It's bad news for princesses, of course, but for empires and armies, poison can be a game-changer.
WHERE THERE’S SMOKE, THERE’S FIRE
It
should have been a perfect murder. In 1850, Count Hyppolyte de Bocarmé
and his wife, Countess Lydie, had a plan to kill her brother for his
money. Their weapon: nicotine. But the plan was more involved than
providing him with smokes and hoping he’d get emphysema; nicotine, it
turns out, is a spectacularly lethal plant alkaloid. Ingesting as little
as 30 milligrams of pure nicotine will kill an adult. And for murder,
the drug was just the right poison for its time—mid-19th-century
scientists had no idea how to detect plant poisons in corpses.
Working
from his estate in southern Belgium, the count converted an old
laundry into a lab, where he claimed to be mixing up perfumes. In
actuality, he was extracting nicotine from tobacco leaves. When the
countess’s wealthy brother came to visit, the count and his wife served
up a poisoned dinner and attributed his death to stroke. But the
servants, unnerved by the count’s strange lab experiments, sensed that
something was amiss. They contacted the police, who in turn contacted
Jean Servais Stas, Belgium’s best chemist.
Stas,
whose work on atomic weights was essential to the creation of the
periodic table, relished the challenge. He spent three months searching
for a way to extract nicotine from dead tissue. Finally, he found an
exact mixture of acids and solvents to detect the lethal compound. The
damning results sealed the case, and the count was sentenced to the
guillotine. The countess, claiming she’d been forced to participate,
escaped charges. Today, the murderous couple is long forgotten, but the
crime they committed is remembered for changing forensics—and ending
nicotine’s run as the perfect murder weapon.
A HONEY OF A WEAPON
Pompey
the Great’s soldiers were bone tired. For most of 65 BCE, Roman
legions marched around the southern edge of the Black Sea as they
battled the local ruler, Mithridates VI of Pontus. Then, something
magical happened: The exhausted troops discovered a stockpile of
honeycombs strewn across their path, and they fell upon the sticky
treats like hungry bears.
But
the local honey packed a toxic punch. Within a few hours, the troops
began staggering blindly and falling to the ground. Mithridates’s
supporters, who had planted the honeycombs along the soldiers’ route,
promptly appeared and massacred their incapacitated enemies. Pompey lost
three squadrons in the skirmish, a defeat he could have avoided had he
brushed up on the region’s military history. In a book published
almost 400 years earlier, the Greek general Xenophon reported that his
men, after feasting on the region’s wild honey, “all went for the nonce
quite off their heads.”
It wasn’t until centuries later, in
1891, that scientists discovered the cause of “mad honey”:
rhododendrons. Bees feeding upon the blossoms take in not only nectar
but also a grayanotoxin, a poison that disrupts the signaling ability
of nerve cells. The symptoms—nausea, headache, dizziness, loss of
muscle control, and unconsciousness—can resemble alcohol poisoning. But
Mithridates didn’t need to know how it worked to use the honey as a
weapon. His soldiers won the battle, delaying (though not preventing)
the eventual takeover. As for the Romans, they never made that
particular mistake again. Decades later, the writer Pliny the Elder was
still warning of the “pernicious” qualities associated with the Black
Sea’s golden honey.
AMERICA’S LETHAL COCKTAIL PARTY
By
the mid-1920s, the American government was at its wit’s end. The
era’s strict Prohibition laws had proved futile. Americans were still
drinking; they were just doing so on the sly, frequenting speakeasies
and buying alcohol from crime syndicates. Gangs would steal large
quantities of industrial alcohol—used for everything from fueling
machines to sterilizing instruments—then redistill the hooch to remove
impurities before putting it on the market. In its effort to fight
back, the Bureau of Prohibition came up with a shocking idea: What if
it poisoned the industrial alcohol supply?
In 1926, the federal
government bought into the idea, issuing regulations that required
manufacturers to make industrial alcohol more lethal. The new formulas
included mercury salts, benzene, and kerosene, and the results were
chilling. Alcohol-related deaths skyrocketed, with officials
attributing more than a thousand deaths to the program in its first
year alone. People were outraged. “The United States government must
be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths,” said New
York City medical examiner Charles Norris, one of the measure’s most
outspoken foes.
The
government held firm on its position even as the body count rose. In
New York City, 400 people died the first year. Seven hundred died the
next, and the pattern was replicated in cities across the country. Yet
Prohibitionists continued to defend the law. The Anti-Saloon League,
Norris’s frequent sparring partner, fired back: “Dr. Norris should
logically next demand palatable varnish and potable shellac.” Nebraska’s
Omaha Bee asked, “Must Uncle Sam guarantee safety for souses?”
It
took more than 10,000 American deaths and a furious public backlash
for the government to quietly end its “chemists’ war.” But it wasn’t
until sometime around 1933, when the regulations were phased out
quietly, that what Norris had dubbed “our national experiment in
extermination” was officially over.
THE HEAVY METAL THAT ROCKED AN EMPIRE
Modern
cooks could probably find their way around a Roman culina. The
kitchens featured an oven of sorts and pots and pans made of metal. One
major difference, however: Those utensils packed plenty of lead. Soft,
flexible, and wonderfully ubiquitous, lead was used to make Roman
pipes, coins, and wine jugs. It was even used in face powders and
paints. As historian Jack Lewis notes in
EPA Journal, the
Romans “thought nothing of washing down platters of lead-seasoned food
with gallons of lead-adulterated wine.” The result “was the death by
slow poisoning of the greatest empire the world has ever known.”
According
to one study, two thirds of Roman emperors—from Caligula to
Nero—showed symptoms of lead poisoning. Another analysis of bones from
Roman cemeteries uncovered lead deposits that measured three times the
World Health Organization’s standard for severe lead poisoning.
From
top to bottom, lead is bad news for the human body: It damages the
kidneys and heart, it impairs the production of red blood cells, and it
inhibits the growth of bone cells. But it’s also a neurotoxin,
disrupting cognitive processing and affecting the regulation of brain
cell growth so severely that synapses often fail to form.
As a
result, some historians believe that the poison eventually compromised
not just the brains of Roman emperors but everyone in Rome. Suddenly,
Caligula declaring his own divinity, appointing his horse to the
Senate, and ordering his soldiers into the ocean to “fight the sea god”
makes a little more sense.
