Suicide Solution
The Darkness, Depravity and Despair of the 'Sanctioned Suicide' Collective
In the late nineties, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said, “the Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow”.
Almost three decades later, the statement rings as loud as it does true.
The World Wide Web has allowed both communication and commerce to flourish in ways that our ancestors might’ve never thought possible, and the benefits have been innumerous.
Yet the digital Great Leap Forward has not been without its pitfalls.
Some might say that, despite being more connected than ever before, the Western World has never been so divided.
The deliberate engineering of algorithms has resulted in many of us being fed a daily stream of recreational outrage, while viral topics of debate encourage us to disagree over the pronunciation of a word, or the color of an evening gown.
Yet this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
One could be forgiven for believing that the mass proliferation of the internet would result in a happier, more thoughtful global society. But in some corners of the internet, quite the opposite is true.
During the late spring of 2020, at the height of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, school closures across the United States forced millions of children to continue their education remotely.
Some dealt with this sudden change remarkably well. Others did not.
Seventeen-year-old Matthew van Antwerpen, who lived with his parents in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas, began feeling increasingly lonely as the weeks dragged on; and like many teenagers, he sought a sense of community online.
Yet despite having a veneer of compassion, the community he found did not have his best interests at heart.
“Any enjoyment or progress I make in my life simply comes across as forced,” Matthew told his new friends. “I know it is all just a distraction to blow time until the end.”
But instead of coaching him through such a challenging period in his life, Matthew’s new friends made a horrifying suggestion.
A short time afterward, Matthew’s parents arrived home to discover their teenage son lying motionless in his bedroom.
He had followed the advice of his new, online “friends” - and taken his own life.
Following their son’s death, Matthew’s parents commissioned an analysis of their son’s internet history, in the hopes it would shed some light on his motivations.
What they discovered - was chilling.
In the weeks before his death, Matthew had been a frequent visitor to a website named ‘Sanctioned Suicide’.
Founded by two shadowy figures calling themselves ‘Serge’ and ‘Marquis’, the website not only provides detailed instructions on how to successfully end your own life, but it also hosts message boards and chatrooms in which users actually encourage each other to do so.
Some seek out partners to assist in their suicides, and it’s been speculated that certain users have aided in the deaths of dozens, if not hundreds of separate individuals.
Fellow members often derided therapy and other treatments, while encouraging one another to keep their suicidal intentions hidden from relatives and medical professionals.
Those who choose to announce the day of their departure are often responded to with thumbs up or heart emojis, and are told they’re “brave”, a “legend”, or in one case, “a hero”.
It’s believed that the website was founded following the forced closure of a Reddit forum known as ‘r/sanctionedsuicide’.
Mainstream social networks operate a zero-tolerance policy concerning content which encourages self-harm or suicide, and rightfully so. But in the words of John Perry Barlow, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “the Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it”.
‘Sanctioned Suicide’ didn’t disappear when Reddit chose to censor it, it simply migrated elsewhere.
On the day the website opened to the public, one of its founders wrote that he “hated to see the community disperse and disappear”, and assured users that “we know how to keep the website safe.”
Between the years 2018 and 2021, more than five hundred individual users posted so-called ‘goodbye threads’ on the website, announcing that they were just hours from taking their own lives.
After that, the accounts remained eerily inactive.
Since the website’s user profiles are strictly anonymous, it is impossible to determine how many of these posts are genuine. But one source claimed to know of at least forty-five individual users who had livestreamed their own suicides.
Although the site is accessed by vulnerable people across the globe, the vast majority of users hail from English speaking countries; although it should also be noted that a disproportionate contingent of Italian users also appear to frequent the site.
The demographics are diverse, and the userbase’s reasons for ending their own lives are as vast and varied as the users themselves, but almost all agree that the newest and most effective method involves a substance that some of us consume every single day.
Sodium nitrite is a yellowish-white, odorless powder; and it’s so easily obtainable that you can order it directly to your home, next-day-delivery, via Amazon.com.
The substance is used as a preservative in meat and fish products, but its also utilized in car maintenance, metal treatment, and in rare cases, as an antidote for cyanide poisoning.
Chances are, if you’ve eaten a deli sub or a bacon sandwich during the last few years, you’ve ingested a small amount of sodium nitrate. But consume too much, and it can be life threatening.
