My first job out of college, I was a police reporter for a small newspaper in North Georgia, situated in rolling foothills of the southern Appalachian mountains. Moonshine country, in fact. I was hardly a month on the job when agents at the local office of the federal government's Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) offered to let me accompany them on a raid to break up a still. From which I learned that those back-mountain stills tend to be pretty grubby looking. I got a better education in moonshine - or white liquor as most folks called it - from local firefighters. I hung out at the fire…
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? William Blake, the brilliant British poet, published "The Tyger" in 1794 and it's always been one of my favorite poems. I studied him during a brief period when I thought I might want to be a poet, a career plan undone by the fact that I hated it when others actually read my poetry. Blake, obviously, didn't have that problem. But he had plenty of others. He struggled for recognition during his lifetime. He was plagued by chronic illness and also by apparent hallucinations. He…
I find it ironic - okay, I find it slightly hilarious - that the house plant which results in the most calls to poison control centers is called the Peace Lily. Next on the list is Pokeweed - which people have a bad habit of mistaking for other edible wild plants - followed by two holiday favorites, poinsettias and holly plants. As the Peace Lily is popular at Easter, one could conclude that holiday plants are particularly dangerous. But there's actually a more interesting - if less amusing - background to such risks. Most of the calls, of course, aren't funny at all. They concern curious…
Let me begin with a confession: until I researched and wrote a book about poisons, The Poisoner's Handbook, I never paid too much attention to National Poison Prevention Week. Like most of us, I was just too comfortable with our chemical culture, the toxic compounds that we use daily to clean our sinks and counters, polish our furniture and our fingernails, keep our cars running. We depend on these compounds and we live with them daily, never fully considering that we've turned ourselves into guinea pigs, test cases for chemical exposure. They worried about this more acutely in the 1920s and…
I couldn't resist this wonderfully explosive video on YouTube showing the unfortunate end of a red gummy bear when mixed with potassium perchlorate. I do love to watch a good hissing, sparking chemical reaction. Especially when it's not me doing the sparking (see earlier blog on the art of setting one's hair on fire in a Bunsen burner.) Anyway, potassium perchlorate is made of  potassium (no surprise there), chlorine and oxygen. Its chemical formula is KCLO4, short-hand for saying it contains one atom of potassium, one of chlorine and four of oxygen. Yes, you already figured that out,  I…
When I was eight years old, my sister and I discovered that a small tree in our Louisiana backyard was dropping some thickly shelled nuts into the grass. We loved  eating fallen nuts; an enormous pecan tree carpeted the front yard with them every summer. But these were different - rounder and fatter. Curious, we smashed a few on a brick, opening up some fleshy pale kernels inside. "Almonds!" I proposed hopefully. We sat down under the tree and prepared a feast. I don't fully remember what they tasted like. Slightly bitter, a little like a fresh leaf, a blade of grass. We were always tasting…
After I wrote my last blog post on mercury, readers wrote to ask about the old-time antiseptic Mercurochrome which - as you might imagine - was named for the poisonous traces of mercury mixed into it. One man wondered about childhood toxic exposure. Another noted that her mother still liked to tell the story of when she was a little girl and dumped Mercurochrome "all over her beautiful white bedspread."  I had to laugh (my mother likes to tell the story of how I colored all over her white bedspread). But if you know Mercurochrome, you know that it would have made an incandescently brilliant…
Elemental mercury is a slippery substance. In the earth's crust, it anchors itself by bonding with other elements, creating materials like the rough coppery rock cinnabar, a crystalline combination of mercury and sulfur. Once cinnabar, or other metallic ores, are mined and crushed, mercury can be easily extracted.  Then the warmer above-ground temperatures, the decrease in pressure, cause pure mercury to become a very odd liquid metal. Unlike a drop of water, a drop of mercury touched by a finger does not wet the skin. Instead, it breaks into smaller drops, tiny glittering balls that…
A little over a week ago, I wrote a story for Slate called The Chemists' War. It was based on information I'd uncovered for my book, The Poisoner's Handbook, and it detailed a forgotten program of the U.S. government to poison alcohol supplies during the 1920s. The poisoning program was an outgrowth of federal frustration over the failure of Prohibition. Supporters of the 18th Constitutional amendment - which made illegal trade and commerce in potable spirits - had expected it to result in more sober (literally) and upright citizenry. Instead, crime syndicates grew wealthy selling bootleg…
Cyanides are old poisons, with a uniquely long, dark history, probably because they grow so bountifully around us. They flavor the leaves of the yew tree, flowers of the cherry laurel, the kernels of peach and apricot pits, the fat pale crunch of bitter almonds. They ooze in secretions of insects like millipedes, weave a toxic thread through cyanobacteria, mass in the floating blue-green algae along the edges of the murkier ponds and lakes, live in plants threaded through forests and fields. But cyanide didn't really become a widely used poison until the 18th century, beginning with some…
