Watching a CSI rerun (always a bastion of factual and accurate information 
) the other day, one victim was poisoned with liquid nicotine. This got me wondering, is it possible to poison yourself through cigarette smoking? Could you physically get through enough cigarettes quickly enough to kill yourself?
Presumably you’re not counting lung cancer?
Yes, but most cigarette smokers stop at that point because they are smoking just to satiate themselves.
The LD50 on nicotine is 0.5-10 mg/kg. You get about 1 mg of nicotine from each cigarette smoked. So it’s really unlikely that you could smoke the 50+ cigarettes needed in a short enough time to die from the nicotine. You can, however, make yourself feel rather sick, and I’ve done that before. Takes, for me, about 3 chain-smoked cigarettes and I feel like I’d rather sit down against a cool wall for a bit until the room settled down, thanks. (Or it did when I smoked.)
I don’t have the numbers, but the one time I smoked a hookah (tobacco), it sure felt like I was getting a lot more of the nicotine than I did from cigarettes. I had to pass after a few minutes because I was getting dizzy with heart palpitations. I actually felt uncomfortably high, although there were no drugs but tobacco in there.
cite for LD50 and nicotine consumed per cigarette: http://chemweb.calpoly.edu/cbailey/377/PapersF06/BryceF/nicotinepoisoning.html
more sciencey stuff:Nicotine (PIM)
Like Whynot I’ve chain smoked 3 or 4 cigarettes and felt pretty ill. Clammy skin, sick stomach, light headed, etc. I could imagine that it wouldn’t take much more (depending on how much you smoked) to make yourself pretty sick.
No, I didn’t want to include that in the discussion. Just the possibility of “immediate” poisoning.
A local tobacconist had these Turkish cigs that were REALLY strong; even we experienced smokers felt dizzy after one. So, I guess if I smoked, say, two at a time, chainsmoking them, I might get sick. I think I’d pass out before I got to a lethal dose. In all cases, this will not be an invisible poisoning; the victim will be very noticeably ill for a good while before keeling over.
What May Be Urban Legend: You can soak some cigars in water overnight, and drinking the water the next day will be fatal.
Most people that try their first cigarette will get pretty sick if they figure out how to inhale semi-well right away. Most people that try chewing tobacco or snuff start as teenagers. If you take a teenager that has never tried tobacco of any kind and give them snuff, it will have a massive effect. In particular, you can give a teenage boy Skoal, or even better, Copenhagen and tell him to keep it in as a dare, the results will be bad and get worse the longer they keep it in their cheek.
I know that because I did it myself and gave it to others along with strong peer pressure. It will cause extreme dizziness, headaches, and a lot of other symptoms. Often, the person can’t walk at all or can barely do so. The first time I did it, I couldn’t walk so friends carried me into our house and dropped my into a bathtub of cold water. I just laid there for three hours sometimes praying that I was dead.
It is amazing that anyone ever does it again but of course they do.
When I used to smoke, and under very stressful times, I’ve been able to chain smoke an entire pack (20 cigarettes) in about an hour and a half. These were rare occasions, but I’m sure people must have done much more than me (I topped out at 2 packs per day). I would also sometimes do snus (Scandinavian dipping tobacco) and smoke at the same time. How quickly do you need to get that nicotine in your system?
I had heard that, and also that eating the tobacco from a couple of cigarettes would be enough to kill an adult. I think the latter was contemplated as a suicide method by the protagonist in The Handmaid’s Tale.
A little searching turned up this recent NYT article about restaurants using tobacco as a flavoring in some dishes. Apparently it can be unpleasant but not lethal.
My highschool biology teacher told us there was enough nicotine in a can of dip to kill someone if they swallowed it all at once, or you could concentrate it somehow and put it in someone’s coffee and they wouldn’t even taste it; they’d just die. Even at the time I figured he was full of shit but I’d be interested to know for sure one way or another. (He dipped, by the way, so this wasn’t some scare tactic to keep us away from tobacco.)
On and off, I’ve dabbled in smoking over the last 20 years. The worst feeling I ever had was when I smoked three 'Export A" Milds in about 20 minutes. It felt like I had pure copper flowing through my veins and I thought I was going to die. Lay still, don’t move. Truly horrible, lasts about an hour.
There are some more factors than LD50 and nicotine content per cigarette. Some nicotine is destroyed by high temperature during smoking. Only part of what is left gets into your lungs, and only part of that (around 60%) actually is assimilated. So to get LD50 of nicotine by smoking cigarettes you need to smoke several hundreds of them. In short succession.
But.
Nicotine is not only thing toxic in cigarettes. There is also CO, HCN, NH3, acrolein etc. Smoking will make you sick long before you got toxic dose of only nicotine.
Ed McBain’s Poison told me more about nicotine poisoning than I ever wanted to know. Ed was a very thorough researcher.
Yes, most of it, in fact. The 1 mg mentioned is, according to the sources I could find, the amount of nicotine actually absorbed by the body, on average, from one cigarette. There is more nicotine in there to start with, about 15-25 mg, but most of that oxidized (burns) into other compounds during smoking. This is why a small child EATING a cigarette (or an ashtray full of butts) is far more serious than the same child smoking the cigarette or being around the secondhand smoke from it - 10 mg can kill a small child, and that’s about half a cigarette if it’s eaten instead of smoked.