If high levels of the substance make it into your bloodstream, it can reduce the ability of your red blood cells to move oxygen around the body, resulting in a painful and terrifying condition known as ‘methemoglobinemia’.
Prior to bouts of dizziness and confusion, sufferers become extremely short of breath before eventually losing consciousness altogether; and if they aren’t provided medical assistance almost immediately, there’s a good chance they’ll pass away as a result of advanced hypoxia.
A wealth of such information made Sanctioned Suicide shockingly popular, with more than six million unique visitors to the site each month.
That’s four times the traffic of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which receives only 1.5 million views per month.
But unlike the NSPL, which draws a vast range of users from a variety of different ages and backgrounds, the age range of those frequenting Sanctioned Suicide are generally between the ages of fifteen to twenty-four.
Such was the case with Daniel Dal Canto, a seventeen-year-old high school junior, who first came across Sanctioned Suicide during the fall of 2019.
Back in 2016, a then fourteen-year-old Daniel had started to struggle with depressive thoughts, and after confiding in his parents, a combination of therapy and anti-depressants were applied to great effect.
Over the next two years, Daniel’s academic performance improved dramatically.
He also poured his energy into learning how to play the drums, and within just a year of picking up the sticks, he was participating in live performances with the high school jazz band.
In his spare time, Daniel would often retreat to his bedroom to play video games. Yet his parents observed that, more often than not, he would play online with a group of friends.
This was far preferable to hours spent in isolation, which had no doubt contributed to the depression Daniel had experienced as a fourteen-year-old.
Things seemed to be going great, but sometime in 2019, Daniel began to develop severe stomach pain, and became increasingly housebound as the condition grew worse.
Unable to socialize, and wracked by a seemingly untreatable infirmity, Daniel became almost entirely nocturnal, and spent hours upon hours browsing the darkest depths of the internet.
It was during these marathon surfing sessions that Daniel came across the Sanctioned Suicide website, and after browsing some of its ‘Resource’ threads, he came across a post regarding sodium nitrite.
One user told him the substance was by far the quickest and most painless method by which he could end his own life. Another even sent him a link to a website he could purchase it from.
Daniel found he could purchase five hundred grams of sodium nitrite from an online chemist for just thirty dollars.
Consuming just 2.6 grams constitutes a lethal dose.
“I thought that you were supposed to feel happy as you near [the date of your planned suicide]”, Daniel wrote in a thread of his own. “Is a part of me just desperately hanging on?”
Another user quickly reassured him that he was doing the right thing.
“Setting a date has always upset me”, the anonymous user wrote, “I just keep extending it, but I won’t be able to forever. I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong. Hang in there.”
The post history of this user, who referred to themselves only as ‘Stan’, suggested he was divorced, estranged from his children, and severely depressed.
He was also a passionate advocate for the use of sodium nitrate, and would go on to become a minor celebrity on SanctionedSuicide.com after penning a detailed guide on how to obtain and ingest it.
In response to another user’s hesitance to take their own lives, Stan wrote “Keep talking to us, you are not alone”, and “don’t stray from the method”.
On October 3rd of 2019, Daniel posted a photograph depicting a bottle of sodium nitrite he’d purchased online.
Later that night, he thanked the website’s userbase for, quote, “all of the good wishes”. Daniel also confessed to being “a little scared”, but vowed that he would not survive the night.
The post drew eleven ‘hug’ emojis, four likes, three heart emojis, and two ‘cry-smile’ emojis.
A few hours later, at around 2:30am, Pamela Dal Canto got out of bed, and walked down to her son’s room to check on him. The notorious night owl had been worryingly quiet that evening, and when she opened his door, his mother understood why.
Daniel was lying in bed, with a half empty glass of water and sodium nitrite on his nightstand; and from the moment his mother laid eyes on him – she knew he was dead.
According to Sanctioned Suicide’s official rules, assisting or encouraging suicide is strictly forbidden.
But in reality, the practice of users reassuring or even goading each other into taking their own lives is shockingly commonplace.
One former user, who claimed to be a middle-aged British woman named Emma, admitted to a deep feeling of shock when she the first time she came across one of the so-called ‘goodbye threads’; but that it was also scarily easy to normalize what she was seeing.
