Exit bag
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This article is about suicide. For those at risk, there is a wide network of offers of help in which ways out are shown. In acute emergencies, the telephone counseling and the European emergency number 112 can be reached continuously and free of charge. After an initial crisis intervention , qualified referrals can be made to suitable counseling centers on request. |
An exit bag is a plastic bag which is used as an aid to carry out a suicide or a killing on request and which is usually filled with inert gas . If used correctly, death occurs painlessly in a few minutes due to an imperceptible normobaric hypoxia . This takes advantage of the fact that if the bag is sufficiently dimensioned, the body does not perceive a life-threatening increased concentration of carbon dioxide and consequently no strong respiratory reflex is triggered.
How to use
An exit bag is usually an airtight plastic bag that the person who wants to die pulls or is put over his head himself. In this way, the person is cut off from the ambient air with an oxygen content of around 21% and instead exposed to a sufficiently large amount of inert gas. Pure helium , for example, serves as the inert gas . The inert gas can also be introduced continuously over several minutes.
If there is an increase in exhaled carbon dioxide of more than 8000 ppm in a plastic bag that has been chosen too small without gas exchange and if the lack of oxygen has not yet resulted in complete unconsciousness, the carbon dioxide leads to a very strong, non-suppressible breathing reflex and a feeling of suffocation painful agony.
The function of the "exit bag" is guaranteed by the following aspects:
- Displacement of the oxygen in the air by an inert gas such as helium from breathing. For rapid onset of unconsciousness, the residual oxygen content in the inert gas must be below 0.1% and the entry of ambient air must be shielded with oxygen.
- Exhaled carbon dioxide must not be inhaled again under the “exit bag” or its proportion must be kept below approx. 8000 ppm. In addition to the continuous exchange of the gas volume (e.g. from a helium tank with at least 0.42 m³ content), this can also be achieved through a correspondingly large gas volume in the "exit bag" or, as a technically complex method, through chemical binding of the exhaled Carbon dioxide in soda lime, for example . This procedure is carried out as in anesthesia machines and rebreathers (rebreather).
The reason for the relatively simple and painless method of suicide by normobaric hypoxia is that the human body does not have sufficiently fast sensor system in the carotid body has for recognizing the inadequate supply of oxygen. The feeling of suffocation occurs when there is an increase in the level of carbon dioxide in the blood, not from the lack of oxygen. If the carbon dioxide continuously produced by the body can be easily exhaled in a pure inert gas atmosphere, there is no noticeable feeling of suffocation. If there is a complete lack of oxygen in an inert gas such as pure helium, the person concerned will experience hypoxia that is not consciously perceptible within 15 to 20 seconds, which begins with unconsciousness. Death with respiratory arrest occurs after a few minutes if the inert gas has no significant oxygen content as a foreign gas component.
In addition to self-made exit bags, there are “professional” models that are “properly” produced and distributed by euthanasia groups. The Australian doctor Philip Nitschke is considered to be the inventor of this type of exit bag. He first presented the exit bag he developed in 2001 and is known as the “Aussie Exit Bag”. This “model” is handed out to interested parties by euthanasia groups such as the Right to Die Society of Canada or Exit International . The main difference between a professional and a self-made "exit bag" is the elastic opening of the bag, which closes almost gas-tight without an additional elastic band on the neck.
Political and social controversy
In particular, the launch of the Aussie Exit Bag 2001 attracted wide media coverage and led to public debates in numerous countries - particularly in Australia, Canada and Great Britain - about the ethical permissibility of the manufacture and / or use of such a product.
The Canadian magazine Abilities , a trade journal for the disabled and disabled, condemned the exit bag as a danger to the lives of people in need of care in 2002:
"The production and distribution of the Exit Bag directly threatens people with disabilities [...] who are pressured by 'caregivers' to commit suicide, or killed without their consent, because they are considered a burden."
“The production and distribution of 'exit bags' directly threatens the lives of people with disabilities […] who are pressured by their 'carers' to commit suicide or killed without their consent because they are seen as a burden . "
Peter Beattie , the Prime Minister of the Australian Territory of Queensland , publicly condemned the product, but rejected a ban as impracticable, since otherwise other everyday objects such as “knives, bricks or razor blades” would have to be banned, which could cause death if used appropriately. In Ireland, on the other hand, the use or provision of (professional) exit bags is subject to penalties. The British newspaper Guardian reported in 2003 the request from the Irish authorities to the United States to extradite an American citizen who had made suicide possible for an Irish woman by obtaining an exit bag.
Nitschke and other supporters of euthanasia or suicide counter this by stating that the exit bag is a particularly humane method of bringing a life to an end, as it enables the person concerned to have a painless, “neither brutal nor traumatic” death. This is contradicted by the authors of a book by the Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Zorgvuldige Zelfdoding Foundation , who classify this method alone as very unreliable and the struggle for suffocation as painful and undignified. There is also the danger that people present will be traumatized or even criminalized.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Jessica Düber: Self-determined dying - handout for a rational suicide . 2017, ISBN 978-1-5204-8820-2 , Chapter 4 .: Use of inert gases in combination with an exit bag, p. 57 to 79 .
- ^ Hazards of inert gases and oxygen depletion. European Industrial Gases Association AISBL, 2009, accessed July 21, 2018 .
- ↑ Cryogenic materials - The risks posed by using them. University of Bath, Department of Biology & Biochemistry, February 6, 2007, accessed July 20, 2018 .
- ^ Phil Mercer: 'Suicide bags' launched in Australia. In: BBC . August 20, 2002, accessed April 7, 2017 .
- ^ Abilities . Issue 52, autumn 2002, p. 9.
- ^ Henry McDonald: Minister to be extradited over assisted suicide . In: The Guardian . January 25, 2003.
- ↑ WOZZ: Ways to a humane, self-determined death. Amsterdam, 2008, p. 127f
