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How to Poison Your Enemies
1.3k Plays1 year ago
In our next episode, we interview Dr. Neil Bradbury on poisons and their uses. Dr Bradbury is a graduate of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and the University of Wales School of Medicine, with degrees in Biochemistry and Medical Biochemistry. Although he grew up in the UK, he now lives and works in Illinois, USA, where he’s a scientist, teacher and writer. His first book “A Taste for Poison” will appeal to true-crime fans, sciencey types, and history buffs. He has spoken at national and international meetings to present his research, and authored numerous scientific manuscripts and book chapters.
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Transcript
Introduction & Focus
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to How to Get on a Watchlist, the new podcast series from Encyclopedia Geopolitica. In each episode, we'll sit down with leading experts to discuss dangerous activities. From assassinations and airliner shootdowns through to kidnappings and coups, we'll examine each of these threats through the lenses of both the dangerous actors seeking to conduct these operations and the agencies around the world seeking to stop them. In the interest of operational security, certain tactical details will be omitted from these discussions.
00:00:33
Speaker
However, the cases and threats which we discuss here are very real.
00:01:02
Speaker
911, what's your emergency?
Meet the Hosts
00:01:05
Speaker
I'm Lewis H. Prisant, the founder and co-editor of Encyclopedia Geopolitica. I'm a researcher in the field of intelligence and espionage with a PhD in intelligence studies from Loughborough University. I'm an adjunct professor in intelligence at Science Pro Paris. And in my day job, I provide geopolitical analysis and security focused intelligence to private sector corporations. I'm Alexandra Shokiewicz, a co-editor of Encyclopedia Geopolitica.
00:01:30
Speaker
I'm a multilingual security and intelligence professional with a master's in international security from Sciences-Popari. I have served in both consulting and in-house roles, focusing on threat monitoring, geopolitical intelligence, and security support to various public and private audiences.
Guest Introduction: Dr. Neil Bradbury
00:01:45
Speaker
So our topic today is how to poison your enemies and joining us to discuss this rather dark topic even by the standards of this show is Dr. Neil Bradbury. Dr. Bradbury is a graduate of the University of St Andrews in Scotland and the University of Wales School of Medicine with degrees in biochemistry and medical biochemistry.
00:02:03
Speaker
Although he grew up in the UK, he now lives and works in Illinois, USA, where he's a scientist, teacher and writer. His first book, A Taste for Poison, will appeal to true crime fans, science types and history buffs. And we'll make sure we get a link to that in our show notes. He's spoken at national and international meetings to present his research and has authored numerous scientific manuscripts and book chapters on this topic. Dr Bradbury, thank you very much for joining us.
00:02:29
Speaker
Well, thank you for the opportunity to come and talk
Medical Advances through Poisons
00:02:32
Speaker
with you today. It's really exciting. Thank you so much. Well, given that this is possibly the most watchlistable episode we've ever done, I will just start with a brief disclaimer saying the information we're going to discuss today is purely for educational purposes. The team at Encyclopedia Geopolitica really doesn't endorse trying any of the things we're discussing here at home. But with that out of the way, Dr Bradbury, you have an absolutely fascinating background. Please, how did you get into your line of work?
00:02:59
Speaker
It's been something I've been interested in for a long time. Obviously, I've had a long standing interest in science wanting to go to university to study biochemistry. And one of the things that you start to appreciate is just how much of modern medicine that we have today is actually based upon the use of poisons and poisons being used in experiments to figure out how the body works.
00:03:26
Speaker
If we hadn't done experiments with frugal fish, for example, which contain the tetrodotoxin poison, we would not have as much information on how to treat patients or who are undergoing surgery and regulating their diaphragms for abdominal surgery. We'd have a lot less understanding on how to treat pain.
History and Sources of Poisons
00:03:49
Speaker
So poisons have actually had a long history in biomedicine, and it's also true that many things that typically classed as poisons can actually be used therapeutically under the right circumstances to treat various conditions.
00:04:07
Speaker
I think it's important to appreciate that, although we talk about poisons and poisonous and how terrible it is, that the actual chemicals are not intrinsically good or bad themselves. It's just chemicals. It's really the person that's using them. And that's a perfect transition to start looking at the offensive side of things here, actually. It's a really fascinating topic. We're talking about poison. What type of substances are we actually talking about when we talk about poison?
00:04:37
Speaker
Well, poison can cover a fairly large range of materials. A lot of poisons are obtained from plants, and those extracts have been known for hundreds if not thousands of years. But you can also get poisons from the ground as well. Things like arsenic, which was widely used in the Victorian times,
00:05:01
Speaker
upwards of 50 tons of arsenic was imported into London during Victorian times. And so there's a lot of different places you can get poisons. Obviously with the newer poisons that are man-made, particularly we can think of poisons that have been used by the Russian government, pretty much all man-made, specifically designed to be poisons to kill people, assassinate people for various reasons.
