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Oklahoma plans to start carrying out executions with nitrogen gas, a method that has never been used in the U.S. but that some states have already approved amid difficulties with lethal injections.
At a news conference Wednesday, Oklahoma Atty. Gen. Mike Hunter and Corrections Director Joe M. Allbaugh said that over the next few months the state would develop a protocol for using nitrogen.
[...] In recent years, Oklahoma and other states have struggled to obtain the drugs needed for lethal injections, the most common execution method but one that has increasingly faced scrutiny.
In 2015, a state court put a moratorium on executions in Oklahoma after a series of botched executions, including one in which an inmate convulsed for 43 minutes before dying and another in which the wrong drug was administered.
Oklahoma is poised to become the first state to use nitrogen gas in executions
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday March 16 2018, @05:42AM (1 child)
IIRC Nitrogen narcosis is also known as "rapture of the deep", and fighter pilots with hypo-oxygenation used to space out without even knowing it. All you need to do is reduce the oxygen levels below about 10% (might need to test that, but 5% would certainly work) and the folks will totally space out. I'm not sure how low it has to get to kill them, however, but a sealed room with something to absorb the CO2 should suffice. You don't want to get the CO2 too low, or you get adverse reactions (I forget what, perhaps panic) and you don't want to let it build up, or you're just making them sick. (WWII submariners sometimes experienced that, and they hated it.)
Level of CO2 is used to control the rate of breathing, so it needs to be attended to, and pure Nitrogen would be a bad idea, unless it was so fast it killed them before their breathing went out of control. I think that low CO2 suppresses automatic breathing, which could lead to panic. Elevated CO2 causes rapid automatic breathing which would definitely be associated with panic. It's best to just keep the CO2 in the normal range and not rush things.
P.S.: Check out the fighter pilots. It might have been just caused by low air pressure, which would be easy to manage, just depressurize to lower stratosphere levels with supplementary Oxygen to mimic the breathing system that the pilots had. Until they fixed that problem they had lots of pilots pass out without knowing it. Most of the recovered without issue when the plane got into the lower atmosphere...but some didn't recover fast enough to land safely.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday March 16 2018, @05:00PM
Nitrogen narcosis and hyoxia have superficially similar effects, but very different causes. Oxygen deprivation does indeed cause your brain to stop working well, and quite rapidly, with little awareness that there's a problem. Nitrogen narcossis though is due to the intoxicating effects of basically any inert gasses, which become much greater under pressure - from what I can tell the mechanics of the phenomena are not well understood, but there's a correlation with the lipid-solubility of the gas in question. Basically, if you dive using pressurized ambient air, you have nitrogen narcosis. The only question is how badly it's effecting you, which can vary wildly between individuals and even from one dive to the next and, unlike alcohol, there's no possibility of building up a tolerance.
Pure nitrogen actually works very well for execution, as can be attested by pretty much anyone who has managed to survive an encounter with it. Basically, everything seems fine, and then you pass out. Your breathing will probably slow down as CO2 levels start building more slowly, but that won't happen until the oxygen in your blood is greatly depleted (and thus no more CO2 is being produced), at which point you'll be deep into hypoxia and no longer have the mental acuity to realize there's a problem. Plus, the effects happen VERY rapidly, as breathing an oxygen-free atmosphere will cause your lungs to operate in reverse, diffusing oxygen from your blood into the air, so you'll only remain conscious for a small fraction of the time that you would if you held your breath.
So, if you ever have to rescue someone from a nitrogen environment, hold your breath. Better yet, tape your mouth and nose closed so that you can't breathe no matter how painfully your lungs are screaming, it may buy you enough time to make it back out, and if you do pass out it will keep you alive considerably longer for the next person to try to save.