With Russians dropping dead from polonium poisoning, I’ve begun to wonder about poisoning generally. What’s the fastest-acting, most lethal poison? What’s the most insidious, least detectable? —JP, Syracuse, New York
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Toxicologists have a blunt way of rating a poison’s lethality. Discussed here before, it’s called the LD-50, or 50 percent lethal dose—the amount that on average kills half the target critters. As the term may suggest, a fair amount of guesswork is involved. Since most governments object to running toxicity tests on humans, researchers substitute lab animals, who don’t necessarily react like us. Individual susceptibility varies widely depending on metabolism, tolerance, etc; differing effectiveness among poison delivery methods is another wild card. A compound with a relatively high LD-50 might be carcinogenic and therefore deadlier in the long run, nicotine offering the salient example. So it’s hard to say definitively which poison is the fastest, most insidious, or tastiest. I’ll tell you about some of the deadlier toxins known, and you can make your own plans.
Not up for animal wrangling? Try plants and fungi. Ricin poisoning can be had from eating castor beans, the source of castor oil—the symptoms build slowly and gruesomely (basically your arteries plug up), culminating in death in a week or so. If injected or inhaled, a bit of ricin the size of a pinhead could kill you. The most famous case of ricin poisoning was the 1978 assassination of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, who was killed James Bond-style by a poke from an umbrella rigged to inject him with a tiny pellet of the toxin. Naturally there’s no antidote.
Update 9/11/2018: A new headline was added.