00:05:32
Speaker
Question for me, when we're in the security world, we talk about things like the attack cycle, how terrorists go about conducting an attack, or in the intelligence world, we talk about the intelligence cycle.
Methods of Poison Delivery
00:05:42
Speaker
Is there something like this in the poison world? Could you describe a kind of, I don't know if it'd be a poison cycle, because I imagine it's kind of one-ended, but what actually happens when someone's poisoned? Can it be broken down into stages? Is there a process the body goes through?
00:05:58
Speaker
Well, first of all, you have to think about what poison you're going to use. And that comes down to how are you going to deliver it? Is it something that will be absorbed through the skin? Is it something you're going to have to put in someone's food?
00:06:15
Speaker
Is it something you're going to have to inject into someone? So you have to think about the delivery method, which also leads on to what access you have to that individual. If it's someone you have easy access to that you can put poisons into their food.
00:06:33
Speaker
then it's somewhat easy. If you don't really have access to them, then you're going to have to think about different ways of delivering that poison. And so that leads on to what kind of poison you're going to use. Are you going to try and take out one individual, in which case you might need one specific kind of poison, or are you going to take out a larger group, in which case you may need to think about something like a nerve agent, which could be broadly dispersed.
00:07:02
Speaker
So you really do have to think about the identity of the target, the ease of access to that target, and how that poison gets into the body. All of those are going to have to come into play in making the decision as to what you're going to use and how you're going to get it to that individual. And so you already mentioned different types of poison and the delivery method, etc.
Understanding Cumulative Poisons
00:07:26
Speaker
What are the factors then that would determine how strong or potent the poison would be beyond just a simple type of the poison that you would use? What really makes the difference there? Are there, I know maybe geographical factors that could have an influence or, as you mentioned, the delivery method, or obviously the amounts that that's administrative. What are the different elements there?
00:07:45
Speaker
It really depends upon the nature of the poison. So arsenic, for example, if you give a large enough dose all at once, that can be lethal. But it's also true that arsenic can be given in smaller doses over time.
00:08:00
Speaker
It's what we call a cumulative poison, so an individual may not necessarily die immediately, but over time they're given small doses that gradually accumulate in the body until at some point that individual dies.
00:08:16
Speaker
Up until then, of course, the symptoms may just be an upset stomach, just not feeling well, and so it may not be immediately apparent that there is something that's going on as the poison gets just gradually more and more into the body.
00:08:32
Speaker
And on the other extreme, we have poisons that are very deadly.
Debunking Poison Myths
00:08:37
Speaker
One of the classic cases is the Markov case where he was injected with ricin that was shot into his leg from an umbrella that was used to disguise an air rifle. A very, very tiny amount of ricin was needed to get into his body.
00:08:56
Speaker
And there are various other examples. Polonium would be another one that was put into a pot of tea in London to kill Litvinenko. That took a very small amount of polonium, and indeed it was very difficult to trace because no one had ever conceived of using polonium as a murder weapon before, and so no one was looking for it. Obviously, if you don't know what you're looking for, you're certainly not going to find it.
00:09:25
Speaker
On the topic of delivery methods, is there one method that overall is more dangerous than others? Is there one that you would say, you're the KGB, you've got to silence this person, this is the way to go?
00:09:38
Speaker
Certainly, you probably don't want the victim to die immediately whilst you're around. You do want to have some time lag between exposing the victim to your poison and them actually dying. Even when we're talking about the Markov case where he was poisoned with ricin or Litvinenko with polonium, it was actually several days after their exposure before they succumbed to the poison.
00:10:08
Speaker
giving the perpetrators time to get away so that there is some notion that not only do you want to. Terminate your intended target but it's also important that you not get caught doing that as well so you may not want to use something that's going to kill immediately so.
00:10:28
Speaker
Which is one of the reasons why poisons are used in contrast to say something like a gun, where the person immediately dies and it's obvious that you've shot them. Poisons are a little more subtle in that it does allow you time to get away and hopefully escape. I suppose one follow-up question to that would be, are there poisons similar to those we see in the movies which do act instantly, which does kill the person immediately?
Famous Poison Cases
00:10:57
Speaker
It is true that what you see in the movies is a little distant from reality. People tend not to take one sip of a glass of wine and keel over immediately.
00:11:12
Speaker
Hollywood is slightly different from reality. But probably one of the fastest acting would be something like cyanide. That can kill within minutes. That is something that's easily dropped into a glass of wine.
00:11:31
Speaker
There's several examples of people who have been murdered by dropping cyanide into a drink. It's odalis, it's tasteless, and it really does kill very quickly, certainly within minutes. That would be one of the fastest-acting poisons. So, Neil, you mentioned the case of Litvinenko, and he lived for several weeks after being poisoned with polonium. What about poisons that have a delayed effect when administered in one go?
