I’ve been looking for the answer to this one, and I figured that a good way to cast a broad net was to throw it into this nest of know-it-alls.
I’ve been researching soime stuff, and keep coming across the idea of “poisoned tobacco” and “poisoned cigarettes”. Sis such a thing or does such a thing actually exist?
As I say, I can find plenty of references to it. But these are virtually all in the form of rumors about the nefarious activities of enemies, or conspiracy theories about deaths. They’re all in Urban Legend form.
Napoleon was killed by Poisoned Tobacco —someone heard
Yassir Arafat was killed by Polonium -laced cigarettes – they heard
The KGB used poisoned cigarettes –people claim
The CIA considered using poisoned cigarettes – they say
The Japanese distributed lots of poison-laced cigarettes in China – they say.
Even when the reports about the KGB or CIA come from insiders, it’s never anyone directly connected with the programs.
The concept shows up in detective novels and even highfalutin literature – they discuss it in Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment. It’s in S.S. VanDine mysteries. It’s used one time on Columbo Novelists toss it out sas a hard-to-trace way of committing murder.
Okay, but Ihave yet to find a report of any death traceable to poisoned cigarettes. You could argue that, well, of course I can’t – it’s supposed to be untraceable. That gets you into paranoid logic (“Of COURSE it’s happening – the fact that you can’t find any evidence PROVES it!”) Surely, if this was going on, someone would slip up, or break down and confess. Or fail, and leave a smoking…cigarette.
Cigarettes are, of course, deadly enough on their own, and nicotine, in sufficient quantity, is a poison. But I’m not talking about the tobacco status quo. If you put anything into tobacco would it actually kill someone, instead of being burned up and converted into less harmful combustion products? If you laced tobacco with cyanide, couldn’t it be burned into carbon and nitrogen oxides, rather than being a lethal gas? Those complex plant alkaloids would probably not survive burning unaltered. I have yet to see evidence that poison applied to tobacco would even work.
(On the flip side, in the late 19th and early 20th century people tried to treat their asthma with “medicated cigarettes”. The practice died out, and I suspect it’s because the cigarettes , once the compounds were burned, actually had no positive benefit.)
On the other hand, I do recognize that cigarettes with menthol apparently retain that characteristic “coolness”, so some additives survive combustion, evidently. They reportedly throw a host of additives into cigarettes these days.
I can more easily believe in poisoned snuff or chewing tobacco or e-cigarettes. In those cases the poison won’t get altered by burning. It’d be like poisoning someone’s drink. Although I haven’t encountered reports of any of those either. I’d be interested in hearing of any.
So, I throw it open to you Dopers. Have you encountered any cases of death-by-poisoned-tobacco? Killing someone by adulterating their cigarettes, their cigars, or their pipe tobacco? And I mean actual confirmed cases – not rumors or conspiracy theories or the reports of the nefarious doings of our enemies or intelligence agencies – unless by someone who actually did it. (And if you find such – Did it actually work?. It’s one thing to soak someone’s Kools in arsenic, it’s another to have them keel over as a result) And I’m not looking for fictional mysteries where someone kills someone with poisoned tobacco, unless they also cite confirming evidence.
