The Poisoner's Handbook
dblum | March 3, 2010A little over a week ago, I wrote a story for Slate called The Chemists' War. It was based on information I'd uncovered for my book, The Poisoner's Handbook, and it detailed a forgotten program of the U.S. government to poison alcohol supplies during the 1920s.
The poisoning program was an outgrowth of federal frustration over the failure of Prohibition. Supporters of the 18th Constitutional amendment - which made illegal trade and commerce in potable spirits - had expected it to result in more sober (literally) and upright citizenry. Instead, crime syndicates grew wealthy selling bootleg…
dblum | February 26, 2010Cyanides are old poisons, with a uniquely long, dark history, probably because they grow so bountifully around us.
They flavor the leaves of the yew tree, flowers of the cherry laurel, the kernels of peach and apricot pits, the fat pale crunch of bitter almonds. They ooze in secretions of insects like millipedes, weave a toxic thread through cyanobacteria, mass in the floating blue-green algae along the edges of the murkier ponds and lakes, live in plants threaded through forests and fields.
But cyanide didn't really become a widely used poison until the 18th century, beginning with some…
dblum | February 21, 2010I've just started my book tour for The Poisoner's Handbook and people seem to be wondering why I (a friendly mother-of-two) am so fascinated by poisons. I admit to a fascination with murder mysteries (count on me later in this blog to write about Agatha Christie). I share my affection for forensic dramas on television. I talk about the thrill of discovering two forgotten and quite heroic forensic scientists from jazz-age New York.
And then I confess that I love chemistry - the most beautiful, the most fundamental, and on occasion the most sinister of all sciences - and that I even…
dblum | February 17, 2010One of the most repeated rules in toxicology is this: the dose makes the poison.
In other words, a milligram of arsenic is unlikely to kill you. Make that 200 milligrams and a cemetery plot awaits. Seems obvious, right? But what if we're talking about a benign substance - say a drink of cold water? And this is pure water, free of arsenic and any other toxic substance.
If the dose goes up in the same proportion - if instead of drinking a standard 8-ounce glass of water you gulp down 160 ounces - could it kill you? Absolutely yes.
People have been convicted of homicide in water poisoning cases…
dblum | February 15, 2010A story in today's Salt Lake City Tribune carries this rather obscure headline: "Poison Death Rate is High." What poison, what death rate, you wonder? Where?
And the story deserved better than that because what it says is that residents of Utah die from poisons at twice the rate of people living elsewhere in the country. The national average for poison fatalities - mostly accidents and suicides - is 11 deaths per 100,000 residents annually. In Utah, though, the yearly rate is 21.3 per 100,000.
Why Utah, you wonder? Even the state officials aren't sure. The state has its share of unusual…
dblum | February 14, 2010Last week, The Poisoner's Handbook got a great, pre-publication review in one of my favorite magazines, New Scientist. I was thrilled - and relieved. Hard to say which came first. The week before publication - the book's official date is Feb. 22 - always makes me a little crazy.
But much as I like my work being called "fascinating" (and I do, I do), it was the closing sentence of the review that really spoke to me: "Alas, sometimes the poisoners we seek are ourselves." Collins was referring to the findings by the 1920s toxicologist in my book that carbon monoxide was becoming such an…
dblum | February 10, 2010 The Poisoner's Handbook, is out next week and in a recent interview I found myself trying to explain why I'm now writing about poison and murder when my last book was about supernatural research and the one before that about the biology of love and affection.
I know, it sounds like I have a short attention span. Usually I explain that these topics are all connected by my fascination with the way science and society intersect, the way science changes our world, the way our culture responds. But this time I found myself replying: " I'm a really good friend to dead scientists."
This could be…
dblum | February 7, 2010Just before this weekend's stunning snow storm arrived in the Mid-Atlantic, poison control centers started issuing chirps of alarm.
I thought of them as chirps - something like the peeping alarm calls of small birds - because they sounded so faint against the other looming worries - adequate food supplies, airport closures, shut downs in government services.
And yet the fact is that more people have already been poisoned as a result of the monster storm than have suffered from starvation. The Washington Post today reported eight people treated for carbon monoxide poisoning and in…
dblum | February 3, 2010Browsing through the most recent annual report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers, I began to worry that my choice of reading material is becoming too dark. Didn't I used to relax with novels instead of lists of household materials used in suicides?
My husband is sitting across the room, reading a normal book. I peer at him over the top of my laptop. Can he tell that I'm comparing the toxic effects of drain cleaners in the kitchen cupboards and foxglove plants from the backyard?
No, he's engrossed in his book (and I'm sorry to tell you that it's not my masterpiece, The…
dblum | January 29, 2010In 1854, the essayist Henry David Thoreau published an ode to a morning fire: "Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird... Lark without song, and messenger of dawn." Scientists, of course, saw the hazing blue of wood smoke - or any smoke derived from burning plant material - as something less poetic. In particular, the smoke from dried leaves of the tobacco plant attracted serious attention from chemists by the end of the 19th century.
Victorian scientists had, for instance, calculated that cigarette smoke was about four percent carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas which directly interferes with the…
dblum | January 27, 2010Late last summer, six researchers at Harvard University's medical school fell into a poisoner's trap. Each poured a cup of coffee from a communal coffee maker in the school's pathology department. All of them ended up in the hospital; some had fainted, others were dizzy and nauseated, most couldn't hear over the ringing in their ears.
Investigators quickly discovered that the coffee machine's water tank had been laced with laboratory preservative called sodium azide, used to keep bacteria from growing in chemical solutions. This offered up an almost limitless pool of suspects - anyone…
dblum | January 25, 2010
Speakeasy bar, 1933
I love the cocktails of the 1920s, invented by Prohibition-era mixologists trying to cover up the taste of bathtub gin. The Bee's Knees, which stirs lemon juice and honey in with the liquor; the Sidecar (personal favorite) which blends lemon juice and orange-infused liqueurs like Cointreau with whiskey. At one point I acquired the 1930s Savoy Book of Cocktails thinking to gain even more, um, experience.
I gave it up up though. Those Jazz-Age cocktails are just too potent. During Prohibition (1920-1933), of course, they were even more so because the bootlegged liquors…
dblum | January 13, 2010My new book - The Poisoner's Handbook - will be published next month (February 18). But it's already having this effect on my life: my husband has developed a nervous habit of moving his coffee cup out of my reach. When the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt of the book (see link below) I promptly received the following e-mail: "Read the wonderful weekend section front in the Journal. But the coffee my wife just handed me tastes a little odd."Â When the invitation was sent out for my book launch party, it read: "We promise that the beer, wine, and snacks will be completely…