It was to be expected that sodium nitrite would attract the interest of medical and academic researchers. In late 2020, scholarly articles began appearing in a range of medical journals on this ‘new method of suicide’. The analytical paradigm of these articles was suicide prevention.
The rationale goes that any person considering their end of life choices must be mentally ill and that mental illness is a condition in need of medical treatment and cure. Within the medical discourse, if the cause of the suicide is sodium nitrite, then the substance must be restricted. As this book has been identified as an information source for nitrite information, it stands to reason that its readers must be protected from themselves. This is why police ‘welfare checks’ have been performed. It seems the online purchase of nitrite by the elderly, and people who are seriously ill, is red-flagged as a reason for intervention by police and social services.
The following section contains extracts from three of the first of many journal articles in which the growth of nitrite as an end of life agent is addressed.
The Journal of Emergency Medicine
‘Severe Methemoglobinemia & Death from Intentional So- dium Nitrite Ingestion’ - June 2020
This cluster of cases highlights an alarming trend, and we reported these cases to the state health department and to the directors of poison centers across the United States. Potential responses should focus on curtailing the ease by which
