Murder by poisoning may seem like an old-fashioned phenomenon interesting only to fans of mystery novels and the odd toxicologist. But the new book, The Poisoner’s Handbook, suggests the threat of poisons and poisoning is ever present.
I spoke to author Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer-prize winning science journalist, about the eerie and shocking history of poisoning in the U.S., and why it continues to captivate the public imagination.
Why are people — especially mystery writers and their fans — so fascinated by poison?
I think some of it is the basic creepiness of it. Poisoners themselves are such wonderfully creepy killers. I think they’re the coldest of killers. It’s always premeditated. With almost any other weapon, you can do it by impulse.
There’s something about the heartlessness plotting and planning that really catches people’s imaginations. And there’s a running thread through murder mysteries [because of this]. We don’t have that many great poisoners now, though, because since the 20th century, they’re much easier to catch.
When you go and look at homicide statistics, poisons are a really small part of it. Most murderers are not cold plotters and planners. The rareness gives it an added cachet.
Some of it is also the gruesomeness. Poison deaths are also [usually] wicked deaths. I’ve had people come up to me when I’ve given talks and they ask, ‘What would poison would you use if you wanted to cause a painless death?’
My guess is opioids?
With opioids or even carbon monoxide, if you get the dose right, they will drift off to sleep. As toxicologists say, the dose makes the poison. If you wanted a quick death, you could do something like cyanide. That’s superfast but you’d have a few very bad minutes.
Tell me about carbon monoxide.
It’s such a good poison, so efficient. We know so much about it and it’s still so dangerous. We don’t take it seriously enough. It consistently kills 500 or more people every year.
It’s a byproduct of incomplete combustion. What makes it interesting as a poison is that, normally, when we inhale air, the oxygen binds to proteins in our blood and those drag oxygen to every cell in the body. But carbon monoxide bonds much more efficiently to those proteins. It loves them, so even though there might be oxygen in the air, if you breathe carbon monoxide, the oxygen never gets [to the cells].
I think of it as a big muscular bully — it shoves the oxygen off and so you suffocate. As your blood becomes more and more saturated, there’s huge individual variance. Some people die very quickly from not that much; some live a bit longer.
The way it bonds sets off chemical reactions and the blood becomes an intense cherry pink. It’s so strong, it literally stains you. People find the corpse, which would normally be pale, but with carbon monoxide, it looks pink and rosy.
That’s a real giveaway. For example, someone kills his wife with pills and breaks a gas pipe [to make it look like a carbon monoxide death]. But when they find her, she’s pale and that gives it away. It’s a wonderful example of how if you just know a tiny bit of chemistry, it could help you solve murder. That pink tells you something about what this very poisonous chemical does in the body.
Do you think that poisoners are typically sociopaths?
I think you have to be a [sociopath]. If you look at poisoners today, when you are looking at the criminal prosecutions, they’ve been on their computers researching this away. The hard drive evidence shows up in court trial. They sat down and carefully planned it.
There was woman who planted an ornamental plant called foxglove. It contains an alkaloid called digitalis that can stop your heart. She said to her husband, “Gosh I think you need to eat more greens,’ and starts mixing up poison salads. He got sick and they pumped his stomach and she got caught.
If you think about the kind of mind that does it, that’s a sociopathic mind. They’re game players. Poisoners fit the psychopathy checklist perfectly. It’s a game they’re figuring out how to win — that’s poisoners to a T.
NEXT: “A lot of lives are saved by the FDA”
In the book, you describe how factory workers at a plant making leaded gasoline literally started going crazy, then dying in the 1920s. We knew back then that lead exposure was dangerous, but it wasn’t banned until the 1970s.
Isn’t that an incredible story? They called it the “looney gas building” because people went in and went crazy. And not only did they have good evidence that it was poisonous and neurotoxic, they even got some rules on books in New York [to ban it]. And then the federal government, hand in hand with corporate America, just erased that progress.
Some researchers claim that lead-related brain damage accounted for much of the crime wave of the late 1970s and 1980s.
I was just starting to write a blog about why we need regulators like the FDA. Let’s look at the pre-regulatory days. [Leaded gasoline] is [particularly] scandalous because there’s so much government complicity.
MORE: Mind Reading: When You Go Hunting for Psychopaths, They Turn Up Everywhere
People don’t appreciate what the FDA does. Look at the elixir sulfanilimide disaster of 1937: a drug company used the chemical diethylene glycol to aid in sweetening [a children’s medication]. It did no testing even though was there was evidence that the chemical [normally used as an antifreeze] was poisonous.
There was an FDA, then, but it had no teeth. It didn’t require safety testing and the only reason the agency as able to start a recall was because [of misbranding]: an “elixir” was supposed to contain alcohol and this medication didn’t. But it wasn’t criminal [to sell this poisonous drug to parents]. A hundred people died, mostly children and the company had no liability at all.
In fact, a Chinese chemical company recently produced a drug with the same chemical and exported it to Panama, killing hundreds of children.
A lot of lives are saved by the FDA.
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You also write about how the government actually made bootleg alcohol more poisonous during Prohibition, in an attempt to deter drinking. Why haven’t we heard about that before?
All of it was in newspapers and magazines and speeches [of the time], but none of it was in the standard histories of Prohibition. I realized later that I found it because I was looking at it through the lens of poisoning.
NEXT: “Poisons make our bodies betray us”
You quote the famous newspaper columnist Heywood Broun saying, “The 18th is the only Amendment that carries the death penalty.” Thousands of people died from alcohol poisoned by their own government, so why would the other histories leave it out?
I don’t know. These sorts of holy moral crusades are really dangerous. It’s not jihad, but it’s exactly the same kind of thinking. I’m right and the ends justify the means. The attitude was, ‘Oh well, they died. They were using an illegal product and they’re scum so it doesn’t matter.’ There were even eugenic arguments in favor of it
One of the points [made by New York’s medical examiner at the time] is that the people who drank this stuff were people with very little money and power. It wasn’t our image of Prohibition with Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley. If those [types of people] had died, it would have been a different story, but they had the money to avoid it.
How come no one sued?
The idea of going up against the government in court never seemed to cross anyone’s mind. I’m not sure when they started doing big class actions but this would have been [a huge one].
You could say we do the same thing today by putting acetaminophen (Tylenol), which can cause fatal liver damage, into many opioid painkillers, partly as an attempt to deter abusers.
I agree. I have people write me about it. They’ll send me email with scientific evidence of what the government is doing today in terms of putting things into drugs [that could harm or kill addicts].
It’s weird how both poisoners and poisons themselves work by betraying people’s trust.
A select number of compounds kill us because they take advantage of the way our bodies work naturally. A radioactive poison like radium is structured like calcium [so it gets into the bones]. This is the dark side of how chemicals move through our body. Drugs that help us take advantage of those same systems to bring things back to a normal healthy state. These chemicals don’t do that at all; they take advantage of everything that works to make us healthy and twist it so it works against us.
Poisons make our bodies betray us. They’re wicked chemistry. But sometimes understanding how these things work for evil also helps us understand how they can work for good.
See more of Healthland’s ‘Mind Reading’ series.
Maia Szalavitz is a health writer at TIME.com. Find her on Twitter at @maiasz. You can also continue the discussion on TIME Healthland’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.