Let’s say I’m a mid 20s male in tip top shape.
I’m an average joe, so I don’t have access to nuclear plants or X-Ray machines.
What would be the quickest and surest way for me, a young lad of getting cancer?
I thought maybe I could smoke 20 packs a day, but that would take too long. Household cleaners? I can’t poison myself in any way! It has to be cancer?
Suggestions?
Radiation gives people cancer right? Smoking will still takes years upon years to give you lung cancer, if it ever does. Radiation will kill you now given a high enough dosage in your exposure. Too high will give you radiaton poisoning, not quite the same as cancer. So you’ll need to find a good balance between enough radiation to give you cancer, but not so much just to have you keel over right then and there.
Best of luck?
I guess I should also add a “time to death” factor into the equation. I thought about radiation. How practical would it be for me, an average joe, to find a strong enough source of radiation? Where would I find this source?
The easiest source would be to steal some from a construction site where they have a radioactive source to measure for imperfections in welds like on a pipeline. They get stolen every year.
Go to the “exclusion zone” in Chernobyl, and run around naked through the remains of the power plant. I think that would do it.
I wonder if eating the alpha source in a smoke detector would cause your innards to absorb enough radiation. That’s the most readily-available radioactive substance I can think of, anyway.
According to Wiki there are still some people living there. Since they haven’t died I’m going to assume the remaining radiation is not strong enough to give me cancer quickly.
How’bout deep breathing asbestos particles throughout the day?
Find some asbestos (if you can) and go for mesothelioma.
Or, alternatively, buy about 500 smoke detectors, take them apart, and consume the Americium-241 within. The world of radiation poisoning will be your oyster.
You could also engage in sexual activity with anybody and everybody you can get your hands on, you’ll have a real good shot at Kaposi’s Sarcoma. Unfortunately, that comes with AIDS as a package deal.
Last, you could lay out in the sun for hours on end every day and hope for melanoma.
There are lots of ways to get cancer. Think outside the box, dude.
Find someone with Metastatic cancer, take their (still alive) tumor, and start breaking up their cells into a plasma solution and start injecting* it into your blood stream. Eventually, it’ll take.
Or find some h. pylori and maybe some mycoplasma bugs in solution and drink that stuff- that’d work for H.pylori, but maybe not for mycoplasma - still there are other choicestoo.
If that doesn’t work, you could go the viral route.
*Only because surgically implanting the tumor into you would probably be cheating. And eating it would just dissolve it in your stomach. We need to bypass that ish, yo.
Just buy a UV light, or tanning booths too- easier and more concentrated if you can focus several beams onto you! 
Just throwing a number outthere but could I develop cancer and die under a month? (using any of the methods already mentioned?) I’m obviously not going to seek any treatment.
There are people living in rural villages around the Chernobyl area. But there sure as hell isn’t anyone living inside Pripyat, the actual city itself, where the nuclear reactor was. You realize that the radiation is not at the same level in all places; in the countryside, it’s still present, but low enough that people can live there. Inside the actual city, in the remains of the nuclear reactor where the meltdown happened, it’s a hell of a lot higher. You would definitely get radiation sickness or cancer if you spent time inside the reactor.
I would go with something like benzene… although I note that cigarettes are a major source of benzene.
But dying in less than a month? Nothing is going to cause cancer all that quickly. Even if you had a full-blown cancer already, you’d probably have more than a month to live anyway. With most carcinogens, you’re talking decades unless you push the doses so high that you die of poisoning rather than cancer.
My more flippant response: do anything to extremes. I don’t think any substance or situation exists that will not cause cancer in very large amounts (at least in lab rats).
The ill-fated Chernobyl reactor 4 has been encased in some 50 feet of solid concrete, since nobody wants radioactive materials released in the atmosphere and there’s no feasible way of salvaging them. In fact, there’s currently an international project underway to encase it even further, since it’s still leaking small amounts of radioactive particles even with that level of isolation. Not nearly enough for the surrounding area to be lethal, mind you, but it’s not exactly prime camping grounds either.
At any rate, radiation is a very insidious thing. High enough levels to really damage you would kill a large number of the cells in your body a lot faster than they could be replaced, so that would cause you to lose much of your skin and organ function and die quite horribly long before any tumour might develop.
Yes, it may not be a certainty but a very high level of radiation could kill you in days or possibly even hours. Ummm, though if it acts that quickly, the mechanism probably isn’t cancer per se.
As an aside, I have read a few stories where an xray machine is used as a nearly perfect murder weapon. Someone puts one into a room next to where the victim lives or works, and sends the beam through the wall, and sooner or later comes sickness and death.
A friend of mine claimed that in research labs when they need to induce cancer (specifically brain cancer if I remember correctly) they inject rats with huge amounts of MSG.
He wasn’t exactly a unbiased source of information on the matter (he thought MSG was somewhere between crack cocaine and plutonium on the list of things you shouldn’t put in your body).
Go for the Hepatic cancer trifecta: Aflatoxins, Alcohol and Hepatitis B.
Of course, to do it fast you’ll need to walk a fine line between fatal cirrhosis and developing a liver carcinoma, but what the heck. At least with the alcohol and mouldy peanuts, you will enjoy the process. And catching HepB could be fun, too.
Certainly more fun than inhaling absestos or drinking Hexavalent Chromium contaminated water.
You won’t develop cancer and die within a month though.
Si
Cancer from exposure is a result of chronic (time-consuming) exposure.
Heavy/fast exposure = poisoning/damage/death
The rapid-onset cancers (leuekemia, lymphoma) are triggered by mutations. Young people get these, because there is no need for exposure or misuse of body and/or product over time.
Radiation used properly would be good at triggering thyroid cancer, I believe.
my question is, who are you trying to kill by giving them cancer and why do you only got a month? anyways…
http://www.cancer.org/docroot/cri/content/cri_2_4_1x_what_is_cancer.asp
read that to understand what cancer is first.
then read this:
and your golden…er, well your somethign anyways
You seem to be asking for two things here. One a very fast, surefire way of creating a cancer, and then that the cancer you create be very aggressive and soon fatal. As has been suggested above, about the only very fast way of getting enough mutations in a hurry to get a cancer growing is probably a radioactive source. Then you want a very agressive deadly cancer. This really means a vital body function that is made from fast dividing cells. That is pretty well met by the blood supply’s hematogenesis. So, leukemia, in one of its variants, would probably meet the bill. So, maybe insert a suitable radioactive source into your pelvis or a femur, right into the marrow. Dead in a month? Dunno, but I would suspect it would not take very long.