Ricin: The Perfect Poison

This episode is brought to you by Curiositystream, a subscription streaming service offering thousands of documentaries and non-fiction titles right now for a limited time. You can get a 25 discount on the cost of a subscription. More on them in a moment. It is one of the deadliest. substances known to man

ricin

is a

poison

so toxic that just three milligrams, about one-tenth the value of a teaspoon, are enough to kill a human being. Odorless and tasteless, once refined, it can easily be introduced into food or water or even aerosolized and inhaled into the lungs. In its purest form it is believed that the amount obtained from a single castor bean could end a thousand lives, but it is not the potency of the castor that makes it a nightmare or even the lack of antidotes, no, it is how easy it is. is to produce it naturally.

Ricin bean seeds can be cooked 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

poison

ers, bioterrorists and governments seeking to cause carnage used as a weapon since prehistory today we are telling the story of

ricin

- nature's

perfect

poison in terms of common household objects that are secretly nightmare killing machines you can't get much scarier or more murderous than ricinous communists the scientific name for the castor bean plant ricinia communist grows all over the world and arises naturally in tropical climates.

It also grows in many American gardens where it is valued for its easy cultivation and pretty colors, and that's a boon because it also creates one of the deadliest poisons known to man. found inside the seeds of the castor bean plant, ricin is a poison, it's what the bfg was for the doom franchise, the ultimate shortcut to just killing everyone, as a toxin, ricin sticks to the cells and prevents them from producing proteins, which means that affected cells die en masse. leading to all sorts of horrible side effects for the animal they are a part of and eventually leading to the ultimate side effect, death.

There is currently no known antidote. Nothing doctors can do for you except try to alleviate your symptoms, cross your fingers and hope for the best. The best part is that eating just two castor beans could introduce enough ricin into your system to kill you. This is more than a little scary, but the good news is that accidental ricin poisoning is relatively rare; instead of coating the seeds, the ricin is found by pulping the castor beans and separating the different chemicals, so Generally, this is when castor beans are crushed to produce castor oil, a process that occurs on a large scale every year without killing anyone, meaning that simply swallowing a handful of seeds almost certainly won't kill you. which is great news for negligent parents with young children determined to eat almost anything, rather than chew the seed that releases ricin and makes it deadly.

In Latin America, where castor beans are painted and made into jewelry, this occasionally results in teenagers choking on their Although the chances of you unintentionally killing yourself with ricin are extremely small, it is when someone deliberately wants to poison you that things They get scary. Ricin is painfully easy to prepare at home, while anyone who wants to kill someone with anthrax will have to do so. Locate the spores first, then earn an advanced degree in microbiology to learn how to weaponize them. Any potential rice poisoner and poisoner just needs to go to the store and buy some castor beans and some other common products after grinding the beans and your coffee grinder.

The only step to obtaining a deadly poison is to master chromatography, a process that any chemistry student could tell you about and no, obviously, we are not going to go into more detail, this is intended to be an information and entertainment piece, not a exhibition, and some future federal prosecutor's office, thank you very much, okay, we have seen how terribly easy it is for someone to produce ricin. The obvious question is what would happen if you were poisoned with it. If you have a weak stomach, you should probably look away. Now, because answering that question is where things are going to get really gross according to the Centers for Disease Control, there are three ways you can get ricin poisoning: ingesting it, injecting it, and inhaling it, while each one is so fun Like a porcupine enema.

The details of their pointed hugs are wildly different. Let's start with the most obvious way to get it into your system: ingesting it. Of all the cases of ricin poisoning, this is by far the most common and can also be the least pleasant within a few hours. poisoned or just stupidly chewing some castor beans, you would start feeling nauseous, this would be followed by extreme abdominal cramps and then you would vomit them up with bloody diarrhea inside your intestine, the ricin would be attacking the cells killing them and causing them to die in a microscopic genocide , but the damage would not stop there, as the poison would spread to the bloodstream, other organs would be affected, liver failure, kidney failure, even central nervous system failure, are all possibilities, while rice and accidental ingestion they only result in death about six percent of the time.

It will still be a rollercoaster of pain, but if someone really wanted to kill you, they would probably use the following method. to cramps and projectile vomiting probably the first thing you will notice is pain around the puncture wound as the ricin attacks the muscle itself causing necrosis of the flesh a phase I would really advise against searching on Google within five hours general weakness and dizziness would overcome you , but it wouldn't be until about half a day had passed that symptoms would really appear, after which her body would become a raft tossed in a storm of fever, headaches, vomiting and drop in blood pressure for about one in five people.

