Better yet, a jar labeled “glucose” but actually containing nicotine. 
One wonders if the cleanup of old high school chemistry cabinets is complete.
“We got bottles with labels from the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s,” says Wine. “We didn’t know what to do with them. You can’t throw them away because of the environmental hazard. So they stacked up!”
“One” might wonder that, but I don’t: It’s definitely not complete.
If the no-longer-needed bottles are labelled, it’s not so bad. It is more or less known what to do with a flask of mercury or bottle of nicotine. Also, not every stored substance becomes dangerously unstable; it is the few that do that need to be cleaned up urgently. But why would you get rid of perfectly good chemicals?
Nicotinic receptor demo was my first thought.
That’s what I was thinking.
This is the answer. I recall doing an experiment where we removed the heart from a living frog, hooked it up to wires to record the contraction, and bathed it in various drugs including nicotine to gauge the effect on the rhythm and strength of contractions.
Sorry frog! it was for science.
Horrifying. I’d call poison control if I encountered an old jar labeled “nicotine” in a closet.
Sodium metal: A classmate of my older brother swiped some of this stuff during a chemistry class and everyone soon found out. How? As you’d expect: He put the metal, formerly sitting in some liquid that was not water (maybe a light oil?) into the back pocket of his jeans. And this was down in Florida, so it soon got damp from the boy’s sweat. Started to burn a hole in his pocket and underwear, probably gave him at least a 2nd degree burn.
As for why it’s not gone, blame the EPA. Well, don’t blame the EPA like they’re a bad agency, but that the environmental laws puts the school on the hook for disposing this stuff properly as hazardous waste. Cradle to grave is important and I agree with it, but it means that dealing with old stuff can be unpleasant and expensive. Easier to stick it on a shelf somewhere and let it be someone else’s problem.
Also, there’s that academic mentality of never getting rid of anything because money is always tight. When I was in grad school (mid 2000s) we had jars of chemicals from companies that no longer existed and dated back to the Nixon administration.
Erm, no. The EPA has no jurisdiction over my school.
Sure, if you’re not in the US. If you are, I’m willing to bet that both the EPA and the state level equivalent agency have jurisdiction regarding the disposal of hazardous waste. And all school systems generate hazardous waste, not just in the science building, though of course it’s site by site. The point was not the EPA specifically, but that environmental laws have made it so that somebody is always on the hook for proper disposal and its costs, with fines and other penalties for non-compliance. RCRA still applies, though most schools are in the smallest quantity classification.
The EPA maintains a chemical resource management guide for schools that details agency oversight.
https://www.epa.gov/schools/chemical-management-resource-guide-school-administrators
I remember a school educational film where the teacher put a drop of nicotine in a white rat’s mouth. The rat thrashed around and quickly died. “See kids, this is why you shouldn’t take up smoking.”
Possibly the teacher in this school believed in live demonstrations.
Nicotine was the murder “weapon” in an early P.D. James mystery. I read it decades ago when I hadn’t really thought toxic it was.
It was also used as a weapon in a murder-mystery play I was in in high school. Though I think that was written by the faculty director.
According to the murderer, its value as a weapon was that, so long as the victim was a smoker, it being detected in the blood at the autopsy would be unremarkable. But then, of course, the murderer is forced by circumstances to kill a non-smoker witness that she wasn’t planning on killing, and so the nicotine in his blood was remarkable.
Yes I suspect they’re holding onto it for biology. Punching
high school biology lab nicotine
into Google returns lots of experiments that are an appropriate level for high school.
Yep. I retired eleven years ago- when I left, there was a jar of chloral hydrate, at least one of iodine crystals, and enough chromium and cyanide chemicals in the closet to kill the county. The stuff was there for seventeen years while I was there and had been for decades before. The school is now a 6-8th grade building, but I’m sure the stuff is still there. The only things we got rid of were the alkali metals- one teacher just took them home and threw them into a pond for fun.
Adding- a bottle of toluene came home with me. So did a bottle of ammonium sulfide solution.
Here in melb.vic.au, the schools were cleaned out in the early 1980’s. (A friend worked for) a company got the contract, and went around to every government school and collected everything not on the official safe list.
Assuming is sometimes dangerous, but I would assume that he never did that again.
Where I went to high school, the biology lab and chemistry lab were connected via a short corridor that also had the supply room for both of them. While I don’t know if there’s anything in common between what gets used in them, they both need a secure place to keep stuff away from students and other interlopers. I remember the door said “Staph only”.
Toluene…
Strangely enough, I remember an experiment in chemistry. Our teacher told us to put some in a test tube and heat it over a bunsen burner. I think the term was “carefully.” He did NOT want us to let it catch fire. Naturally, that made us wonder what would happen if it caught fire and a slight tilt of the test tube and…OOPS!
Quite a bit of soot in the air. In the Midwest in winter, lots of girls were wearing fuzzy sweaters. We teenage boys were watching them rub the ashes, trying to get them off their bodies. Man, I loved chemistry! 
RIP Mr. B, you were a great teacher!