What would happen if I placed one drop of Black Leaf 40 under my tongue? Would it cause immediate death, or would I just get sick as a dog?
In G. Gordon Liddy’s autobiography, he describes how he needed to shoot someone without making any noise. (I think it was when he was talking about his plan to kill Jack Anderson, but I’m not sure. My copy is in storage right now and I can’t get to it.) Liddy said he used a gun that fired a spring-loaded round. Since the probability of lethality was relatively low using a weapon of this type, he coated the bullets with nicotine to increase the chances of his target dying. What was the nicotine for? Was it to kill the target via simple poisoning, or was it because the vasoconstrictive effects of nicotine would exacerbate the physical trauma of being shot and therefore have a crippling effect on the target’s nervous system, as somebody once suggested to me?
I would take Liddy’s claims with a grain of…something.
It used to be claimed that mobsters used garlic-coated bullets to induce fatal sepsis if their shooting victim survived the initial trauma. But you can also find reports that garlic is antiseptic. There (thankfully) don’t seem to be any clinical trials to settle the matter. If you could induce sepsis through large doses of garlic, Italy would be depopulated by now, and I would not be around to post this.
I used to (many years ago) use Black Leaf 40 as in insecticide, always being very careful to avoid skin exposure or inhalation. These days I’d want to avoid any pesticide with a label warning of possible fatality through contact.
Surprisingly, it looks like the stuff (including generic nicotine sulfate) is still on the market as an organic formulation. And it certainly has environmental benefits (breaks down very fast) if you don’t mind handling a deadly chemical.
How much nicotine kills a human? Tracing back the generally accepted lethal dose to dubious self-experiments in the nineteenth century
This recent paper says the LD50 of nicotine as usually published is based one very small and very unscientific study done in 1906.
High concentrations of nicotine is dangerous and can certainly kill people who ingest enough of it. It seems that the amount needed to kill a person may be quite a bit more than has been thought.