Suicide do's and dont's: Seven drugs, poisons, and other chemicals that are great to kill yourself with, provided you are into that sort of thing

A commenter on my last post pointed out that I had only addressed the "dont's" of chemical-based suicide. So here are the "do's". I've kept it to single chemicals, so effective synergistic combos like ethanol and Valium are excluded.

Disclaimer: Heck yeah, this post is even more tasteless than the last one. Again, it should be noted that I am in no way condoning suicide with this post. I am, in fact, merely pointing out why trying to kill yourself with the following compounds would be an appreciably better experience than with those from the other list.

7. Old school tricyclic antidepressants
As far as prescription drugs go, these suckers are pretty darn toxic. Tricyclics are associated with a higher rate of death in the event of an overdose than the newer nontricyclic antidepressants (e.g. SSRIs), with desipramine (Norpramin and Pertofrane) being the most effective drug of this group.

6. General anaesthetics
Count down from 10, out cold at 8, heart stops at 2. Acquisition may be a challenge, but otherwise just make sure you push enough to shut your brain down.

5. Any narcotic solvent (diethyl ether, chloroform, benzene, etc.)
Narcotic: in large quantities produces euphoria, stupor, or coma. Up the dose a little bit more, add death to that list.

4. gamma-Hydroxybutyrate (GHB)
A big dose will cause rapid unconsciousness, respiratory depression and heart failure. Vomiting and convulsions may occur but only while you're unconscious so no biggie. In short, a big mess for whoever cleans you up but a built-in fail-safe (aspirating on your vomit) as far as killing yourself goes.

3. Opioids
The primary purpose of these drugs are to numb pain, a good place to start when you're looking to meet the reaper. Respiratory failure seals the deal.

2. Barbiturates
The number one choice of doctors who end their lives.

1. Carbon monoxide
Puts you to sleep before it knocks you off, is readily available (see: gas ovens, running vehicles in the garage, etc.), and you don't even have to swallow or inject something. Aces.

Suicide do's and dont's: Eight drugs, poisons, and other chemicals that you shouldn't use to kill yourself

I did a post on this topic when I first started this blog, but it needed improvement. Behold, improvement!

Disclaimer: Yeah, this post is pretty tasteless. However, it should be noted that I am in no way condoning suicide with this post. I am, in fact, merely pointing out why trying to kill yourself with the following compounds is a really bad idea.

8. Sodium chloride (table salt)
Yeah, you read me right. Pretty much anything will kill you, if you get enough of it into you. This includes good old table salt. You're probably looking at drinking a couple of gallons of salt water, and you'll puke long before you get most of that into you.

7. Methanol (wood alcohol)
It'll work, and you get to get drunk while you're at it. But if it doesn't work, you'll end up blind and with holes in your brain.

6. Any radioactive substance
Even if you somehow manage to get your hands on something that is sufficiently radioactive to dose yourself with thousands of rems, it's still going to take you at the very minimum three whole days to die. Three whole days of intense nausea and massive diarrhea.

5. Strychnine
As I discussed previously, a painful and terrifying way to die. You remain fully conscious and coherent as you experience repeated bouts of violent convulsions until finally your lungs stop working and you asphyxiate.

4. Any carcinogen with low acute toxicity
You'll need to a get a lot of it into you, which is a pain, and if you don't finish the job, you end up with cancer a couple of years (or more) down the road. I suppose the cancer might kill you, but that's an awfully roundabout and terribly painful and potentially very slow and agonizing way of ending things, don't you think?

3. Corrosive substances
These include common household chemicals like bleach, oven cleaner (sodium hydroxide), chlorine for the pool, and of course, that sulphuric acid you have stockpiled in the garage. Some people seem to think that drinking on of these chemicals would be a good way to meet the reaper. Those people are wrong. Being strongly acidic or strongly alkaline, these chemicals will corrode anything organic, including your mouth, esophagus, and stomach. Then all of your stomach acid will escape into the trunk of your body, dissolving your internal organs. That doesn't sound terrible at all, does it?

