Not the first time I heard someone failing with Argon.
Might have something to do with the chemical's properties itself?
Why didn't you use Nitrogen?
Couldn't get nitrogen.
Why not just evacuate the air from a well-sealed small space?
Huh? A vacuum?? I don't think your understanding of physics is .... all that great lol. It would be nothing short of slow torture, not to mention hard to achieve anyway.
Some argon is sold as a mixture (75% argon/25% CO2). Are you saying that you purchased 100% argon, and you believe they deliberately gave you the wrong product?
This is 2nd person I've read saying something like this and it doesn't make any sense. This isn't helium for balloons. These gases are used in the welding industry and have to meet very exact specifications in order to work.
You can't just put random extra chemicals in there and expect it to still work properly (unlike adding oxygen to balloons, for example, which doesn't affect anything.) Can you please give some more detail as to what made you come to this conclusion?
People sometimes underestimate SI (survival instinct) when trying to CTB with inert gas. There are some crazy stories on here. It's not the gas, it's your brain. (At least, that's my guess... because there's no way they're cutting 100% Argon for industry with random chemicals.)
One last point... Argon is probably one of the least-used methods for peaceful suicide. It surely hasn't gotten the kind of attention compared to SN, nembutal, helium. Unless there's something I missed, no media outlets have been sounding the alarm about "dangerous argon gas child suicide" quite yet. Even if this does eventually happen, it will more likely result in the same thing that has happened with nitrogen: you can no longer buy smaller-sized full tanks on the internet. But you can still buy large $400 nitrogen tanks. And you can still buy the smaller ones if you go into a supplier and purchase it in person.
I really don't think they are cutting anything into the argon. If I'm wrong on any of this someone please correct me because I'm still trying to figure all this out myself.
I had absolutely no fears when using Argon, so it's absolutely not SI. I was completely calm, and completely determined. But I experienced intolerable feelings of suffocation and had to rip off the hood each time I tried. I literally ended up buying 3 cannisters from different suppliers, assuming I'd encountered an unusual problem, but the result was the same every time. To try and establish what was going on, I did a few experiments:
Experiment 1: Firstly, instead of using a hood, which relies on sufficient flow of gas, and to eliminate possible psychological effects or SI, I did an experiment which absolutely had no chance of being fatal: I filled up a bag with argon. I breathed in gas from the bag, breathed out into the room, and repeated as long as I could. After about 3 or 4 breaths I felt like I was suffocating and had to stop breathing in argon from the bag. So this made me assume that unlike the product description, "100% argon" (or thereabouts, it was at least 99% iirc), it must have had some carbon dioxide that was making me feel like I was suffocating. So...
Experiment 2: I tried testing all the argon canisters for carbon dioxide. I can't remember what substance I used, but it was cheap and easy to get, if I remember correctly it was a blue colour. I tried bubbling my exhaled breath through it, and sure enough it changed colour, but bubbling fresh air through it did not - indicating/confirming the reaction was with CO2, so that confirmed that the chemical test was effective. So I prepared another test tube with the indicator liquid for each of the tanks, and bubbled the argon through it. For all three tanks, it was negative. So, most likely, none of the canisters had any CO2.
Yes, I'm fully aware that pure argon is required for many industrial processes, specifically not containing oxygen or carbon dioxide. That's why I said that while I doubt it is carbon dioxide in the canisters that's making me feel like I'm suffocating, that doesn't mean that scientists haven't found a gas they can add in small amounts to the argon that does not interfere with uses of pure argon, but is added for safety reasons to prevent not only accidental deaths, but also suicide attempts. I have absolutely no doubt that this is plausible. For example, with many recreational drugs, for example cannabis/THC, there are many different chemicals that all bind with cannabinoid receptors in the brain, yet their other properties can be very different. There are some synthetic cannabis chemicals that are literally THOUSANDS of times better at binding with those receptors than THC, so I really think this explains what I experienced. There must be some additive that has the same effect on suffocating feelings as CO2 but either given its other chemical properties, does not affect industrial use of argon (at least in the majority of uses, no doubt some scientific/industrial activities do require unadulterated argon, and I can imagine they'd want to make that hard to get, given we're living in a dystopian nanny-state world).
