Suicide bag
Dutch psychiatrist Boudewijn Chabot, in his 2015 book Dignified Dying, calls the suicide bag with inert gas method "rapid, painless and safe".
[25][26] In July 2011, this raid caused Oregon to be the first US state to pass legislation prohibiting the sale of kits containing suicide bags or hoods.
[27] Canadian right-to-die advocates stopped shipping suicide bags to Australia in 2001 when the Australian government announced that it would review their importation.
[14] In 2002, the Queensland Police in Australia said that suicide bags did not violate any laws at that time and the Australian federal government said it would look into banning them.
[13][14] A hypoxic, carbon dioxide-free, metabolically inert gas that is less dense than air is provided for inhalation by confining the continually flowing less dense (than air) gas supply and the head in an impermeable bag which is slightly open at the lower neck, which continuously fills from the closed top down to the slightly open neck.
[3] It will not work with inert gases like argon that are denser/heavier than air as these would just spill out the open neck of the bag and not fill it first from the sealed top downwards.
The deoxygenated blood then passes through the systemic circulation to the vital organs, including the brain, and rapidly lowers oxygen concentrations below the level required to sustain consciousness, and when it is insufficient to keep the heart functioning, cardiac arrest will occur.
[3][30] For the majority of people, an alveolar oxygen tension of less than 30 millimetres of mercury (40 mbar) or 4% by volume at atmospheric pressure is not sufficient to support consciousness.
[3] Helium and nitrogen are non-toxic and can be breathed with no ill effects over short or long term when oxygen levels are sufficient, and present no health risk to third parties except asphyxiation.
These additives may be toxic in large doses, but the concentrations which are needed to indicate the presence of the gas are not dangerous over short terms.
[40] Frost reported that of the two cases he studied that featured death from inert gas asphyxiation using a suicide bag, one had "bilateral eyelid petechiae and large amounts of gastric content in the airways and that these findings challenge the assumption that death by this method is painless and without air hunger, as asserted in Final Exit.
"[41] A review study by Ely and Hirsch (2000) concludes that conjunctival and facial petechiae are the product of purely mechanical vascular phenomena, unrelated to asphyxia or hypoxia, and do not occur unless ligatures were also found around the neck.
The authors wrote,[42] Unless the bag is fastened around the neck by a ligature with sufficient tension to obstruct venous return from the face, in our experience, such persons never have facial or conjunctival petechiae.
However, we have not seen detailed descriptions of such observations that permit another person to evaluate the variables that might have produced an isolated petechia in a rare victim.
The authors wrote, "If the process is interrupted by someone, there is no gas or the tube slips out of the bag, there is a high risk of severe hypoxia of the central nervous system" (in survivors).
[16] However Kleespies feels it is an undignified, impersonal and "hurried" manner of death, which may be used by people who have not had the opportunity for appropriate counseling and that this is largely a result of more dignified methods being made illegal.
He concludes by expressing the hope that with improved and more appropriate care during the dying phase of life, there will be less perceived need for these methods of self-deliverance.
[41][49] Instead of having incurable cancer or other life-threatening physical diseases, most of the users have psychiatric disorders or substance abuse problems that might possibly be addressed through medical and psychological treatment.
