Ah yes, hemlock! Good for what ails you, with the fresh taste of mint besides! Great with Mint Juleps, just don’t use to much!! 
When I was in college a girl in my dorm committed suicide by drinking a milkshake laced with cyanide. After the ambulance took her away, I remember the distinct smell of almonds in the hallway on her corridor.
Who served you that drink, Phil or Dixie Null?
I cannot attest to the percentages, but it is true that some people cannot smell cyanide - I cannot, for one.
You mean it doesn’t taste like chicken?
really, it should be
Actually, I can tell you that in addition to the smell of a lethal gas, frequently you get a taste component. Phosgene has a strange herbish smell in small amounts, but gives you a wierd metallic taste [like when you hold a handful of coins in a sweaty hand] Chlorine is easier to detect by burning eyes rather than smell, and ammonia gives you an odd catch in the back of the throat.
I used to work in a chemical plant. My machine shop was sort of between the ammonia and the chlorine shop. It takes me 2.2 seconds to get into a gas mask and just under a minute to get into an airpack =) I used to jokingly refer to being in training for the jupiter acclimation project. I have been exposed to chloring, ammonioa, sulfur dioxide, phosgene, many different acids and bases ranging from naptha to hydrofluosilicic acid. We also carried potassium cyanide in the cutest little 15 lb cardboard oatmeal drums =) a favorite breaktime hobby was combining ammonia and some of the iodine from the ahem accidently broken can stored back in the hazmat area and making things go boom.
Quantity and form of delivery are important. The poisonous part is the cyanide ion, CN[sup]-[/sup], which binds with an important metabolic enzyme in your body (cytochrome c oxidase) and stops your cells from being able to use oxygen. This is basically bad news all round, but you can survive it if not all the enzyme in your body is bound. Small or gradually increasing doses will make you very sick, large acute doses can take effect rapidly.
Hydrogen cyanide gas will dissolve into the moist surface of your lungs and form hydrocyanic acid, allowing CN[sup]-[/sup] to be absorbed rapidly into the bloodstream. A good concentrated whiff of HCN can black you out before you hit the ground. Despite this, accounts of the Nazi gas chambers describe slow deaths from the pesticide Zyklon B, basically fibrous pellets impregnated with liquid HCN, that evaporates into the air at ambient temperatures. That would be an example of slow poisoning.
Liquid hydrocyanic acid can be absorbed through the stomach and gut, cyanide salts such as potassium or sodium cyanide will be absorbed more slowly. The salts may react to produce HCN in the stomach, which might then be inhaled, but I have no idea if this absorbtion mechanism is significant. I have read a magazine article that stated that suicides drinking hydrocyanic acid have collapsed and ceased breathing before finishing the bottle, but I have no verfication of that.
There are oral and antidotes that bind to cyanide, and amyl nitrite ampoules are effective as well. Labs and industries that use cyanide usually have antidote kits around, so it’s likely that there are many cyanide poisoning survivors who know what it tastes like.
Thanks so much people. Almonds eh? Now who knows what almonds smell like? :rolleyes:
Twenty-five years or more I saved that line for the right opportunity…
This seems pretty inefficient for the Nazis, I would think they wanted to kill as efficiently as possible to keep their quotas up. Gas can be tricky, maybe they wanted to do their worst without killing themselves?
Zyklon B was a commercial product, a fumigation pesticide for use on rodents and the like. It wasn’t designed to be fast, or to be used on people.
The first Nazi concentration camp was at Dachau, and the gas chambers there were simply small concrete rooms with a couple of ports where the pesticide could be posted in from the outside. I recommend taking a tour if you ever visit Munich - it’s not exactly a fun day out, but it is a warning of how bad things can get if we tolerate certain types of thinking. Take one of the walking tours of Nazi history as well.
Our guide told us that later gas chambers had forced circulation of warm air to get the cyanide to work more quickly. But the gassing was probably not the rate-determining process anyway - unloading the dead bodies and running them through the crematoriums probably took longer.
If you want me to make someone die without pain,
I use the poison Iocane,
You will not even recive a bill,
For that would be inconceivable!
'S’ort of like Dr Pepper.