2. Paraquat
Paraquat is a herbicide found in many weed control products (e.g. Gramoxone). If you drink enough of it, you'll experience the joys of multisystem organ failure with death occurring within hours to a few days. However, should you fail to drink enough of it, it will selectively accumulate and persist in your lungs and slowly eat away at them while you spend several weeks gasping for breath in terrible pain before you expire. There is currently no antidote, and even people who manage to get lung transplants find that their new lungs are eventually destroyed as well, since the poison also hangs out in the fat surrounding them. Sadly, it is widely used as a means of suicide in the third world.

1. Acetaminophen
Also known as paracetamol and Tylenol, acetaminophen is the most common cause of intentional self-poisoning in adults in many countries on account of it being widely available and cheap as hell. What doesn't appear to be widely available is the knowledge that this analgesic is highly toxic to pretty much just the liver and kidneys. Even if you take enough to destroy these organs, it can take up to two weeks to actually die. The pain is apparently excruciating.

Listeriolysin O - Pore formin' infection enabler

We've got a bit of a listeriosis outbreak on our hands up here in Canada right now. Three (elderly) people dead, over a dozen confirmed cases across the country. Given Ontario's past history with foodborne bacterial infections, this is big news. Health inspectors have apparently found Listeria monocytogenes, the gram-positive bacterium responsible for listeriosis, in a Toronto meat plant, but have not as of yet determined if the strain matches that which is responsible for the outbreak.

Based on what I've read (Wikipedia, obviously) listeriosis is fairly uncommon and largely associated with infants, old people, and those with compromised immune systems (due to HIV infection, being on certain medications, diabetes, etc.). It's actually more common in animals, particularly domesticated ruminants. Wikipedia also points out that although L. monocytogenes was first described in 1926, it wasn't identified as a cause of foodborne disease until 1981 (in Halifax, Nova Scotia, of all places). Listeriosis often presents as a flu-like illness (fever, puking, feeling like you're gonna puke, and getting the runs) that eventually subsides or else worsens into such fun things as septicemia (blood poisoning), meningitis/encephalitis (brain inflammation), corneal (eye) ulcer, or pneumonia. Spontaneous abortion or stillbirth may occur in pregnant women.

Anywho, let's try and bring some toxicology into the mix, shall we? Heck, it's actually microbiology than anything, but we're going to be talking about a toxin. Listeriolysin O (LLO) is a protein toxin secreted by L. monocytogenes that helps the bacterium get inside cells, where it can reproduce like crazy while remaining hidden from the the immune system. The entire process starts with the bacterium tricking the cell into engulfing it into a container called a phagosome. At this point, LLO creates a pore (hole) in the phagosome, permitting the bacteria to escape its container into the cytoplasm of the cell, where it can start dividing like a mofo.

Here's the really cool part. LLO is activated only under the more acidic conditions it encounters within a phagosome, so once it forms a pore and spills out along with the bacterium into the more basic cytoplasm, it's activity is reduced. This means that LLO won't form pores in the plasma (outer) membrane of the cell, which would likely kill it, thus ensuring the maintenance of a nice little cell incubator for the bacterium to multiply in.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listeriolysin_O

Diisopropyl fluorophosphate (DFP) - Sarin's little brother

Organophosphates are a class of chemical compounds that possess a phosphate atom bound to a couple of oxygen atoms. If you want to be technical, they are esters of phosphoric acid. They include among their ranks essential-for-life biochemicals such as nucleic acids and ATP, as well as life-ending insecticides, herbicides, and nerve agents.

The latter group kill by inhibiting an enzyme called acetylcholinesterase, which hangs out wherever nerves from your brain/spinal cord meet with your muscles to tell them what to do. When the nervous system wishes a muscle to bend to its will (ha!), a neurotransmitter (facilitator of communication between nerve and muscle) called acetylcholine is released from nerves and binds to sites on muscle to cause them to contract. Normally, acetylcholinesterase then breaks down the acetylcholine so that the muscle can relax. Organophosphates bind to a special site on acetylcholinesterase and prevent it from breaking down acetylcholine, resulting in prolonged muscle contraction (i.e. paralyzation). Since you need muscles to breathe, organophosphates can stop this fairly essential process, causing asphyxiation and death death death. The same process can happen in insects or humans.