This storm eventually subsides for 83 percent of injection victims, although it ends in multiple organ failure and death. However, it is the latter type of ricin exposure that really scares people in biodefense, because inhaled ricin alone could come from a terrorist attack, in contrast to swallowing or injecting rice and inhaling the poison will not cause multiple organ failure, but rather the ricin will settle in and attack your lungs with a decided deficiency, destroying them as surely as if you had inhaled napalm , within hours you would feel chest pain and develop a cough and flu-like symptoms your lungs would fill with fluid making it impossible to breathe your blood pressure would drop after a day passed you would almost certainly be dead, we say almost with certainty because There are literally zero recorded cases of people dying after inhaling Ricin experiments have been done on animals, but as far as we know, no human being has ever had ricin in their lungs and this brings us to one of the few good news stories about this deadly poison. - Really sucks for use in mass casualty attacks while purified. ricin from a single beam could, in theory, kill a thousand people;

It's just not profitable on such a scale, put it this way, if you wanted to cover an area of ​​one hundred square kilometers with an aerosolized pathogen, you would need only one kilogram of anthrax, instead, you would have to get four tons of ricin and some professional advice here , buying four tons of castor beans will certainly put you on an FBI watch list, but just because ricin isn't profitable at scale doesn't mean it hasn't been a tempting weapon since prehistoric times, plenty of people have used it to killing many of their enemies in the most grotesque ways imaginable on the border between South Africa and Eastwatini.

Liza Cave was the profoundly unimaginative name of Border Cave, but while its name might be boring the same cannot be said for its contents. One of the best preserved archaeological sites ever bought in a cave has yielded unique artifacts from 200 millennia of history. human history in the context of today's video although it is mainly interesting for a specific discovery dating back to around 22,000 BC. a discovery that suggests humans have been poisoning each other 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 be simply a Cool old stick from history times, but when chemical analysis was performed in the 2010s, the stick was found to have traces of ricin.

It is now believed that ancient tribes used this stick to coat their arrowheads with poison, an ancient form of ricin injection. It is not surprising to learn that our ancestors would seek to turn the humble castor bean into some type of weapon; After all, that's exactly what countless modern governments have tried to do in 1888. Peter Herman Stillmark became the first person in history to successfully extract and isolate castor bean. Before this, the toxin had been used mainly by poisonous, but now it was possible to avoid the slide of someone who put down a bean mulch and go straight to the ricin.

People suddenly became very interested. There was a problem because now the castor bean plant was everywhere not long before. Castor oil had been discovered to be an excellent lubricant for train engines, greatly increasing their efficiency, which meant global optics and the cultivation of rycinious communists, so when news broke of the discovery of Stillmark, every government said to wait, these super common plants we have lying around could be used to make a weapon and none of our enemies have done it first. The first big push to turn ricin into a biological weapon came during World War I, with botion mocking and the Central Powers already launching poison gas at each other.

Scientists at the American University Experiment Station. They began to figure out how to take things to the next level, a main focus of their research was castor bean. American plans for the toxin took two distinct forms: the first was to find a way to coat bullets with it to increase their lethality, the modern equivalent of those. Ancient tribes dipped their arrowheads in poison, the only problem was that ryzen can be destroyed by high temperatures, meaning that firing those bullets would render them useless, so the United States turned to another method to create a cloud of deadly dust.

Remember earlier when we said that snorting ricin was really a nasty way to go, well, the United States wanted to inflict that on the soldiers of the central power on a large scale. The idea was that ricin would be refined into an ultrafine powder and then spread into the air over battlefields. The only reason rice and dust are not so associated now. with World War I like mustard gas is that the military backed down when it became clear that there was no antidote before someone could convince them to move forward. The war came to an end in the flurry of international conventions that followed castor bean being banned along with others. biochemical agents, so I guess that was all right after the First World War, all nations respected these treaties and no government ever did anything wrong with ricin again, well you're in for a bit of a shock if that's what you think like we.

We are about to see that the 20th century would be full of states that would try to use ricin as a weapon, unfortunately some of them would even manage to publish the scariest stories about ricin in modern history, but first, here are a few words from the sponsor of today. Subscription streaming service offering thousands of documentary and non-fiction titles from some of the world's best filmmakers, including exclusive originals. Consider it like Netflix for nerds or Hulu, the curiosity stream for history buffs, it's available on many platforms and web apps, including Roku Android. xbox one smart tvs ios chromecast amazon fire amazon kindle and apple tv is practically everywhere, it is also available everywhere in the world and is constantly updated with incredible and timely content, for example, this spring they added a documentary called secret nazi weapons according to the requests I see. in the comments section of these videos, I'm guessing you'll probably like this, but if you're enjoying today's video on Verizon's super scary topic, you might enjoy the trivia streams from the three-part series Pain Pus and Poison It's .