00:11:59
Speaker
So often known substances, what's the maximum delay actually between exposure and then the first appearance of symptoms? That can actually vary quite a lot. There was one very interesting example of a Japanese gentleman who murdered his wife and actually gave her not only the poison, but the antidote for the poison at the same time.
00:12:28
Speaker
The body broke down the antidote a lot faster than it broke down the poison. So he was able to give his wife both drugs at the same time and be hundreds of miles away when his wife eventually succumbed to the poison.
00:12:46
Speaker
So that can take a long time. It was remarkable that he actually came up with that knowledge. No one had ever suspected that you could even do that. And when his house was raided by the Japanese police, they found cages of dead mice and also of pufferfish that he had been using.
00:13:08
Speaker
And had actually spent quite a lot of time experimenting with different doses to work out just how much he could give and how much time it gave him to get away. So a lot of time and effort generally is spent into delivering poisons. It's not something that you can do.
00:13:28
Speaker
In the heat of the moment, it's a very cold, calculating way of getting rid of someone, which obviously then shows intent that this is something that you're planning, that you are not just doing it in the heat of the moment, and it's something that really is going to affect a lot of people.
00:13:48
Speaker
Are there any other famous cases throughout the history of poisoning that particularly interest you? I'm particularly interested to know if there's any that you think could teach us lessons about the modern poisoning threat.
00:14:00
Speaker
It's certainly true that poisoning has been used throughout history. Poisons as a tool for political assassination have been around as long as poisons themselves. Many of the Roman emperors were victims of poisoning. Agrippina was well known for assassinating all the pretenders to her son's ascension to the Roman throne.
00:14:30
Speaker
He eventually decided that his mother was not really the best person to have, so he eventually dispatched his mother all the way up through the Borges, who were well known as poisonous for ascension to the papal throne and then accumulation of large amounts of wealth.
00:14:51
Speaker
all the way up to modern times with political assassinations, thinking about the Skripals who were subjected to Novichok just a few years ago. So it's something that's been around for thousands of years, and it's remarkable that even though we think that we have a lot of methods for detecting poisons now,
00:15:14
Speaker
that they are still used.
Political Poisonings in History
00:15:16
Speaker
It's not something that people have shied away from. Even this year, I was just noticing that a dentist in Colorado has been accused of poisoning his wife with a particular poison, and that was just a few weeks ago. So people still continue to use poisons.
00:15:36
Speaker
Many are easy to detect these days and that was part of the history of different poisons being used. As one poison became easier to detect, people started moving away to other poisons that were less easy to detect.
00:15:53
Speaker
until someone figured out how to detect those poisons. So there's been a history of moving from different poisons, from mostly poisons like arsenic and cyanide over to a lot of plant-based poisons, and then ultimately now on to the chemically designed poisons by governments. So it looks like this is a method that requires kind of a compilation of very specific technical skills and
00:16:23
Speaker
What are the different obstacles to actually using that method? And how likely is the attacker actually to become exposed to the poison themselves? So I'm thinking about this case at the Kuala Lumpur airport where North Korean agents, these two unwitting women, into conducting the attack on King Jung-un's estranged half-brother,
00:16:41
Speaker
And they thought essentially that they were in a game show, and clearly these were two untrained agents, and they didn't have any issues with the poison there. So yeah, what are these obstacles and the skills that are required and the likelihood for the attacker to be exposed? Well, there are a couple of different steps there. First of all, you have to acquire the poison.
00:17:02
Speaker
So once you've decided which poison you're going to use, how are you going to get it? Obviously, if you're a government agency, then it's fairly easy to get a hold of that poison. If you're an individual, then you have to think how you're going to get it.
00:17:18
Speaker
A lot of the poisons that are somewhat easily available and certainly there are poisons that you could get from plants that you can obtain from any garden center.
Challenges in Poison Acquisition
00:17:30
Speaker
I think most people would be familiar with foxglove and digitonin that you can extract from foxglove.
00:17:38
Speaker
But having a plant and extracting a drug from that, that you can get in a pure enough quantity that's in a lethal quantity, does require a little bit of skill and knowledge. So there does have to be some expertise there obtaining the right starting materials, making the poison.
00:18:01
Speaker
And as you say, at each step there is a liability that you may be exposed to the poison yourself. So a lot of care has to be taken. Same thing at any time you're dealing with any chemicals that can be noxious. You have to take care. So there are certain steps that you have to go through in order to be able to get the right amount of material.
00:18:27
Speaker
I'm going to pause there because I can't remember the rest of your question. Sorry. I think you covered most of it, actually. It was how likely the being exposed to that would be and the different obstacles to someone using poisoning as a preferred method.