Diisopropyl fluorophosphate (DFP) is an organosphate nerve gas; an insecticide gone wrong, if you will. It was originally developed by a British dude named Bernard Charles Saunders, who was looking for chemical warfare agents (aren't we all). In a major setback for Mr. Saunders, DFP was found to be less toxic than similar compounds like tabun or sarin. However, he stuck with his little toxic friend, and eventually figured out that it could be mixed with mustard gas to produce a mixture with a sufficiently low enough melting point to be used in cold weather, which was apparently a big deal at the time. Mustard gas: Now able to blister you to hell all year round.

Since DFP resembles much more toxic chemical agents (taurin, sarin, soman, cyclosarin, etc.), it has been used by military forces as a substitute for such agents in training drills and top-secret experiments and stuff. DFP is actually a structural analog of sarin, meaning that it contains the same atoms but they are arranged differently.

DFP has been used by eye doctors and vets to produce miosis (constriction of the pupil of the eye), which is beneficial to the treatment of chronic glaucoma and some other stuff. Neuroscience researchers have been known to play around with it since it inhibits acetylcholinesterase and so can be used to induce delayed peripheral neuropathy, permitting this condition to be studied.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diisopropylfluorophosphate

Persin - Friend of vegans, foe of their cats

Fun fact: If you feed your pet a bunch of avocado, it will likely get sick. This is thanks to a toxin called persin, which is found in both the fruit and leaves of the avocado tree (Persea americana). Persin is an polyketide derived from the synthetic pathways responsible for the production of fatty acids. It closely resembles linoleic acid, an essential omega-6 fatty acid.

For some reason, persin is usually harmless to humans (it may be responsible for some avocado allergies) but can seriously mess with all sorts of other animals including birds, mammals (other than us), and fish. Lactating rodents and livestock that eat avocado leaves often develop udder-related problems such as inflammation and wonky milk secretion. Avocado consumption has been linked to heart damage (necrosis of myocardial fibres) in several mammals. This sort of selective toxicity deal is fairly common among drugs. Penicillin ranks pretty darn low on the drug toxicity scale for humans, but it kills off guinea pigs like you wouldn't believe. Keep this in mind the next time your little furry bundle of joy and frequent excretion gets an infection and requires antibiotics.

Persin is also capable of laying the hurt on fungi and insects, particularly those species that infect/eat the avocado plant (e.g. Colletotrichum gloeosporioides, which also attacks citrus fruits and papayas).

In keeping with its toxic nature, persin is capable of killing breast cancer cells (hooray!). Not only that, it can boost the effects of tamoxifen, a popular breast cancer drug. This synergistic effect is thought to be in part due to persin messing with steroid hormone receptor signaling so as to make breast cancer cells more susceptible to the estrogen receptor modulatory effects of tamoxifen.

- Buoro IB, Nyamwange SB, Chai D, Munyua SM. Putative avocado toxicity in two dogs. Onderstepoort J Vet Res. 1994 Mar;61(1):107-9.
- Oelrichs PB, Ng JC, Seawright AA, Ward A, Schäffeler L, MacLeod JK. Isolation and identification of a compound from avocado (Persea americana) leaves which causes necrosis of the acinar epithelium of the lactating mammary gland and the myocardium. Nat Toxins. 1995;3(5):344-9.
- Roberts CG, Gurisik E, Biden TJ, Sutherland RL, Butt AJ. Synergistic cytotoxicity between tamoxifen and the plant toxin persin in human breast cancer cells is dependent on Bim expression and mediated by modulation of ceramide metabolism. Mol Cancer Ther. 2007 Oct;6(10):2777-85.