I've just started my book tour  for The Poisoner's Handbook and people seem to be wondering  why I (a friendly mother-of-two) am so fascinated by poisons. I admit to a fascination with murder mysteries (count on me later in this blog to write about Agatha Christie). I share my affection for forensic dramas on television. I talk about the thrill of discovering two forgotten and quite heroic forensic scientists from jazz-age New York. And then I confess that I love chemistry - the most beautiful, the most fundamental,  and on occasion the most sinister of all sciences - and that I even…
One of the most repeated rules in toxicology is this: the dose makes the poison. In other words, a milligram of arsenic is unlikely to kill you. Make that 200 milligrams and a cemetery plot awaits. Seems obvious, right? But what if we're talking about a benign substance - say a drink of cold water? And this is pure water, free of arsenic and any other toxic substance. If the dose goes up in the same proportion - if instead of drinking a standard 8-ounce glass of water you gulp down 160 ounces - could it kill you? Absolutely yes. People have been convicted of homicide in water poisoning cases…
A story in today's Salt Lake City Tribune carries this rather obscure headline: "Poison Death Rate is High." What poison, what death rate, you wonder? Where? And the story deserved better than that because what it says is that residents of Utah die from poisons at twice the rate of people living elsewhere in the country. The national average for poison fatalities - mostly accidents and suicides - is 11 deaths per 100,000 residents annually. In Utah, though, the yearly rate is 21.3 per 100,000. Why Utah, you wonder? Even the state officials aren't sure. The state has its share of unusual…
Last week, The Poisoner's Handbook got a great, pre-publication review in one of my favorite magazines,  New Scientist.  I was thrilled - and relieved. Hard to say which came first.  The week before publication - the book's official date is Feb. 22 - always makes me a little crazy. But much as I like my work being called "fascinating" (and I do, I do), it was the closing sentence of the review that really spoke to me: "Alas, sometimes the poisoners we seek are ourselves." Collins was referring to the findings by the 1920s toxicologist in my book that carbon monoxide was becoming such an…
The poison, according to Greek mythology, could be traced to the gates of hell. It dripped from the jaws of Cerberus, the hulking three-headed dog that guarded the entrance to the underworld. For centuries, it's carried the  taint of dark magic. The ancient Greeks called it the Queen of Poisons, the deadliest of all. People called it wolfsbane, dogsbane, even - rather horrifyingly - wifesbane. The poison's reputation has intrigued writers over the years. Oscar Wilde used it in his story of a determined murderer, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime. It was used  by a character in James Joyce's…
The Poisoner's Handbook, is out next week and in a recent interview I found myself trying to explain why I'm now writing about poison and murder when my last book was about supernatural research and the one before that about the biology of love and affection. I know, it sounds like I have a short attention span. Usually I explain that these topics are all connected by my fascination with the way science and society intersect, the way science changes our world, the way our culture responds. But this time  I found myself replying: " I'm a really good friend to dead scientists." This could be…
Just before this weekend's stunning snow storm arrived in the Mid-Atlantic, poison control centers started issuing chirps of alarm. I thought of them as chirps -  something like the peeping alarm calls  of  small birds -  because they sounded so faint against the other looming worries - adequate food supplies, airport closures, shut downs in government services. And yet the fact is that more people have already been poisoned as a result of the monster storm than have suffered from starvation. The Washington Post today  reported eight people treated for carbon monoxide poisoning and in…
When I bought my poison ring (I think I mentioned earlier that I do own one), I was browsing around at an antique show. While I stood admiring an ornately chased Victorian ring, the dealer came over smiling. "What makes that one so good," she said, "is that it's a poison ring." Good is, perhaps, not the best word to describe such an elegantly dangerous device. And yet, I was immediately fascinated. I'd always imagined poison rings as rather obvious, an enormous golden blob like thing on the fingers of Lucretia Borgia (although, apparently, her brothers were far more murderous).This was dainty…
So one summer evening in 2008, a Maryland family sits down to a dinner of home-made beef stew flavored with mint from the backyard and, oh yeah, some other plant growing in the leafy borders by the fence. It looks like this:An hour after dinner, another relative shows up to find the members of the dinner party dazed and incoherent, some giggling uncontrollably, some staggering with hallucinations. Then they start to throw up. The dismayed relative calls 911; by the time all six of the stew-eaters arrive at the emergency room, two are unconscious. All are struggling for breath, their heart-…
Browsing through the most recent annual report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers, I began to worry that my choice of reading material is becoming too dark. Didn't I used to relax with novels instead of lists of household materials used in suicides? My husband is sitting across the room, reading a normal book. I peer at him over the top of my laptop. Can he tell that I'm comparing the toxic effects of drain cleaners in the kitchen cupboards and foxglove plants from the backyard? No, he's engrossed in his book (and I'm sorry to tell you that it's not my masterpiece, The…