Sciencemadness Discussion Board

OMG some people can still buy sodium nitrite on the internet

S.C. Wack - 4-2-2022 at 15:49

The war on chemicals continues. Today's victim is sodium nitrite. The Times is unconcerned about nicotine, acetaminophen (what, you can buy this in a grocery store???), or 10,000 other common items. How many people died in fires started by candles last year?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/technology/amazon-suicide...

...But when family members left behind and others alerted Amazon to the deaths and to the danger of the sales, the company declined to act.

Now, members of Congress are demanding answers. In a letter sent last week to Andy Jassy, Amazon’s president and chief executive, a bipartisan group of House members sought an accounting of the company’s sales of the preservative and related suicides, details on how the retailer had addressed the dangers, and an explanation of how it had responded to complaints...

In their letter to Amazon, seven House lawmakers pressed the company, saying that the ease and swiftness with which vulnerable people could buy the compound, called sodium nitrite, was a “grave concern.”

The lawmakers are targeting Amazon for questioning because they believe it to be the e-commerce site most often used to buy the compound and get it quickly delivered, and because of claims by parents and others that product reviews on Amazon warning about the danger were removed, said Representative Lori Trahan, Democrat of Massachusetts and a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee...

Other sites said they had restricted sales of the compound.

Last year, an eBay director wrote to a coroner in England that the company had prohibited global sales of the compound in 2019 after receiving a report of its potential use in suicides...

In November 2020, Etsy banned sales of the compound, said a spokesperson, who declined to explain why...

Dr. Kyle Pires, a resident emergency room physician at Yale University Hospital who treated a 28-year-old woman who had bought the compound on Amazon, wrote in the journal Clinical Toxicology about her death and the recent rise in suicides by this method. The article, published last May, said policymakers should be aware of the preservative’s use in suicides, and encouraged emergency rooms to stock doses of an antidote, methylene blue, that can prevent death if administered early.

In an interview, Dr. Pires said that businesses should be able to buy the preservative, but sales to individuals should be banned.

“There’s an argument that it’s a slippery slope to restrict sales of something that is legal just because some people are using it to kill themselves,” Dr. Pires said. But, he added, “this is a cost-benefit analysis of a small number of hobbyists using this chemical to cure meat at home versus these growing numbers of young people, including teenagers, using it to kill themselves. For me, it’s an easy calculation.”

In the United Kingdom, coroners for nearly two years have been highlighting suicides involving online purchases of the preservative and asking the government to take action. A cross-government group is working with businesses — including manufacturers and online suppliers of the preservative — to reduce access and end some sales to individuals, according to a spokeswoman for the government’s Department of Health and Social Care. The United Kingdom already requires sellers to inform law enforcement officials of any suspicious purchases of the compound, though it’s unclear how often such reports are made.

Some businesses have gone further. Metalchem, a British vendor, stopped selling the compound to the public in April 2020 after learning that it had been used for suicide. Mike Keay, the company’s chief executive, also notified an English coroner that he had asked other businesses to stop selling the compound online “when the reason for the purchase cannot be reasonably ascertained.”

“Sadly, nearly two years later and the preservative is still available online, even on Amazon, with worldwide shipping,” Mr. Keay wrote in an email to The Times this week.

SWIM - 4-2-2022 at 16:23

What a bunch of idiots run Ebay.

They still sell red P there, and they ban nitrites.

I think they spend most of their time brainstorming new ways to fuck over their vendors.

I got sick of them and quit.

What's next for the banhammer?
Bleach?
Tide pods?
Matches? (those chlorates are deadly don'cha know)
How about rutabagas (Swedes to you Brits) They do you in too if eaten raw.
Rhubarb too.

Soon we'll all be living on burgers from McDonald's because ground beef is just too dangerous to trust to private individuals. who might not cook it properly.


Rainwater - 4-2-2022 at 18:02

Evil needs no reason, nor excuse.
The simple fact is that the loudest wheel gets the oil, and money buys volume.
There is an agenda at work that hides behind an excuse.
All life is precious.
Instead of addressing the cause of the incident, they choose to take action so they may boast in the fact that they took action.

Texium - 4-2-2022 at 20:37

This is ridiculously dumb… what we need is effective and free mental health resources, not bans on useful chemicals that someone might decide to ingest to end their life. Banning sodium nitrite or any other potentially poisonous chemical isn’t going to prevent people from being suicidal. It’s just going to make them find another way to be suicidal.