“It felt like you were wrapping yourself up in this blanket of all of this misery and darkness,” said Ms. Davis, who eventually found the site dangerous and quit. “You sort of - felt safe - but you weren’t safe.”
In one post on the site, a woman with bipolar disorder explained that she had already attempted suicide on two previous occasions, and she was terrified of the effect her death might have on her two young sons.
Instead of encouraging her to rethink her decision for the sake of her children, one user told her - “I’m sorry your sons got traumatized, but you know you need to kill yourself”.
In another post, a young Australian man confessed to harboring suicidal ideations after being diagnosed with mental illness.
Instead of offering support, his fellow users asked him to livestream his suicide, with one joking about enjoying a box of popcorn while they watched him die.
Just a few weeks later, the Australian man posted a ‘goodbye thread’, then logged off, never to return.
Another user, a Romanian psychology student named Roberta Barbos, was studying at the University of Glasgow when she posted an advertisement on Sanctioned Suicide’s personals section.
In November of 2019, the twenty-two-year-old told the community she was looking for an older man to, and I quote, “hold her hand throughout her suicide”.
Roberta and her long-term boyfriend had recently broken up, causing her to sink into a deep depression. In her despair, she searched the web, and came across Sanctioned Suicide.
“Sometimes loneliness hurts so much that I can barely hold myself together”, she wrote.
Within hours, one user posted the following in reply -
“I’m based in Glasgow”, he said, “and I’ve a hell of a lot of experience with hanging. I’d be happy to aid if you want. No pressure, no judgment, and [we can do things] at your own pace.”
The man offering his help was named Craig McInally, and although Roberta met with him briefly at a local coffee shop, he was unable to assist her in taking her own life.
And that’s because he was arrested just weeks later – for sexually assaulting two women who’s suicides he’d promised to assist with.
McInally was later jailed for a minimum of two years and three months following a conviction for ‘reckless conduct with a sexual element’, and was also given a lifelong restriction order, preventing him from contacting unfamiliar women via the internet.
Despite McInally’s arrest, Roberta remained committed to taking her own life, and her post history revealed an increasing interest in the use of poisons as her method of suicide.
Finally, in February of 2020, Roberta was found dead by a neighbor.
The exact method of suicide isn’t listed in any of the online news reports, but I doubt anyone would be surprised if the coroner discovered a fatal amount of sodium nitrite in Roberta’s system.
In December of 2019, just two months after Daniel Dal Canto’s death, a coroner in the UK called for a full government inquiry after learning of Sanctioned Suicide during the course of his work.
The German government opened an investigation around a similar time, while Australia’s eSafety Commission had been looking into the site for months prior to both the German and British inquiries.
By November of 2020, Sanctioned Suicide garnered even more infamy, after it was revealed that the wife of British Member of Parliament, Owen Paterson, had taken her own life during the summer of lockdowns, after stumbling across the site during a bout of depression.
At the time of writing, Italy, Germany and Australia have all passed legislation which prevents internet users within their borders from accessing Sanctioned Suicide.
But as many will tell you, circumventing such bans is as easy as downloading and installing one of the many Virtual Private Networks available on today’s online marketplace.
Google had already started to filter certain websites from its search results, but after pressure from government ministers, one senior manager was forced to explain that it simply wasn’t in their power to remove things from the internet.
Efforts to combat SanctionedSuicide.com in other ways have been equally unsuccessful.
The United States laws against assisting in a person’s suicide, but not only is it notoriously difficult to enforce, but many states yet to expand such laws to include online activity. What’s more, website operators cannot be held legally responsible for the activities of their users, as federal law shields them from any liability.
Initially, Sanctioned Suicide’s two founders promised to resist any attempt to take the website down.
‘Serge’ and ‘Marquis’ moved the servers from country to country, making them almost impossible to track, and worked tirelessly to scrub the internet of any trace of their identity.
In particular, Marquis has repeatedly stated that the website complies with US law, and does not permit assisting in, or encouraging suicide.
On several different occasions, he’s referred to the site as a “pro-choice” forum that supports members’ decisions to live or die.
“At the end of the day, people are responsible for their own actions,” Marquis wrote, “and there’s not much we can do about that.”
Marquis might’ve claimed that ‘Sanctioned Suicide’ complies with US law, but just a quick visit to the site reveals a very different story.
