Ricin: The Perfect Poison

this episode is brought to you by curiositystream a subscription streaming service that offers thousands of documentaries and non-fiction titles right now for a limited time you guys can get 25 off the cost of a subscription more on them in a bit it's one of the deadliest substances known to man ricin is a poison so toxic that a mere three milligrams about one tenth of a teaspoon's worth is enough to kill a human odorless and tasteless once refined it can be easily slipped into food or water or even aerosolized and inhaled into the lungs in its purest form it's thought the amount obtained from a single castor bean could end a thousand lives yet it's not the potency of ricin that makes it such a nightmare or even the lack of antidotes no it's how damn easy it is to make naturally occurring in the seeds of the cast of beans ricin can be cooked up by anyone with access to a coffee grinder and some basic chemistry knowledge as a result it has long been one of the most tempting substances for poisoners bioterrorists and governments looking to cause carnage used as a weapon since prehistory today we're telling the story of ricin nature's perfect poison in terms of common household objects that are secretly nightmare murder machines you couldn't get much more nightmarish or more murderous than rycinious communists the scientific name for the castor bean plant ricinia's communist grows across the world cropping up naturally in tropical climates it also crops up in a whole lot of american gardens where it's valued for its easy growing and pretty colors and that's something of a mine because it also creates one of the deadliest poisons known to man found inside the seeds of the castor bean plant ricin is to poison is what the bfg was to the doom franchise the ultimate shortcut for just super killing everyone as a toxin ricin latches onto cells and stops them from making proteins this means affected cells die on mass leading to all sorts of horrible side effects for the animal they're a part of and eventually leading to the ultimate side effect death currently there's no known antidote nothing doctors can do for you but try to alleviate your symptoms cross their fingers and hope for the best since eating as few as two castor beans could get enough ricin into your system to kill you this is just a bit more than a little terrifying but the good news is that accidental ricin poisoning is relatively rare rather than coating the seeds ricin is found by pulping castor beans and separating out the different chemicals typically this is when castor beans are mashed for producing castor oil a process that happens on a grand scale each year without ever killing anyone that means simply swallowing a cast of bean almost certainly won't kill you which is great news for negligent parents with toddlers determined to eat just about everything rather it's chewing the seed that releases the ricin and makes it deadly down in latin america where castor beans are painted and made into jewelry this occasionally results in teenagers who choke on their bracelets getting hospitalized really though the chances of you unintentionally killing yourself with ricin are vanishingly small it's when someone wants to deliberately poison you that things get terrifying ricin is painfully easy to make at home while anyone wanting to kill someone with anthrax is going to have to first locate the spores then get an advanced degree in microbiology to learn how to weaponize them any would-be rice and poisoner just needs to nip to the store and buy some castor beans and a few other common products after mashing the beans and their coffee grinder the only step to getting a deadly poison is mastering chromatography a process any chemistry undergrad could talk you through and no obviously we're not going to go into any more detail than that this is meant to be a piece of infotainment not exhibit a and some future federal prosecution thank you very much okay so we've seen how terrifyingly easy it is for someone to make ricin the obvious question is what would happen if they poisoned you with it if you've got a weak stomach you should probably look away about now because answering that question is where things are gonna get really icky according to the centers for disease control there are three ways that you can be poisoned with ricin ingesting it being injected with it and inhaling it while each is about as fun as a porcupine enema the specifics of their spiky embraces are wildly different let's start with the most obvious way of getting it into your system ingesting it of all cases of ricin poisoning this is by far the most common it may be also the least pleasant within a few hours of being poisoned or just stupidly chewing on some caster beans you'd start to feel nauseous this would be followed by extreme abdominal cramps then vomiting them bloody diarrhea inside your gut the ricin would be attacking the cells killing them causing them to die in a microscopic genocide but the damage wouldn't stop there as the poison spread into your bloodstream other organs would be affected liver failure kidney failure even failure of your central nervous system are all possibilities while accidental rice and ingestion only results in death around six percent of the time this would still be a roller coaster of pain but if anyone really wanted to kill you they'd probably use the next method injection for assassin's injection has long been the favored method of rice and delivery with good reason unlike ingesting ricin injecting it doesn't quickly lead to cramps and projectile vomiting likely the first thing you'd notice is pain around the puncture wound as the ricin attacks the muscle itself causing necrosis of the flesh a phase would really advise you against googling within five hours general weakness and dizziness would overcome you but it wouldn't be until approximately half a day had passed that the symptoms really hit after that your body would become a raft tossed around in a storm of fever headaches vomiting and falling blood pressure for about one in five people this storm eventually abates for 83 percent of injection victims though it ends in multiple organ failure and death yet it's the last type of ricin exposure that really scares people in biodefense that's because inhaled ricin could only come from a terrorist attack in contrast to swallowing or being injected with rice and inhaling the poison won't lead to multiple organ failure instead the ricin will settle into and attack your lungs with single-minded deficiency destroying them as surely as if you'd inhaled napalm within hours you'd feel pain in your chest to develop a cough and flu-like symptoms your lungs would fill with fluid making it impossible to breathe your blood pressure would drop by the time a day had passed you'd almost certainly be dead we say almost certainly because there's literally zero