Hydrogen sulfide - is there anything it can’t do? You don’t just have to top yourself with it - you can threaten others with it too.
Being the current suicide aide du jour taking Japan by storm, it seems it’s now being touted as an offensive weapon.
An Osaka robber dropped in on a loan company on Wednesday, threated the staff with what was purportedly the oh-so-fashionable poison, and made off with a (small) pile of cash.
At around 1:10 p.m. on Wednesday, the man entered the Nankai-Nanba-Higashiguchi branch of Aifle Corp. in Chuo-ku, Osaka, showed three employees a transparent plastic bag containing a brown liquid, and demanded money, investigators said.
“This is hydrogen sulfide. Give me your money,” he was quoted as saying. He grabbed 77,000 yen in cash from the office before fleeing. Three employees at the office were unharmed in the incident. There were no customers in the office at the time.
Now, you might argue that I’m contributing to the problem by posting this (but I’d argue that at this late stage, and in this language, it makes little difference), but would this whole palaver not have grown so huge if it hadn’t been reported in such lurid detail? I guess you could argue that they would have happened somehow anyway, but I can’t help but feel that the rash of cases of hydrogen-sulfide-facilitated suicides across Japan recently, and now this, are partly the responsibility of those who are so eagerly printing the headlines.
I was talking about the same thing with my wife last night (and she actually agreed with me!). The news keeps going on about it, so more people become aware of it. Once they’ve got the idea, it’s easy enough to find the “recipe” on the net, but they wouldn’t be looking in the first place if the TV hadn’t told them about it.
A similar story was a couple of years ago when all those Junior high kids were hanging themselves after writing suicide threats to their school boards. The media had a field day with it, blaming bullies, parents and teachers, but it was the media themselves that were planting the seed in these kids’ minds.