00:18:43
Speaker
Yeah, it is true that one of the downsides to the modern Internet is the availability of information on how to make these poisons. There was one case of a lady at a retirement home in Vermont who was able to isolate ricin from plants that were grown on the grounds of the retirement home.
00:19:10
Speaker
It was suspected that she was going to use that to kill herself, but she decided that if she was going to do that, it might be best to test it out first. And so she did test it on several of the other members of the retirement home. It was identified, finally, that she had isolated ricin from plants that were grown on the grounds.
00:19:35
Speaker
Obviously, when the police came and they found search histories, ricin, how do I purify ricin? It is a little bit of a giveaway. It is remarkable how many times people have been caught out
00:19:55
Speaker
by having search histories come up during police searches, even professional people. There was a case of a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who killed his wife with cyanide. He was a leader of one of the main departments at the University of Pittsburgh and was found out partly because his search history on his computer included, how do I kill my wife with cyanide?
00:20:23
Speaker
So a lot of this material is unfortunately about, but again, it's what you do with that information. Are you going to use it to isolate poisons that you're going to take and find a victim to use? Again, the information itself is not good or bad. It's what you do with that information.
00:20:46
Speaker
Well, I'll certainly say, listeners of our show who want to refer friends to the show, please send them a link directly rather than sending them off searching for how to poison your enemies. Just think about public safety and think about perceptions there. But that's a very good point. So I just want to come back to a point you made earlier when you said this is a weapon that we associate with Russia a lot these days.
00:21:08
Speaker
A lot of the cases we've talked about have been Russian here. Is this a particularly Russian weapon or are others doing it and they're just better at hiding it? Whilst we tend to think about Russians as particular purveyors of poisoning, it would indeed be unfair to say that other governments have not been involved with poisoning.
00:21:33
Speaker
I think there are several examples of the CIA in America using poisons to try and take out Fidel Castro during his reign of Cuba.
CIA's Poison Plots against Castro
00:21:45
Speaker
Some of them fairly bizarre, such as putting fungus and bacteria in wetsuits, because it was known that Castro liked to scuba dive.
00:21:57
Speaker
And so they were going to smear the inside of his wetsuit with fungus so that he would contract a deadly disease and die all the way to cigars containing botulinum toxin so that when he would smoke the cigar, he would get infected with Botox and botulism. How practical those would be, I'm not sure.
00:22:23
Speaker
But it is certainly true that the CIA has been involved with poisons used in assassination attempts.
00:22:31
Speaker
The governments of other countries, particularly Britain, for example, were well known to be heavily involved in the development of chemical weapons during World War I. And one of their main agents that they developed was a compound called Lewisite that was never really fully deployed during World War I.
00:22:54
Speaker
But actually, one of the uses that came out of that, you mentioned earlier that when you're purifying poisons that you're likely to get exposed yourself to that poison. The British government realized that if they were making chemical weapons, that there was a good chance that their own troops would be exposed to those same chemical weapons.
00:23:18
Speaker
And so whilst they had devised this chemical, which was a nerve engine called lewisite, they also needed to come up with an antidote, which they call British anti-lewisite or BAL, which is actually still used therapeutically to get rid of various heavy metal poisons in people. They're exposed to them.
00:23:42
Speaker
So knowing what the chemical is and also developing an antidote to that chemical has proved to be fairly useful. And although we don't use leucite anymore, the treatment for that anti leucite is still widely used therapeutically to treat people who have been exposed to various poisons.
00:24:01
Speaker
And you have mentioned different cases of politically motivated and state-backed poisonings, as well as some other individually organized poisonings as well. I'm just wondering, how common is it actually for individuals, but also for criminal organizations to perpetrate these types of attacks in other contexts as something that's politically motivated?
Poison in Crime & Politics
00:24:24
Speaker
It's surprisingly broad in terms of both individuals and also groups who have used poisons.
00:24:33
Speaker
Probably one of the largest was the Japanese subway sarin attack, where the group was trying to achieve political aims. Again, that's political by poisoning people with sarin in the subway. But there was also a fairly interesting case in the early 20th century in Philadelphia in the US, which was just around the same time that life insurance was becoming fairly common.
00:25:03
Speaker
And there was the so-called Philadelphia poison ring, who found women who were, shall we say, fed up of being with their husbands.
00:25:16
Speaker
And they convinced the women to take out life insurance. They paid the premiums for the life insurance. They would also supply the women with the necessary poisons to get rid of their husbands. And when the life insurance came, they would take their cut of that insurance.
00:25:33
Speaker
And this was a fairly big criminal gang that were involved with this. Several people were killed and women collecting life insurance from their husband until it was eventually uncovered and many people were sent to prison for this. So it wasn't really that they were trying to get rid of these people as such. It was merely to try and get money from the life insurance that really motivated the poisoning of these individuals.
