painless death.