O.K., having seen this oldy but goody movie/television plot on a recent episode of Smallville, it left me wondering. Are there any poisons that really work such that you would be dead in X minutes, unless you give away the secret to get the antidote that only Mr. Evil has? Where said antidote works to almost immediately counteract most if not all of the effects of the poison (as opposed to say, keeping you alive with some organs in a near jellied state)?
If there are, are there many? What are they?
P.S. No, I do not intend to poison anyone in the future.
IANAT (toxicologist), but wouldn’t a poison that could kill you in two minutes, be so deadly that it would have to either cause multiple organ failure instantly or stop your heart or respiration?
Various nerve gases and poisons based on organophosphates (e.g. Sarin) can be reversed (mostly) by injecting atropine and some other substances. You won’t necessarily make a complete recovery (there will be subtle cognitive problems, for example) but at least you won’t be suffocating while expelling fluids from every orifice. Of course, while you’re poisoned, you’d probably be too busy convulsing to be doing any bargaining.
If you’re not hung up on the “two minutes” part or purely chemical poisons, you could always inject your victim with a toxin like bubonic plague or anthrax which is curable by antibiotics but can be rapidly fatal if not treated.
I’ve been meaning to ask this for some time. It’s one of those common B grade movie plot devices for which I’ve always wondered if there is any factual foundation.
I suppose you could make a case that cyanide fits these criteria. Death from cyanide poisoning is rapid, yet it may be possible to prevent it by the quick adminstration of various antidotes.
Another potential candidate would be curare (the famous poision used by Indians of the Amazon rain forest). There are a number of potential antidotes for curare, but, unless I’m mistaken, all need to be given intravenously to be effective in the necessary time frame.
However, this question reminds me that I’ve heard frequently about a book called: Deadly Doses: A Writer’s Guide to Poisons , which is supposed to be great at answering this sort of thing. It’s intended for mystery writers, which I am not, but I’ve always meant to buy a copy anyway – every reference to it that I’ve ever seen claims it’s a great book.
The problem is that while there are poisons which can be quickly reversed and poisons that will kill you in two minutes, there are very few that do both. In addition the mysterious poison they use in movies doesn’t seem to produce any effects until the two minutes is nearly up.
I think it’s possible that you might be able to produce somewhat similar effects with cyanide, nerve agents, or curare (the problem with these would be whether the antidote worked fast enough) as has been suggested above, however I would have thought that possibly the best candidate for this type of thing would be some type of opiate preparation.
With all of these thing, the key would be in how they were administered, the antidote would almost certainly have to be given intravenously to work quick enough.
Ya scooped me, Finagle.I used to work for a scientific consulting company. We inherited some lab space from a group that was doing contract work for the army on nerve agents. Every drawer in the lab had an atropine styrette. The idea was that if you exposed yourself to any of the compounds they were working with, you had a very limited period of time to grab one and jab it into your thigh. The only caveat was that if you weren’t exposed (but thought you were), and dosed yourself, well, you would die.
I don’t think this is strictly true, the injectors would contain Atropine (and probably Pralidoxime). The atropine works by binding competitively to the same sites as the nerve toxin, I don’t think the effects would be any worse if you were exposed to the Atropine without the presence of OP poisoning, however the effects of these injections would be pretty dramatic and you certainly could die, and would almost certainly require medical attention.
Animal venoms tend to be composed a lot of different complicated substances and as a rule tend to effect large animals pretty slowly, they often require treatment with antivenom antibodies rather than a straightforward antidote and this type of treatment tends to be rather slow and prone to complications. There are however refined components from these venoms that work in such a way as to have a pretty quick effect. I would imagine that conotoxins terodotoxin and bungarotoxin could work pretty darn fast in high enough doses.
As I said above, a lot of this depends on dosage, route of adminstration, and the victim in question.
I am pretty sure you could mess around with the dosage and administration of something like Heroin to produce effects over pretty much any timeframe from 5min to an hour and it’s effects can be reversed very quickly with Naloxone, this probably wouldn’t be exotic enough for your average evil overlord though.
Does anyone know how quickly an insulin overdose would work/could be reversed? I could see that fitting in to the general timeframe too.
In general though I would suggest that any would be bond villian stick to the suggestions in the Evil Overlord List and rely on judicious application of the time honoured favourite technique - massive systemic high velocity lead poisoning
Well that’s odd, the ID corpsman on mrAru’s next to last sub accidently shot up with an atropine autoinject while disposing of some outdated meds, and all he had was a serious case of the jutters for about half a day. I know he didn’t die, he was on a hospital training update when I was in getting poked and prodded a couple months afterwards and he was in on the festivities for training purposes. Nice guy despite his taste in vile puns.
Clearly the solution is to take a big breath of the nerve agent right as you push the plunger. Then you know you’ve been exposed and you have the antidote.
Honestly, it’s like no one uses common sense anymore.
Were I an evil overlord, I think that it would be more fun and effective to inject something to make the victim think he was going to die. It seems to me that that would be much easier to accomplish. Knock the guy out, then you have time to decide what to do. You can finish him off in any of a number of ways. You could revive him and toy with him some more.
Really, lots more effective, if you think about it.