00:26:02
Speaker
So it is both individuals who want to get rid of, let's say, wealthy relatives who are not appearing to die anytime soon and are needing to be hastened on their way so that the wills can be spread around all the way to gangs who have used it in order to get financial gain from, in this case, life insurance.
00:26:27
Speaker
It's fascinating. And how about the likes of Mexican cartels or organizations of
Impact of Drug Cartels & Fentanyl
00:26:32
Speaker
that type? Is this something that they've either been doing or that they're looking into doing, or is this just not something that's really of interest to them? What's your take on that?
00:26:42
Speaker
I'm not sure entirely. I mean, one could argue that the drugs that they are shipping are in and of themselves poisonous. And one could argue that killing off your clientele is not good for business. So in that sense, I can't imagine that a lot of cartels would be wanting to use widespread poison.
00:27:04
Speaker
But it is also true that all these opioids are deadly, and certainly fentanyl is a huge issue in the US at the moment. It's estimated that about 150 people a day are dying from fentanyl overdose. The drugs themselves, without any nefarious other concepts of poisoning, are just bad on their own.
00:27:31
Speaker
Well you're listening to Dr Neil Bradbury who's talking to us about how to poison your enemies. After the break we'll discuss how to mitigate these risks, how to survive a poisoning. You have been listening to How to Get on a Watchlist, the podcast series from Encyclopedia Geopolitica.
00:27:56
Speaker
If you like this show, don't forget to check out our other content at Encyclopedia Geopolitica, which you can find at howtogettontowatchlist.com, where you can find our analysis on various geopolitical issues, as well as reading lists covering topics like those discussed in the podcast. Please also consider subscribing to the podcast on your streaming platform of choice, giving us a rating, and joining our Patreon.
00:28:33
Speaker
Okay, so before the break, we were talking about how to poison your enemies. Now let's talk a little bit about how to survive a poisoning, how to defend against poisoning.
Detecting & Surviving Poison Exposure
00:28:41
Speaker
So the first question I have is, how can you detect poisons? If you suspected someone was trying to get you, you're on someone's list. How could you go about checking to see if you were being poisoned?
00:28:54
Speaker
A lot of it actually comes down to very old tried and tested methods. Knowing who's preparing your food. Maybe having a food taster. Knowing who's around you. Probably the best defense from that is trusting those around you.
00:29:14
Speaker
Obviously, if you're out in the public domain, you are exposed to a lot of different things. The Skripals, for example, were poisoned by having the Novichok spread on their door handles of the front door. Not a lot you can do about that other than wearing gloves all the time, which is, as you mentioned right now, it's kind of hot in the middle of summer. So wearing gloves may not be the most feasible.
00:29:44
Speaker
There are certain things that are very useful for preventing and indeed are carried by a lot of troops in war zones. Troops who may be exposed to chemical weapons, nerve gases, will all carry around with them an atropine injection. So similar, very similar to an epi-pin.
00:30:09
Speaker
that many people carry around for when they get a bee sting or an exposure to nuts and have a reaction to that. Atropine is an incredibly effective treatment for nerve agents.
00:30:26
Speaker
It blocks the activity of nerve agents and does indeed give people time to recover from any exposure, get away from the area that may be contaminated with nerve agents. The downside to that is that atropine on its own can be quite deadly itself. So in this case, we have two things that are both deadly on their own, but can counteract each other.
00:30:54
Speaker
Similarly for cyanide, cyanide is actually very widely used in the gold industry to isolate gold from its ores. Cyanide is one of the few things that will react with gold and obviously you want to make sure that the people who are working in that environment don't get exposed to cyanide.
00:31:16
Speaker
and so they will again carry around essentially an epi-pin that they can inject themselves with, which in this case is actually a vitamin. It's vitamin B12, which you can get from any store on the corner, and is a remarkably effective treatment for cyanide.
00:31:38
Speaker
Although I should say that there are two forms of vitamin B12, one of which does not contain cyanide, which is fairly hard to make and quite expensive, but it is useful for treating people who have been exposed to cyanide.
00:31:54
Speaker
Most of the vitamin B12 that you would buy from your local pharmacy does actually contain cyanide. It's very tightly bound. It's of no problem to anybody. Many people take it every day. So it is interesting that certain things will contain cyanide. A lot of drugs that are used for heartburn also have cyanide very tightly associated with them.
00:32:22
Speaker
The cyanide never comes off, it's never a problem. But the point being is that there are certain industries, the gold industry or the military, who may be exposed to poisonous agents do carry around antidotes that they can use when they potentially will get exposed to these agents.
00:32:43
Speaker
That's fascinating. What about once you're at the hospital, you've arrived in the hospital and you say, look, I think I've been poisoned. I'm a former KGB officer or something that puts you on a suspect list. Are emergency wards equipped to detect and to treat that kind of stuff? I imagine they probably get a lot of people showing up saying that they think they've been poisoned that may not have been. How do they go about figuring this out?