In a post-dated February 1st of 2024, a user named Sourdough asked -
“If I were able to secure a large amount of oral opiates, would these be sufficient for an overdose or would my body just throw them up if I took them all?”
Another user replies, “yes especially in [combination with isotonitazene]. If you don’t have a tolerance, then [inhaling] one line will kill, most certainly in combination with benzos, and absolutely in combination with alcohol”.
But that’s not all the user wrote in reply. They went onto claim that -
“Putting the powder in [enteric] coated capsules [will] ensure they pass the stomach, and only burst deep in the lower intestine where vomiting is not possible. I will warn you though, the amount of euphoria will scare you to death. You'll be hit with this wave of pleasure that is [insanely intense]. [For me, it] became exponentially and overwhelmingly unbearable until I blacked out. [I then] woke up with EMS all over place, [they rescued me, but] I don't want to talk about that part [right now]. Prepare to die in a supersonic pleasure wave, just don't be dumb and get addicted”.
Firstly, the user’s reply was so unintelligible that it required heavy editing to be read aloud.
They also used the word “isoetazines” instead of “isotonitazene”, referring to a kind of heart medication instead of the synthetic opioid.
They also typed the word “insuffating”, a misspelling of the word “insufflate”, which means “to blow or breathe hard on or into”. This, as I’m sure many of you will know, is not the correct word to describe ‘snorting’ or ‘inhaling’.
This suggests the user is either extremely careless, communicating poorly in a second language, or they’re extremely young, and are using such words in a confident but incorrect manner.
Secondly, the claim that someone will experience “waves of pleasure” during an opiate overdose is patently false.
Victims feel cold, shaky, drowsy and nauseous; ask someone who’s survived a heroin overdose, and the word “pleasure” is probably the last word they’d use to describe it.
This reply constitutes a direct attempt to deceive and manipulate a vulnerable person into taking their own life; and either it was written by a malevolent adult, or a child that has next to no idea what they’re talking about, and might even be receiving a twisted thrill from encouraging others to kill themselves.
In November of 2020, an international effort to take the site down was successful.
At least, temporarily so.
“We have been planning this for years”, Marquis wrote in a post he uploaded to the site, “and we are confident even if they coordinated all those takedowns at the same time (which is very unlikely), we could be back online within 24 hours.”
Serge and Marquis then went a step further to ensure the site’s security, and began cracking down on anyone sharing personal contact information.
Apparently, this was to keep their users “safe”, but in reality, the move did nothing but prevent outsiders from identifying vulnerable loved ones, and prevent life saving measures being implemented in time.
“If you’re preparing your departure, please contact a mod so we can help with preparations,” Serge wrote. He then went on to announce that accounts that had posted ‘goodbye threads’ would be deleted after a set period.
Serge explained that this was to protect privacy, but it can be argued that all this did was prevent the families of the dead from getting any closure regarding the deaths of their loved ones.
In other messages posted to the site, Serge gave users an insight into his own suicidal ideations.
“[There’s] not much to tell about myself, except that I’ve never really found a reason to be here,” he wrote. “There is little that I find worthy in this life.”
Marquis also confessed to have entertain the possibility of suicide, and explained that, quote -
“This community was made as a place where people can freely speak about their issues without having to worry about being ‘saved’ or [given] empty platitudes.”
Marquis certainly paints a saintly picture of himself, he seems to view his maintenance of the site as giving a voice to the voiceless. Yet Sanctioned Suicide has been operating, in various forms, for almost ten years now, and neither man has taken their own life.
Perhaps a better clue to their motivations was revealed in 2019, when it was discovered that Serge also runs a website for so-called ‘incels’.
While the term remains controversial, the portmanteau ‘incel’ reportedly stands for ‘involuntary celibates’.
Such people believe that they’re incapable of attracting members of the opposite sex, either due to their appearance or social standing. Yet instead of trying to better themselves, such people are said to lean into their incel status, and embrace feelings of envy, resentment and retribution.
Much like Sanctioned Suicide, the so-called ‘incel’ community used to congregate in a subsection of Reddit known as a ‘subreddit’.
But in 2017, the community was banned following the Aztec High School shooting, the perpetrator of which had an ‘Alpha Male of Group’ tattoo, which is heavily associated with incel philosophy and the so-called ‘Manopshere’.