Great, it's terrifying, it's a miniseries. You can visit Curiositystream.com Biographics to get unlimited access to the best documentaries and non-fiction series in the world.world and now use the promo code Biographics to save 25 on the cost of an annual subscription which comes out to just 14.99 for the entire year again curiositystream.com forward slash biographies 25 for 14.99 for the entire year and let's get back to the ricin chronicles it was 7 september 1978 when georgie markov left her job at the bbc world service in london and headed to 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 was now living in England from where he broadcast scathing takedowns of the Bulgarian regime it was a dangerous job as Markov had already survived two assassinations The attempts were not the only ones, just a fortnight before, his fellow Bulgarian dissident, Vladimir Kostav had been hospitalized in Paris with a mysterious illness that nearly killed him, but if Markov was looking for assassins that warm autumn day, it's doubtful he could have prepared for it.

What came next while waiting at a bus stop the playwright felt a sharp pain in his leg as he turned around he saw a man with an umbrella mumble an apology and get into a taxi it was a minor incident that could have easily been forgotten it was also the moment markov's fate was sealed that same night markov began to suffer muscle cramps and fever the place on his leg where the guy hit him with the umbrella hurt he felt weak and dizzy the next day georgie markov was hospitalized without being able to discover What was wrong with the doctors?

Initially they assumed that he was suffering from a strange infection, but as you have seen up to this point you can already guess what was really happening. 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, capable of firing a small pellet from its tip and deep into the victim's flesh, and we mean small, the pellet now housed in Markov was a mere 1.5 millimeters in diameter, so small that one would assume it was incapable of causing harm if it were not so.

Through the small hole in its surface, a hole that contained a couple of milligrams of purified castor bean sealed with wax designed to melt after entering a human body, minutes after being injected into Markov, that pellet had released its deadly payload and now There was nothing that could When Markov died of ricin poisoning on September 11 at the age of 49, doctors didn't even know that it was the ricin that had killed him. It wasn't until an autopsy discovered the pellet that it became clear that Scotland Yard was dealing with a murder even then. The truth about Markov's death was not confirmed until the early 1990s, when communism finally collapsed in Eastern Europe.

Today, Markov's murder remains the most prominent rice and poisoning case in history, but he was far from the only one to suffer this fate in the Cold War; that other Bulgarian in Paris who had mysteriously fallen ill just two weeks before markov long after markov's death the doctors returned and examined a small puncture wound on his back inside they found an identical metal pellet it was only by pure chance that the rice, the dose and the kostov pellet had been right by below the lethal limit, but it was not only the Bulgarians who were playing with rice in those years in 1981, the Polish communist agent and active CIA agent, Boris Korsak, was shopping in a store in Virginia and felt a sharp pain above his his kidney within hours felt mortal with symptoms similar to markov fortunately unlike markov he somehow survived after these three assassination attempts ryzen slipped into the menu to kill dissidents and replaced him with more agents exotics like polonium or novichok, but even as governments were beginning to turn their backs on the toxin, another type of more terrifying group was becoming very interested in it, it's time we met the ricin terrorists, although it had been discussed For the first time in World War I, no one took serious steps to create inhalable rice and dust until World War II.

In 1944, the United States began experimenting with rice and dust at Utah's Dugway Proving Ground, where it was known as agent. The test went quite far in the spring. A form of agent was ready that could be ground into an ultrafine powder. To go, scientists hoped that it could be sprayed from airplanes over Germany, but it wasn't long before the Americans ran into the main problem with rice as a military weapon: there are simply much more profitable toxins, so they abandoned their research just as the British and French abandoned theirs, just as Iraq in the 1980s abandoned its plan to create ricin bombs, but all of this research firmly established an unalterable fact that breathable ricin powder was super deadly. , maybe it wasn't. 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 seemed very tempting, the first one to try to get on This car was far from the United States. -Right-wing extremists in 1991, the feds foiled a plot to kill US marshals with rice absorbed through the skin or inhaled.

Four anti-government plotters fell over the next decade. Several other members of the militia group were arrested for possessing or trying to produce ricin. but it wouldn't be until the 21st century that Ryzen truly 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, letters with Anthrax had sickeningly crippled the US postal system. killing 17 people and killing five after the Ameritrax attacks, the United States had invested colossal sums in screening mail for biological contaminants and now that the investment was paying off, a letter was isolated that day at the North Carolina facility.

