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

[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.

[orange_fell]

About a year and a half ago, this comm was being hit with annoying bot link spam, so I turned the spam filters on. Normal comments with links are usually unspammed pretty quickly :)