Alabama is seeking to become the first state to execute a prisoner by making him breathe pure nitrogen.
The Alabama attorney general’s office on Friday asked the state Supreme Court to set an execution date for death row inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58. The court filing indicated Alabama plans to put him to death by nitrogen hypoxia, an execution method that is authorized in three states but has never been used.
Nitrogen hypoxia is caused by forcing the inmate to breathe only nitrogen, depriving them of oxygen and causing them to die. Nitrogen makes up 78% of the air inhaled by humans and is harmless when inhaled with oxygen. While proponents of the new method have theorized it would be painless, opponents have likened it to human experimentation.
FWIW, nitrogen asphyxiation is one of the methods that’s preferred by advocates of assisted suicide. Done correctly–by which I mean in a way that doesn’t allow a buildup of CO2 in your bloodstream–it’s not only painless but gives you a mild high. The proper way to do it is with something like a BiPAP, where the air that’s being piped in is pure nitrogen, and the CO2 is all being removed immediately so you aren’t breathing it back in. Without a buildup of CO2 in your bloodstream, your brain doesn’t recognize that you’re suffocating.
Have you ever breathed in helium from a balloon and gotten lightheaded? It’s about like that.
I’m in favor of the death penalty in very, very rare cases–and this is not one where I would support it–and this is one of the surest, least barbaric ways to execute someone.
Let’s tighten this up a bit.
Inert gas asphyxiation is very much a great way to go, but it’s basically symptomless until after you lose consciousness.
You don’t get high. The “high” people get is when they are choked out. I’m not really sure on the mechanism of that, though. You don’t get lightheaded. The lightheadedness is from the blood oxygen levels increasing.
This is why it’s very dangerous to enter enclosed spaces. You simply don’t know you’re about to die until it’s too late. Plus, people come in to try to rescue you and succumb as well.
Anyway, lots of people have this experience. It’s a common part of training for rebreathers for use in scuba diving.
As far as good ways to die, inert gas asphyxiation is up there with “proper” lethal injection (i.e. with a commercial euthanasia drug), opiate overdose, or just anesthetizing the being and doing whatever gets the job done.
Nitrogen can cause a “high” (aka nitrogen narcosis), but this effect only occurs at high pressures. So it is only a practical concern for divers, because they have to breathe high pressure air. Some divers replace the nitrogen in their tanks with other gases to avoid it.
It is unrelated to asphyxiation, and can occur even when the lungs are properly exchanging oxygen and CO2. It is a poorly understood direct interaction between high pressure nitrogen and the brain that does not occur at atmospheric pressure.
When I did my deep diving certification one of the things they got us to do was try and do maths of varying complexity (compared to previously doing it on the surface). I didn’t feel high at all, but most of us had slower response times and more errors at depth, apparently as a side effect of the increased nitrogen. Pretty wild.
IIRC the hypoxia “high” panic reaction is from an elevated level of CO2 - that’s the evolved mechanism by which humans detect they’re in a bad place for breathing. Not absence of O2.
Edit: Correction: Hypoxia alone gets you high just before you keel over. It’s the CO2 buildup that activates your body’s panic reactions.
When I was ~10 I attended a wedding. Me and the other kids where tasked to fill balloons with helium and we did so without supervision. Naturally, we breathed some helium in and talked in funny voices.
I then had the bright idea to try to breathe as many of these balloons without normal air in between.
After the third of these, I lost conciousness. To me it felt as if I was gone for maybe half an hour. I was basically dreaming weird stuff. Luckily I stayed in my seat during that time and didn’t fall over or something. Noone of the others noticed anything, so it couldn’t have been that long. Maybe a few seconds in reality.