00:33:08
Speaker
It can actually be fairly difficult to figure out what someone's been poisoned with. A lot of poisons give fairly similar symptoms. So just not feeling very well, vomiting, diarrhea, fever, could be caused by a lot of different things. So the symptoms themselves are really not going to give you much information.
00:33:35
Speaker
There are various tests that you can use, but again, you have to be really sure that you've got some idea of what you're looking for. There are not many blanket tests that you can just throw at a blood sample and say, is there a poison here?
00:33:55
Speaker
It doesn't really work that way. You have to have some idea of what you're looking for, which was the case for Litvinenko, one of the first clues that he had been exposed to polonium, which kills not because of its chemistry, but because it is radioactive. It gets taken up inside the cells of the body.
00:34:19
Speaker
and just essentially smashes through the DNA of all the cells like a wrecking ball, so it breaks cells open from inside.
00:34:29
Speaker
And the clue that Litvinenko may have been exposed to radiation in some form was actually first seen by a doctor who just happened to be passing and noted that Litvinenko's hair
Radiation Poisoning Challenges
00:34:45
Speaker
was falling out, which is true for a lot of his patients that were undergoing radiation therapy for cancer. And so it was suggested then that he might have been exposed.
00:34:58
Speaker
The normal detection methods for radiation that would be available in a hospital can't detect the type of radiation that polonium gives off. It's a particular type called alpha particle radiation.
00:35:14
Speaker
And the only way in which that could be detected was by sending blood and urine samples off to Porton Down in the UK, which is a military institute, because there really wasn't any way that hospitals had access to that kind of equipment. So for a lot of the more exotic things, it's really hard to figure out what a person may be exposed to.
00:35:43
Speaker
And unfortunately, in many cases, like polonium or with ricin, even knowing what the poison is really doesn't help you because there is no antidote, which is one of the more unfortunate things that some poisons just do not have an antidote. And all you can do is make the victim feel comfortable as they slowly die.
00:36:11
Speaker
So from a curiosity point, if you like, figuring out what they've been poisoned with will help. It can potentially help knowing that those kind of agents are being used. Again, with polonium, no one had ever considered using polonium before. So it was on nobody's radar that this was a potential poison that could be used for assassinations. But obviously now it is.
00:36:39
Speaker
Once you know that you are looking for that, polonium and radiation was detected on the seats of the Aeroflot flights that the assassins flew on back and forth between Moscow and London. It became easily detectable once you know what you're looking for.
00:36:59
Speaker
But you have to have that first step of knowing exactly what you're looking for. And that can be quite tricky if you have absolutely no idea what kind of chemical it's been exposed to. Is it something like a radiation or a plant toxin that may not be known about?
00:37:18
Speaker
I was just at the Poison Garden, a tannic castle in the north of England just recently, and I was shown one of their plants called the Gimpy Gimpy Plant, which is also known as the Suicide Plant.
00:37:36
Speaker
Not because it itself has been used to commit suicide, but because the pain that it causes when you're exposed to this plant is so intense, apparently, that you want to die. This is a very rare plant. Not many people know about it. It's kept in a locked container at the poison garden.
00:38:00
Speaker
And so something like that, which may not kill you, but it would be incredibly debilitating and just take you out. So many people are familiar being stung by a nettle, which we kind of shrug off. The pain that's caused by this plant was it's kind of like a nettle lasts for years.
00:38:23
Speaker
incredibly debilitating pain. So whilst it may not kill you, it will certainly take you out of action. Knowing exactly what to look for in that plant is very difficult if you've got someone that's been exposed to it. It comes from the tropical regions of Australia.
00:38:41
Speaker
So you would have to know that those plants exist. So it can actually be quite difficult to come back at the end of the day and try and figure out what someone's been poisoned with. And what you essentially end up doing is just hoping for the best, throwing antibiotics at people, treating them for fevers, and just hoping that they will recover on their own.
00:39:06
Speaker
And so those looking into what's happened to these people that have been poisoned, those in charge of treating the poisonings, in addition to, you know, atropine pens that some may carry around in work environments that you mentioned earlier, what's the type of protective equipment that these people would have that are then in charge of treating those that have been poisoned?
