When I was in pharmacy school, carfentanil was mentioned just so we would know it existed. It’s always been used as a large-animal tranquilizer, and it is extremely difficult to legally obtain.
For some substances, the best-known properties depend on certain compounds, not the pure element. The “sulfur smell” that a lot of people know is actually a sulfur compound–hydrogen sulfide. Pure sulfur is odorless. Likewise, elemental mercury is relatively safe.
Tobacco harvesters can get sick from just rubbing up against the plants:
The freaky thing in the Wetterhahn case is that it it wasn’t just a drop or two on her skin - it was a drop or two on her latex glove, and enough of that permeated directly through the glove, and then through her skin, and then killed her almost a year later.
I’ve always thought that one of the worst ways to die would be from a screw-up at work. Even worse if you had a year to consider the consequences of your mistake. Certainly in her case there was the mitigation that nobody knew quite how hazardous a procedure she’d been doing. But still. Poor woman.
And this is why I side eye people who deliberately get injections of the stuff to make themselves look less wrinkled. That’s a hell of a risk to take to “improve” your looks.
So why doesn’t smoking it kill you? I mean, right away.
The dose makes the poison.
A smoker smokes a cigarette for maybe five minutes, inhaling a small fraction of the smoke that comes from it and absorbing a small fraction of the nicotine present in that smoke.
A field hand harvesting tobacco might be out in the field for hours, brushing up against rain/dew-drenched plants and soaking his sweaty, wet clothing in nicotine stew. His exposure to nicotine is continuous and lasts until he removes those clothes and showers - which, for the average migrant farm worker, is probably not until he gets home at the end of the day.
As Stranger noted, I think they’re equating pulmonary edema with ‘drowning.’ I think clinically speaking ‘drowning’ means immersion.
There was a case locally several years ago where a kid aspirated some swimming pool water, and several hours later died from pulmonary edema as the result of a bad reaction–which goes back to the earlier quote " the way our bodies react means there may be nothing we can do to stop it."
There was a plastic surgeon who occasionally did cosmetic Botox in my old town, and accidentally penetrated a blood vessel and the patient spent a few days in the ICU. The pharmacist who was working that night contacted Poison Control, who referred him to a place in Chicago that had the best antidote and it was flown to our town. The patient did recover.
Heavy price to pay, that’s for sure.
Back in the 1970s, two of my cousins worked in tobacco fields in the Southeast, a job similar to corn detasseling in the Midwest. Don’t know what they did, but it was indeed filthy and potentially dangerous, and also paid quite well for something a mid-teenager could do.