On the other hand, the part about Amazon’s algorithm suggesting other items that suicidal people might use to people who want to buy sodium nitrite, that truly is fucked up. Like that makes me want to avoid buying sodium nitrite from Amazon if I ever needed more, cause then I’d be getting uncannily morbid suggestions after that…

arkoma - 5-2-2022 at 00:01

Why on EARTH anyone would do business with Dr. Evil(1) to begin with is beyond me.


(1)Jeff Bezos

metalresearcher - 5-2-2022 at 01:39

Quote: Originally posted by SWIM  
What a bunch of idiots run Ebay.

They still sell red P there, and they ban nitrites.

I think they spend most of their time brainstorming new ways to fuck over their vendors.

I got sick of them and quit.

What's next for the banhammer?
Bleach?
Tide pods?
Matches? (those chlorates are deadly don'cha know)
How about rutabagas (Swedes to you Brits) They do you in too if eaten raw.
Rhubarb too.

Soon we'll all be living on burgers from McDonald's because ground beef is just too dangerous to trust to private individuals. who might not cook it properly.


When they really ban this, then add to the list of dangerous goods to be banned:

* Propane tenks
* Gasoline
* Lithium batteries
* Knives
* (Sledge)hammers
* Paracetamol (and many oother OTC medication)


All these products are far more dangerous than e.g. NaNO3 when used wrongly or by terrorists or other criminals. So it is all stupic politics and politics is mostly evil.


[Edited on 2022-2-5 by metalresearcher]

SWIM - 5-2-2022 at 06:35

If we take away the most popular means of suicide, people will start offing themselves in much larger numbers with odd pharmaceutical Knick-knacks instead and whatever is the suicide "flavor of the day" will get banned and the populace will turn to something else only for that to be banned in turn.

I'm against suicide (except for euthanasia) but making it harder by banning things doesn't work.
Texium hit the nail on the head here.
Mental health resources for the (unjustifiably) suicidal.
And also for the narcissistic and sociopathic who often function as carriers in the plague of suicide.

90% of US suicides aren't by chemicals.

Jenks - 5-2-2022 at 08:59

Are you saying that this ban is like when China started installing nets under factory windows to catch the workers jumping out of them?

SWIM - 5-2-2022 at 20:01

Quote: Originally posted by Jenks  
Are you saying that this ban is like when China started installing nets under factory windows to catch the workers jumping out of them?


I said making it hard by banning things didn't work.
The nets are giving them something extra.

Keras - 6-2-2022 at 09:28


Poisonous plants will always exist.
Yew is very common, and quite lethal
Lily of the valley
Foxgloves
And, of course, hemlock.

That list goes on and on…

clearly_not_atara - 6-2-2022 at 10:55

It's utterly futile. Sodium chlorite, the water treatment chemical, also causes methemoglobinemia. Are you going to prevent suicide by banning water?!

XeonTheMGPony - 9-2-2022 at 03:28

Stupid people often happily walk into tyrannical nanny statism, because they haven't a brain cell to rub together, it is all about fefe's.


I am so sick of morons blaming the tools rather then the root cause, but whelp here we are. WestLab has it for those in Canada

BAV Chem - 23-2-2022 at 07:14

The stones of a lot of fruit release cyanide when metabolized. Enough to harm oneself. Are they gonna ban fruit then?

Or what about alcohol, another popular toxin especially with depressed people.

Mains electricity is also quite fatal so they should definitely ban all of that.

Fantasma4500 - 29-3-2022 at 22:38

whats next?? ill tell you whats next. anything deemed non-essential, the US got a taste of this about a year ago where they could only buy non-essentials

Sulaiman - 30-3-2022 at 01:52

I just buy chemicals from a local online shopping site
e.g. https://shopee.com.my/Sodium-Nitrite-AR-500g-Bendosen-i.1808...
(USD7. 11)
At home in uk shopping for chemicals is more difficult.

Fyndium - 29-5-2022 at 12:10

So a guy walked into a store, bought fertilizer urea, bbq charcoal and some drain cleaner - oh, it was out of stock - so he got baking soda instead. He originally got sodium nitrite and potassium nitrate for bluing steel, but before that he wanted to nitride it to harden up the surface to make the parts last a long time.

I mean, like, yeah, keeping the more toxic stuff off the hands of lower forms of life can be beneficial for the general well being for the society.

For the matter of suicides, restricting the access to the most instant ways of commitment can prevent impulsive suicides, but people who are more determined have been historically very successful. I find the concept of restricting something as random as sodium nitrite for suicide prevention just plain stupid.

About that nitrite.. I made some from KNO3 for the benzaldehyde synthesis, so I suppose they need to ban nitrates, too.