00:39:26
Speaker
So that comes down to really not knowing what the individual's been exposed to. So you gown and mask up. You may go into a full hazmat chemical suit because you don't know if they have been exposed to a poison that's on their skin or on their clothes. And so not knowing that you take as many precautions as you can,
00:39:53
Speaker
all the way going up to the full hazmat suits to treat patients if you don't know what's going on. The problem can become that a person who has been exposed to poison and just comes into hospital saying that they're not feeling well may expose many of the healthcare practitioners there who are just
00:40:14
Speaker
unaware of what's going on because generally when someone comes into the emergency room, the first thing that you think about and worry about is not, has this individual been poisoned and are they still contaminated with poison? That's not the first thing. It's only subsequently when you start to learn how these individuals came in, what their symptoms were,
00:40:38
Speaker
who these individuals might be, that it becomes then important to start taking precautions. And these precautions will continue for a long time until the person either succumbs to the poison or eventually does get better.
00:40:55
Speaker
So I suppose a question I have is, and this is a very layperson question here, but if you can't get to a hospital, is there anything you can do? And I'm thinking of the scene in Casino Royale, the James Bond film where he's been poisoned and he forced himself to drink salt water to make himself vomit. Would that do anything? Would that actually help?
00:41:15
Speaker
Certainly for drugs that you have ingested, so if it's been put into your drink or it's been placed on food, vomiting and inducing vomiting would actually be reasonably beneficial. It is also true that one of the body's natural reactions to being exposed to many poisons is vomiting and diarrhea. Both of those are mechanisms of the body's using to just flush out the poison from the body.
00:41:45
Speaker
So there is some instance that inducing vomiting would be of benefit. Other times that if it's particularly an ingested poison, charcoal is used to try and sop up poisoned
00:42:04
Speaker
Charcoal, once it's been exposed to steam, has this ability to form lots of holes in the charcoal. So very small particles of coal that have lots of holes filled in them. And the poisons can actually get sucked up into those holes within the charcoal.
00:42:24
Speaker
This is used a lot of times when people who have taken drugs as an overdose, they'll have their stomach pumped and they'll also be flushed with charcoal to try and stop up any residual poisons that may be left in the stomach.
00:42:40
Speaker
So the good thing about that is that charcoal doesn't rely on what the poison is. As long as the poison can get sucked up into those holes, it'll be useful. So that's why it's actually a very good treatment because it doesn't matter what the poison is, it's going to be useful for a lot of different ingested poisons.
00:43:03
Speaker
Other things like nerve agents require a specific treatment which would be, in this case, atropine.
00:43:11
Speaker
So you do have to somewhat know what it is. Sometimes you can get away with just broad blanket approaches to treating lots of different things using things that will just sop up a lot of potentially different noxious chemicals. But inducing vomiting would be something that would potentially work.
00:43:33
Speaker
Of course, if you've been poisoned and you're really not sure what's going on, then that might not necessarily be something you immediately think about doing. And so you mentioned a few times how difficult it actually is to differentiate between symptoms of poisoning and symptoms of other diseases and actually identifying that that is a poisoning. I'm just wondering, is it actually possible then to have any reliable data on the frequency of the occurrence of poisonings or
00:44:03
Speaker
or any estimate anyway. It's probably a lot harder to get away with poisoning now.
00:44:12
Speaker
than it used to be. Certainly, if you go back to the 1700s, the 1800s, people were getting things like cholera and dysentery and all those kinds of diseases all the time. And the symptoms of those infections are very similar to poison. And so a lot of people undoubtedly were poisoned, but it was just written off as dysentery or cholera.
00:44:41
Speaker
Nowadays, it's a lot harder to get away with that. Even when we're not sure exactly what the poison is, it is known that a poison has been used. That there were cases, for example, where poisons were hidden in a chicken curry. Aconite was used in that case. It was clear that the individual had been poisoned.
00:45:06
Speaker
And so police certainly came along later and found that Mrs. Singh had poisoned her lover with aconite that she'd hidden in the chicken curry. It was a famous trial at the Old Bailey in London criminal case. She is now serving a life sentence for that. Interestingly, they were
00:45:29
Speaker
Pretty sure that they knew what she had used to poison her lover, but actually had to go to Kew Gardens and get a sample of the plant that they could compare it with.
00:45:42
Speaker
This is a plant that is known to anybody that is familiar with Harry Potter movies. It's also known as Wolf's Bane or Henbane, a very famous plant. But nonetheless, the individuals had to go to Kew Gardens in London to get another sample of the plant to confirm and convince themselves that, yes, these individuals have been poisoned with aconite.
00:46:06
Speaker
And yeah, looking at different, there are different reports on intelligence service agents that are wearing rings or false teeth that are hiding poison actually to swallow for them in case of an arrest or torture so that they wouldn't end up talking. And there's also a case in 2017 after the Bosnian karate Slobodan Treliak, who was found guilty of war crimes by an international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
00:46:31
Speaker
And then he drink poison in the courtroom in front of the cameras and then died shortly after in the ICU and other new kind of other famous cases like that and how common is it actually to have cases of self-administered poisonings.