cases in record of people dying after inhaling ricin experiments have been done on animals but as far as we know no human has ever got ricin in their lungs and this brings us to one of the few bits of good news about this deadly poison it really sucks for use in mass casualty attacks while purified ricin from a single caster beam could theoretically kill a thousand people it's simply not cost effective at such a scale put it this way if you wanted to blanket a hundred square kilometer area with an aerosolized pathogen you would need just a kilogram of anthrax by contrast you'd have to source four tons of ricin and pro tip here buying four tons of castor beans is absolutely going to land you on an fbi watch list yet just because ricin isn't cost effective at scale doesn't mean it isn't a tempting weapon since prehistoric times a whole lot of people have used it to kill a whole lot of their enemies in the most grotesque ways imaginable on the border between south africa and eastwatini liza cave was the deeply unimaginative name of border cave but while its name might be boring the same can't be said for its contents one of the best preserved archaeological sites bought a cave has yielded unique artifacts from 200 millennia of human history in the context of today's video though it's mainly interesting for a specific discovery one dating back to around 22 000 bc a discovery which suggests humans have been poisoning one another with ricin since the dawn of time the object in question is a notched wooden stick when it was first discovered in the 1970s it was thought to just be some cool old stick from history times but when a chemical analysis was run in the 2010s it was discovered that the stick had traces of ricin on it it's now thought ancient tribes used this stick to coat their arrowheads in the poison an ancient form of ricin injection chilling as the thought is maybe it's not surprising to know our ancestors would seek to turn the humble caster bean into some kind of weapon after all that's exactly what countless modern governments have tried to do back in 1888 peter herman stillmark became the first person in history to successfully extract and isolate ricin prior to this the toxin had been mainly used by poisonous but now it was possible to skip slipping someone cast a bean mulch and go straight to ricin people suddenly got very interested there was a problem because by now the castor bean plant was everywhere not long before castor oil had been found to make a great lubricant for train engines massively increasing their efficiency that meant a global optic and cultivation of rycinious communists so when news of stillmark's discovery broke governments were all like wait these super common plants we've got lying around could be used to make a weapon and none of our enemies have done it first the first major push to turn ricin into a bioweapon came during world war one with bocion taunt and central powers already lobbing poison gas at one another scientists at the american university experimental station began figuring out how to take things to the next level one major focus of their research was ricin the american plans for the toxin took two distinct forms the first was to find a way to coat bullets in it to increase their lethality the modern equivalent of those ancient tribes dipping their arrowheads in the poison the only trouble was that ryzen can be destroyed by high temperatures meaning firing those bullets would render them useless so the u. s turned to another method creating a deadly dust cloud remember earlier when we said inhaling ricin was a really nasty way to go well america wanted to inflict that on central power soldiers on a vast scale the idea was that ricin would be refined to an ultra fine powder then spread in the air over battlefields the only reason rice and dust isn't now as associated with world war one as mustard gas is that the military got cold feet when it became clear that there was no antidote before anyone could convince them to go ahead the war came to an end in the flurry of international conventions that followed ricin was outlawed alongside other bio and chemical agents so i guess that's it right after world war one all nations respectfully abided by these treaties and no governments ever again did anything evil with ricin well you're in for a bit of a shock if that's what you believe as we're about to see the 20th century would be full of states trying to use ricin as a weapon sadly some of them would even succeed coming up next more terrifying stories of ricin in modern history but first here's a quick word from today's sponsor curiositystream curiositystream is a subscription streaming service that offers thousands of documentaries and non-fiction titles for some of the world's best filmmakers including exclusive originals think of it as the netflix for nerds or the hulu the history buffs curiosity stream is available on many platforms and web apps including roku android xbox one smart tvs ios chromecast 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99 for the whole year again curiositystream. com forward slash biographics 25 off 14. 99 for the whole year and let's get back to the ricin chronicles it was september 7th 1978 when georgie markov left his job at the bbc world service in london and headed toward waterloo bridge a bulgarian playwright and satirist markov had once been close to the country's communist leadership before defecting at the height of the cold war now he lived in england from where he broadcast scathing takedowns of the bulgarian regime it was dangerous work already markov had survived two assassination attempts not was he the only one just a fortnight earlier fellow bulgarian dissident vladimir kostav had been hospitalized in paris with a mysterious sickness that nearly killed him but if markov was on the lookout for assassins that balmy fall day it's doubtful he could have prepared himself for what came next as he was waiting at a bus stop the playwright felt a sharp pain in his leg turning around he saw a man with an umbrella mutter an apology and get into a cab it was a minor incident one that could have been easily forgotten it was also the moment that markov's fate was sealed that same night markov began to suffer muscle cramps and fever the spot on his leg where the guy bumped him with the umbrella was in pain he felt weak dizzy the very next day georgie markov was hospitalized unable to figure out what was wrong with him doctors initially assumed he was suffering from a weird infection but since you've watched this far you can already guess what was really going on that man at the bus stop had been working for the bulgarian secret police his umbrella had been a weapon designed in collaboration with the kgb one capable of firing a tiny pellet out of its tip and deep into a victim's flesh and we mean tiny the pellet now lodged in markov was barely 1.

