Poisoned Bullets

[seb138]

Hello, everyone! First of all I'm so grateful to find this amazing, rich source of information. This is my first post here so I hope I'm doing this right

I'm writing a story, the events set in a fictional but pretty much similar to 1990s London. My character "J" is a healthy, medium built 30 years old male, J gets shot with a poisoned bullet that

Comments

[jgofri]

This answer is based on an article I read some time ago that discussed supposedly "poisoned" medieval weapons.
The point they made is that since metal does not absorb liquids, the type of poison would have to be something that would stick to metal, not drip off of it. Something with gum texture. Such as curare. That is the only example they had, I am afraid.

[reynardo]

Going with this, bullets can be modified to take poison (eg cross-cutting the tip or having the poison inside a hollowpoint), but they're not going to then deliver a great deal of poison without lodging in the body or preferably breaking up. So the poison is going to need to be fairly strong

[cheriola]

Actually, it's pretty easy to 'poison' a blade. Just dip it in human excrement and let it dry. In times before germ theory and after knowledge of basic wound sterilisation was lost (which for example the Roman military surgeons would do, with vinegar), the wound would fester nastily and most likely kill the victim a few days or weeks later through sepsis, even if the blood loss was negligible

[jgofri]

Actually, the point that article was making was that all that medieval paranoia about poisoned weapons was caused by multiple septic wounds that people believed to be inflicted by poisonous weapons, since they had no other explanation for it.

[ilye_elf]

Have you thought about the assailant using a hollow point bullet? They cause more damage than standard bullets because the nose crumples and expands on impact. Someone who knows their ammo would be able to doctor the bullet and fill the hollow point cavity with their poison, which gives you far more options for a type of poison that will give the symptoms you require.

Yes, the degree to which your victim bleeds will alter the poison's activity. If there's loads of blood immediately after he's shot then it's going to just wash the poison right back out again - but that's most likely to happen if the bullet goes straight through and exits the tissue. A hollow point will stick in the tissue and there'll probably be much less bleeding until the bullet is removed (THEN you'll see the blood).

Two suggestions for toxic fillings: elemental mercury (quicksilver) and potassium cyanide. There's plenty about both on the internet so I won't go into details, but the latter will certainly give you the convulsions you're after.

[cheriola]

Actually, you'd need a salt of mercury to have it interact quickly with the body chemistry (e.g. zinnober). Elemental mercury is only a problem with chronic exposure. The same is true with all non-radioactive heavy metals.

And as far as I know, the toxic part of potassium cyanide (a salt) poisoning is really the HCN (a gas, as used in the Nazi death chambers) that gets produced when the salt hits the stomach acid. (My lab supervisor in basic chemistry always used to warn us not to throw the dissolved cyanide compounds in the acid waste bottle. And when I once passed the lab while the clueless med students were in there, you could certaily smell the HCN...) I don't think you'd get the same effect by just rubbing the potassium cyanide in a wound. Or at least, it would need a lot longer to dissolve and take effect, I think.

[cheriola]

Well, coating the bullet in the poison means that the poison must be lethal in very small doses (excluding a lot of chemical toxins), and also very heat-stable (excluding plant- and animal-based poisons). Because all the really fast-acting ones I can think of at the drop of a hat are plant- or animal-based (that includes the curare suggestion above), I don't think you'll find something acting within the time frame you want. However, since the poison will have rubbed off in the wound and entered your victim's bloodstream, I don't know why that would matter. Even if they get the bullet out quickly in the hospital, he could still get the effects of the poison many hours later. Why would anyone suspect a bullet being poisoned? (Actually, I seem to remember encountering such a case in fiction somewhere, where the murderer wanted to make really sure his victim would die no matter how bad the murderer's aim. But I can't remember where and I watch so many murder mystery shows that a list probably wouldn't help you

[ilye_elf]

What kind of temperatures does a bullet get up to? And would it be the same inside the cavity as outside the jacket?

Melting point of strychnine is 270 Celcius and human LD50 i.v. is 5-10 mg, so theoretically under a gram would do the job if you could get it into the victim.

(Cheers for your comments above - I studied drugs rather than poisons or pure chemistry so it's a bit beyond my educated guesses!)

[cheriola]

I'm bored, so I did some googling for you. But I only got very few references, mostly to discussions about "How come it's not done?". The main answer to that seems to be that it would violate international law, but from what I can tell, it wouldn't work very well either

[cheriola]

I put some links in an additional comment to this. It's been blocked as spam.

[evilzerg_r]

Biologically degradable capsule with poison shot from pneumatic weapon from close proximity into uncovered body part.

[seb138]

Sorry for the late reply, I was absorbed by work and life in general.
Thank you guys very much for the amazing information, you're a great help! I really appreciate it.