Chris is lazy so here's a free toxin review article roundup

I'm so not feeling the whole let's read a couple of papers and write a sweet-ass blog post vibe this evening, so instead I've decided to compile a list of comprehensive, well written, and most importantly, free review articles covering different sorts of toxins (poisons produced by living things). Think of it as if I've expertly written a whole crapload of posts, while avoiding any attempts at wit or humorous digression, and then lumped them together according to type into nice looking articles.

Bennett JW, Klich M. Mycotoxins. Clin Microbiol Rev. 2003 Jul;16(3):497-516. Review.

Van Dolah FM. Marine algal toxins: origins, health effects, and their increased occurrence. Environ Health Perspect. 2000 Mar;108 Suppl 1:133-41. Review.

Terlau H, Olivera BM. Conus venoms: a rich source of novel ion channel-targeted peptides. Physiol Rev. 2004 Jan;84(1):41-68. Review.

Kini RM. Anticoagulant proteins from snake venoms: structure, function and mechanism. Biochem J. 2006 Aug 1;397(3):377-87. Review.

Daly JW. The chemistry of poisons in amphibian skin. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1995 Jan 3;92(1):9-13. Review.

Middlebrook JL, Dorland RB. Bacterial toxins: cellular mechanisms of action. Microbiol Rev. 1984 Sep;48(3):199-221. Review.

Can watermelon help keep your cucumber crisp?

Word is on the street that watermelon (Citrullus lanatus), God's gift to summertime family reunions, may produce a Viagra-like effect. As a commenter on reddit put it: "They cool you above and fire you up down below."

This effect is apparently made possible by an amino acid called citrulline, which is found in both the rind and flesh of the watermelon. It's also found in mammals, where it is present as a free molecule in the liver as an intermediate in the urea cycle (toxic ammonia in blood -> urea in kidney -> you pee it out) and occasionally found incorporated into proteins. As it is not coded by DNA, it must be produced via the post-translational (occurring after a protein is synthesized from amino acids) modification of arginine, a structurally related amino acid. This process is called citrullination, and it occurs primarily in proteins found in myelin or involved in keratinization (deposition of keratin in skin, hair, and nails). Insufficient citrullination of these proteins has been implicated in some autoimmune diseases including rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, and multiple sclerosis.

Anyway, back to this watermelon = possible stiffy business. Following the consumption of watermelon, the citrulline it contains is enzymatically converted into arginine, which in turn is broken down to release a gas called nitric oxide (NO). NO causes the smooth muscle within the walls of blood vessels to relax, leading to dilation of affected vessels and increased blood flow through them. Increased blood flow to the penis leads to an erection. Sounds good, right?

Now here's the thing. Lots of substances can dilate blood vessels, including alcohol and chocolate. We synthesize citrulline in our guts from glutamine, a much more common amino acid. Dairy products, meat, seafood, bread, oatmeal, nuts, seeds, and lentils all contain decent amounts of arginine, which is what citrulline is converted to before it becomes NO. Viagra is so good at doing what it does because it acts on a particular enzyme that opposes the action of NO and is found almost exclusively in the penis. Just because something dilates blood vessels and increases blood flow doesn't mean its going to produce a woody.

The way I figure it, either the researchers at Texas A&M wanted some publicity and so went out of their way to mention that watermelon could potentially be used to treat erectile dysfunction, or the media decided to concentrate on the sex and ignore the science. Possibly both.

It should be mentioned that even if this whole watermelon boner thing is bogus, drugs that relax blood vessels are important for the treatment of many cardiovascular issues such as angina and hypertension. Citrulline is currently used to treat inherited urea cycle disorders and may eventually find use as a means of boosting the citrullination of proteins implicated in autoimmune diseases.

- Curis E, Nicolis I, Moinard C, Osowska S, Zerrouk N, Bénazeth S, Cynober L. Almost all about citrulline in mammals. Amino Acids. 2005 Nov;29(3):177-205. Review.