South, inside was a small metal jar and two typewritten notes the first kindly stated caution rice and poison locked in a sealed container do not open without proper protection the second state of the attack is the demand calling themselves a fallen angel they promised to convert DC in a ghost town unless the government repeals it new interstate trucking laws wait so wait a minute yeah it turns out the first rice and card attack in American history was committed by someone very Angry about minor changes to federal trucking regulations, and we mean really minor, the one that worried the fallen angel most was a two-hour increase in the legally allowed sleep time for long-haul drivers and this is where we come to one of the strangest aspects of castor bean because it is so easy to manufacture that it not only attracts governments, terrorists and white people, but it also attracts fruitcakes. crazy people and weird people who if they tried to make a bomb would probably blow their hands off, but who are still able to go to the store and buy some melted beans in a packet of sachets, but while this ease of production increases the chances of idiots getting involved in bioterrorism also means that rice and letters are much less of a problem than those containing anthrax.

A few days after the South Carolina letter, another rice and an envelope for the fallen angel were found in a men's processing facility in the White House months later, in February 2004, castor powder from a suspected burst envelope was found in an office building on Capitol Hill. It is terrifying as this must have been for the issued personnel to be decontaminated. That was the end. There were no more letters from the fallen angel. There were no attempts to ghost DC. city ​​the transportation regulations that had inspired the attack were never repealed in the end the rice and the 2003 letters had made no one sick changed anything and it didn't kill anyone yet that wouldn't stop others from trying again in the very near future it's not common that the story of a deadly toxin turns into an absurdist comedy, but that's what's about to happen here because there's simply no way we can tell the story of 2013's ryzen lyrics without it sounding ridiculously ridiculous despite be perhaps the silliest series of bioterrorist attacks ever perpetrated in history.

The 2013 card story started off pretty dark on April 15. The letter addressed to GOP Senator Roger Wicker set off alarms on Capitol Hill when he tested positive. a coordinated series of attacks when another letter, this one addressed to Barack Obama, tested positive two days later, it looked like a terrorist cell might be out to cause a massacre in the United States, but then things started to get strange in Mississippi, a judge local also received a letter from Ryerson. an unlikely target for any international terrorist, then there were the letters themselves, each of which ended with the phrase i am kc and i approve this message where the feds googled it, it turns out that iamkc and i approve this message was the signature used by A small town Elvis impersonator, Paul Kevin Curtis, gets crazier than that, although despite arresting Curtis, the FBI quickly discovered that he had not mailed the ricin, but rather a local karate instructor who He held a grudge against Curtis' success on the Elvis circuit and had sent the letters to incriminate him. for terrorism and yes, that is a real sentence that he just had to say. james everett dutcher was arrested shortly after trying to dispose of a coffee grinder that tested positive at horizon.

He was submerged for 25 years. It was later learned that what pushed him into the abyss. Edge was Curtis falsely claiming to be a member of Mensa. Interestingly, Dushka was not the only lunatic who sent rice that spring. A month later, another batch of tainted letters were intercepted on the way to Obama. They traced back to Shannon Richardson, a two-part actress who had been on The Walking Dead and The Vampire Diaries, but instead of becoming bioterrorists, she had sent them to frame her hated ex-husband, as a newspaper dryly noted today, a marital dispute broke out. turned into a full-blown bioterrorist attack on the white house, see what we mean by bryson attracting fruitcakes In the years since the 2013 clown festival, rice and dust have occasionally appeared in the news, a Sometimes in scarier and sometimes sillier contexts, in the scariest ending, you have the plot of the colony of 2018 that saw an isis. - arrest-inspired terrorist with both bombs and enough ricin to kill dozens, on the less bizarre end is the Quebec woman who tried to mail rice to Donald Trump in 2020 because she wanted him to drop out of the presidential race, needless to say that letter no I can't get close to the president today, so despite its extreme toxicity, ricin is most often associated with lonely weirdos who have seen too much breaking up with bad weirdos with a grudge or a craving for attention, in some cases both certainly from all the bioterrorist attacks that have been used.

Inside the U.S., ricin has miserably killed no one, but while it might be tempting to dismiss the toxin as little more than a joke—doing so would be foolish—there's a good reason why communist agents they used Ryson for assassinations, a good reason. why the military is attracted to it a good reason why our African ancestors dipped their arrows in it tens of thousands of years ago lest we forget that ricin is one of the most

perfect

poisons known to man a toxin without antidote that leaves few traces after killing you Sure it's a shitty biological weapon in the hands of idiotic karaoke instructors, but put it in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing and you'll see how deadly it can be, maybe the last word on this topic should come from anthony fauci, who opened an envelope in mid-2020 and found himself covered in a mysterious white powder, it had to be one of the three things the doctor commented on: a hoax or anthrax, which meant it would have to take cipro for a month or so.

Ricin, he was dead, say goodbye, so I really hope you enjoyed this absolutely horrible video. Thanks to Curiousstream for sponsoring it. If you enjoyed it, please leave us a like below. Don't forget to subscribe and thanks for watching.