It seems that, in the aftermath of the r/incels subreddit being banned, Serge seized on the opportunity to once again create what he referred as a “home for outcasts”, and railed against digital censorship in an impassioned first post to the website.
But in an interview on the subject, Serge said much of the discussion surrounding incels was, and I quote, “suicide fuel”.
Does Serge mean that in a truly negative sense, and intend his incels website to be a kind of refuge among a sea of contempt? Or does it give an insight into an alternative, and much more sinister motive...
...one involving the curation of online spaces in which negativity is currency.
Marquis has since vehemently denied cultivating a space where children can be exposed to extremely damaging information and content.
He explained that his websites require account users to “tick a box” confirming they are eighteen, but in the same breath, said he would never institute policies which required sharing physical forms of identification, such as passports or driver's licenses.
Marquis also pointed out that links to suicide hotlines, as well as other mental health resources, are available on the Sanctioned Suicide website.
But again, he noted that users who only engaged in the ‘recovery’ thread (the one place on the site that has a hint of positivity to it) will most likely receive a permanent ban on suspicion of attempting to talk others out of killing themselves.
Marquis later dismissed attempts to take his websites down as, and I quote, “the usual pro-life BS”, and said he’d be willing to defend his views and actions in a court of law.
“They’ll never prevail with censorship”, he wrote, “and we will fight every one of their attempts to do so. If people want to change, if they want self-improvement, basically the whole web for that. But if we are being honest, not everyone has a way out.”
Finally, in January of 2021, a senior vice president at a company known as ‘Epik’ received a telephone call.
The company sells domains to various website owners, and the phone call was from none other than Sharon Luft, the mother of the seventeen-year-old suicide I mentioned earlier, Matthew van Antwerpen.
Sharon pleaded with the vice president, Robert Davis, and asked him to permanently remove SantionedSuicide.com from their servers.
Davis then reached out to Serge and Marquis, in the hopes that securing their cooperation might result in a mutual understanding. But following a lengthy conversation, David released the following statement.
“The site owners lack the empathy, compassion or intent to appropriately utilize the platform for future good” he said, before announcing that the site’s services would be terminated with immediate effect.
Critics celebrated, but within just a few days, it was back.
SanctionedSuicide.com had simply changed its name – to Sanctioned-Suicide.net, the same domain it’s hosted on today.
In the state of Missouri, police were contacted by the friend of a man who’d taken his own life using sodium nitrite.
After searching his cellphone for any clues to his motivation, the man discovered that his departed friend had been a frequent visitor to the Sanctioned Suicide website.
Not only had his fellow users instructed him on where to buy the substance that ended his life, but they talked him through the process of ingesting it – as and when it was happening.
Having reached the so-called ‘goodbye thread’ before Serge or Marquis had a chance to delete it, the deceased man’s friend was horrified to find that, as he lay dying, the site’s users actually celebrated his untimely demise.
Naturally, the furious friend of the deceased sought legal retribution, but the case proved impossible to prosecute.
The detective who handled the Missouri case asserted that, without any physical evidence of an assisted suicide, there was no chance of bringing the matter to trial.
It’s true that, back in June of 2017, twenty-three-year-old Michelle Carter was convicted of manslaughter in Massachusetts, after urging her boyfriend to take his own life.
But in the Missouri case, they had no way of uncovering the names or addresses of those involved.
In 2011, a detective from St. Paul, Minnesota, helped convict a man for assisting in the suicide of someone he had met online.
“I’m convinced that there are smart people out there wearing a badge that could handle this type of internet crime,” said the now retired William Haider, “but as it stands, we’re simply not equipped to deal with that kind of cybercrime”.
According to the Center of Disease Control, the age-adjusted suicide rate in the United States increased by 33% between the years 2000 and 2020.
Their website also states that, in the year 2023 alone, more than 50,000 Americans took their own lives.
That’s more than die from traffic accidents each year, the highest figure since records began, and does not include the hundreds of physician-assisted deaths in the nine states where they are legal, but restricted to the terminally ill.
Some have called it a “crisis”, others an “epidemic”, but the fact remains that the United States is facing a battle unlike any it’s ever experienced before.
And just as our ancestors once exchanged their ploughshares for swords in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, perhaps it is our turn to become citizen-soldiers - so we may strive to conquer the greatest adversary some of us have ever faced...
...ourselves.