There is a story appearing now about a retirement home resident making ricin with the intention to use it on herself but testing it out by sprinkling it on the food of other patients. The claim is that she researched producing ricin on the internet. The problem is, both she and the reporters didn’t research enough.
The claim is that she used 30-40 castor beans and made “two or three tablespoons” of ricin twice. Now let’s break that down. My internet research shows that castor beans weigh around 0.25 grams each. They contain between 1.6 mg and 32 mg of ricin per gram. So those beans would have contained roughly between 12 mg and 320 mg of ricin. I don’t know the density of ricin, but it probably isn’t too far from the density of sugar. The density of sugar is 12.5 grams per tablespoon. So if she had managed to extract all of the ricin from the castor beans, she would have had between 0.001 and 0.025 tablespoon worth (instead of the 4 to 6 she claimed.)
Let’s say that she did have pure ricin. How deadly would it have been? If it could have been injected directly into the bloodstream, pretty darn. The 12 mg to 320 mg would have been capable of killing from 6 to 180 people. But eaten, it is far less toxic. That range of ricin would have been enough to kill between 0.15 person and 4 people. So even if there were 320 mg of ricin mixed in those 4 to 6 tablespoons of powder, someone would have to eat at least a full tablespoon to die, and given that she still had “a pill bottle half full” of the powder when the police recovered it, she must have been just sprinkling tiny amounts of the stuff on the food. I’m sure that the press will hype it up about how very deadly it was, though.
And now today I’ve posted in an internet thread about assassinating the president and done research on the properties of ricin, and should be expecting the knock on my door soon.
The depth of your research does seem significantly greater and more detailed than what I imagine would be most people’s level of interest.
What makes you think they’re gonna knock?
“Knocking down the door with a battering ram” still starts with “knock”. 
Not really. The old lady in the nursing home did all the research and production, but apparently not the arithmetic. OP just did the math.
Dang dude you’re on a list for sure!
I am not sure what point the OP is trying to make.
Is is that “the Media” so loves to hype potential threats that they don’t bother to see if the threat is real? Much of the OPs analysis is based on the quantity of “30-40 beans”. This sounds to me as an approximate number, probably as reported by the suspect herself. She probably didn’t count them, but just guessed. Is the number of beans really important? Isn’t it more important that she made 2-3 tablespoons of it, which would seem fairly accurate if there was “about half of a pill bottle” of it in her cupboard.
It seems to me the fact that she was able to produce ricin and poison a resident with it is what is important. One resident was reported to have become ill from the effects of ricin ingestion. That the media reports such events, in my opinion, is a good thing as it suggests such occurrences are rare and there is not anyone trying to cover-up the event. Whether or not the poison she made is as dangerous as anthrax spores or, perhaps, second-hand smoke is not the issue.
I think that the point is that the numbers in the story are so wrong that they make the entire story look like bullshit. It would take kilograms of beans to make that much ricin - not an amount that anyone would mistake for “30 - 40 beans.”
Assuming that the “poisoner” and the “victim” aren’t both delusional attention-seekers, what we’re actually looking at is probably dried pulverized castor beans. Nobody “made” ricin; if there was any present (false positives are common), and it wasn’t denatured, it still would have taken a tablespoonful of powder to cause symptoms.
And if she wanted to kill herself and had access to the internet, why ricin? That’s about the most convoluted and difficult method there is.
Some people just love a challenge. Once you go “Challenge accepted”, it’s hard to stop, even if you have second thoughts.
Did the article mention if there were any castor bean plants on the property or nearby? They’re a common ornamental plant. She probably chose castor beans because they were readily available to her and because everybody (right?) knows that castor beans are poisonous.
Agreed, that pile of powder was certainly not pure ricin, but probably just ground up beans. Calling it “ricin” was probably just the reporter, or the investigator, calling it that.
BTW, I don’t think castor beans are really beans. They’re just shaped kinda like beans.