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]

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