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.)

I think your best option would be the heavy metals.

Polonium kills in tiny doses and would certainly cause nausea (it's radiation poisoning), but it's unlikely that your character would survive that. Besides, it's hard to get, so it's more the choice of poison for governments and spies.

Thallium needs a higher dose (15 mg per kg body weight, though that is with oral ingestion and less can kill as well), but also causes radiation poisoning symptoms, starting with nausea and nerve pain and ending with hair loss and/or death, whichever arrives faster. It used to be quite popular as a method of murder (though normally administered in food), because it was sold as rat poison until the 1970s (still is, in some countries) and because the initial symptoms can be confused with all kinds of diseases. But it's mostly gone out of favour in the West, because it's quite reliably treatable now (with Prussian Blue, orally over the course of several days, and dialysis).

You can look up the lethal doses and poisoning symptoms of arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead (mostly affects the brain), mercury (dito), antimony (vomitting and possible heart failure within half an hour, though that is with oral ingestion), etc. yourself. Just remember that you normally need a heavy metal compound (i.e. a salt), not the pure metal, which wouldn't be absorbed very fast by the body. The treatment is generally a chelating agent, and whatever is necessary to aleviate the symptoms.

[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.

Still, for what it's worth:

- This Yahoo question about such a topic seems to indicate that you would need a hollow point bullet and dipping the bullet wouldn't work: https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110303093709AAop4wX

- Apparently some asshole planned to murder a bunch of people with hollow point ammunition filled with nicotine (Pure nicotine is relatively easily available as an insecticide.): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2018748/Norway-massacre-Anders-Behring-Breivik-Dum-dum-bullets-injected-poision.html
Syptoms of nicotine poisoning include (among other things) nausea, dizziness, pale skin, seizures, slow heart rate / low blood pressure, coma and death by respiratory failure, and the symptoms come in 2 stages requiring different treatment (first it works as a stimulant, then as a neurodepressant), so that might work for you. There's no direct antidote and dialysis doesn't help, but Wikipedia says the prognosis is good under supportive medical care (e.g. medication against the seizures, intravenous fluids against low blood pressure, mechanical ventilation for the breathing problems) if the patient survives the first 4 hours. (Though as with most poisons, most of the medical experience will be with ingested poison, not injected. In your case, they would skip the charcoal treatment, for example.)

- an allegation from the American civil war about bullets rolled in arsenic:
"Mical Harrington died of the wound he received through the fleshy part of the thigh, the ball undoubtedly poisoned; as also one Jonathan Burt, of Brimfield, by a poisoned ball through the arm; and one Brisbee, by a slight shot in the leg which threw him into convulsions. The art of man could not stop the mortification which seized the wounded part, and presently a few hours shut up the scene. Oh cursed malice, that the fatal lead should not be thought sufficient without being rolled up with a solution of copper and yellow arsenic, as I am thoughtful was the case, by many of the poisoned balls which were brought in out of their bullet pouches, taken among the plunder."-Manuscript letter, Surgeon Thomas Williams to his wife.

- a medical article on phosphorus poisoning from a bullet: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2164884/?pageindex=1
Though phosphorus is probably far more brutal than you want: http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/sis/search/a?dbs+hsdb:@term+@DOCNO+1169

[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 :)