5 millimeters in diameter so small you'd assume it was incapable of causing damage were it not for the tiny hole in its surface a hole that held a couple of milligrams of purified ricin sealed with wax designed to melt after it entered a human body minutes after being injected into markov that pellet had released its deadly load and now there was nothing that could be done when markov died of ricin poisoning on september 11th aged 49 doctors didn't even know it was ricin that had killed him it wasn't until an autopsy uncovered the pellet that it became clear that scotland yard was dealing with an assassination even then the truth of markov's death wasn't confirmed until the early 1990s when communism had finally collapsed in eastern europe today markov's murder remains the most high profile instance of rice and poisoning in history yet he was far from the only one to suffer this fate in the cold war that other bulgarian in paris the one who'd got mysteriously sick just two weeks before markov well after markov died doctors went back and examined a small puncture wound on his back inside they found an identical metal pellet it was only by sheer fluke that the rice and dose and kostov's pellet had been just under the lethal limit yet it wasn't just the bulgarians who were messing around with rice in those years in 1981 communist polish agent and cia asset boris korsak was shopping in a store in virginia and he felt a sharp pain above his kidney within hours he felt deathly with similar symptoms to markov luckily unlike markov he somehow survived after these three assassination attempts ryzen slipped up the menu for killing dissidents replaced with more exotic agents like polonium or novichok but even as governments were beginning to turn their backs on the toxin another scarier type of group was getting very interested in it it's time we met the ricin terrorists although it had been first mooted back in world war one no one took serious steps to create inhalable rice and powder until the second world war in 1944 the u. s began to experiment with rice and dust at utah's dugway proving ground where it was known as agent w the test got pretty far by spring a form of agent w that could be ground down to an ultrafine powder was all ready to go the scientists hoped it could be sprayed out of planes over germany but it wasn't before long that the americans ran slap into the major problem that rice imposes as a military weapon there are simply far more cost-effective toxins out there so they abandoned their research just as the british and french would abandon theirs just as iraq in the 1980s would give up its plan to create ricin bombs yet all this research firmly established one unalterable fact powdered ricin that could be breathed in was super deadly it might not be useful for killing hundreds in one go but if you set your sights a little lower if your main goal was to cause mass panic with deaths as a bonus well suddenly inhalable ricin was looking very tempting the first to try and jump on this bandwagon were america's far-right extremists in 1991 the feds busted a plot to kill u. s marshals with rice in either absorbed through the skin or inhaled four anti-government plotters went down across the next decade several more militia group members were arrested for either owning or trying to make ricin but it wouldn't be until the 21st century that ryzen really exploded into american nightmares on october 15 2003 alarms went off at a south carolina mail processing facility just two years earlier in the fall of 2001 anthrax laced letters had paralyzed the u.

s postal system sickening 17 people and killing five in the aftermath of the amerithrax attacks the u. s had invested colossal sums in screening mail for biological contaminants and now that investment was paying off that day a letter was isolated at the south carolina facility inside was a small metal vial and two typewritten notes the first one helpfully declared caution rice and poison enclosed in sealed container do not open without proper protection the second state of the attack is demand calling him or herself fallen angel they promised to turn dc into a ghost town unless that is the government repealed new interstate trucking laws wait so hold on a minute yup it turns out that the first rice and letter attack in u.