00:46:45
Speaker
Actually, it turns out to be fairly common. There was actually one instance of someone committing suicide during a court case that was caught on film because the court case was being filmed for television. This was an individual who had been charged with committing arson
00:47:07
Speaker
He had bought a really expensive house. The money really wasn't his that he'd used to buy the house. He'd gone into various shady business deals and he eventually ended up being bankrupt and so decided that the best way to get out of his problems was burning the house down. He was eventually charged with arson and was taken to court.
00:47:32
Speaker
He went through the court case, was found guilty of committing arson and during the sentencing, he actually did take cyanide and was caught on film taking the cyanide and eventually dying from that. So it is not an uncommon occurrence that people will take their own lives rather than subject themselves to the natural consequences of what they've done.
00:48:00
Speaker
So think about kind of mitigations of this. How can governments, corporations, other organizations protect key leaders, key people from meeting this sort of fate? Because from what you've told us, it's a fairly common risk. There are a broad number of ways to do this. So how can you protect people?
Protecting Key Figures from Poison
00:48:18
Speaker
I think it really comes down to surrounding yourself with people that you absolutely trust.
00:48:25
Speaker
not being exposed to the general public at large, which can not always be as easy because a lot of political figures need to be exposed to the public. And that's what the general public expects, that these people are not secluded away and never seen. So it can actually be quite difficult.
00:48:48
Speaker
Obviously, for these people, they're also surrounded not just by protective security individuals, but also by medical individuals as well. So even if they're not exactly sure what they've been exposed to, they can perform life-supporting systems so that they're kept alive sufficiently long enough to get to a hospital where they may be put onto more supportive care.
00:49:15
Speaker
So having just personal security anything that you would normally do to protect from being shot for example would be not necessarily that much different from being protected from poisonous agents.
00:49:32
Speaker
So having a security team, having a medical team around you that can immediately jump in and treat anything is probably the best thing that you can do. There are so many things that could potentially be used that it really isn't possible to protect yourself from all contingencies.
00:49:57
Speaker
You do the best that you can given the circumstances. And a lot of it is a risk-benefit analysis.
00:50:05
Speaker
Is what you're going to be doing sufficiently beneficial, maybe for your political ambitions or for other reasons? Are those risks worth taking? And so you have to kind of make that decision as to what's going to work out best for you. And unfortunately, you really can't protect yourself from all potential sources of lethality.
00:50:31
Speaker
And so speaking of protecting yourself from poisoning and cyanide came up a few times here, I'm thinking of the Rasputin case. So he was reportedly served a massive dose of cyanide, which seemingly failed to kill him.
00:50:44
Speaker
And there's obviously numerous theories as to why he didn't die. But one of them is that he regularly ingested sub-lethal amounts of poison to develop immunity. How scientifically accurate is that? Can the human body actually develop natural immunity or any kind of tolerance by, you know, administrating small doses of poison over
Myth of Poison Immunity
00:51:03
Speaker
time? And in that regard, are the different types of poison created equal?
00:51:08
Speaker
That's actually a fairly easy question to address. No, it's not possible to build of a tolerance. That thinking is actually fairly old. It goes back to ancient Greek times. Mithridates was known to be taking various poisons over time to try and protect himself. It really doesn't work.
00:51:33
Speaker
One of the notions, particularly with Rasputin, is that the cyanide was put in some Madeira, which is a very sweet wine. It's been suspected that one of the reasons the cyanide didn't work is because it was inactivated by all the sugar.
00:51:50
Speaker
And there is some evidence for that, although it's also true that the stories surrounding the potential and attempts to assassinate Rasputin really aren't that well documented in terms of reality. Certainly he ended up being shot, which was probably the most efficient way of getting rid of him and then throwing him into the river.
00:52:17
Speaker
You can't get away also from incompetence. Whilst it may be true that cyanide was planned on being used, whether it was used properly in the right dosage, I don't think we will ever know the truth about Rasputin. So when you come to think about, can you train yourself to be resistant to poisons? No, it really doesn't work.
00:52:44
Speaker
So something I would not recommend that you try. It's very good to know. I will stop my morning dose of cyanide with breakfast in that case. Neil, I have to ask then, it's a question we like to ask our guests, especially working in such an interesting and quite scary field.
Modern Poison Developments & Risks
00:53:03
Speaker
What keeps you up at night? What is it about the subject that worries you the most?
00:53:09
Speaker
One of the concerns that I have is that people are coming up with new and different ways of generating poisons. Many of the poisons that we've talked about so far have been around for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But it's frightening to think that there are people whose entire career
00:53:31
Speaker
is centered exclusively around designing different and new poisons to kill people, either on mass or as individuals. And those can be quite hard to detect, especially if they're being designed and may only be used once.
00:53:53
Speaker
which means that they're really hard to figure out, especially the first time, can be really difficult to work out what someone's been killed with. And so the notion that there are people whose entire life is centered around designing new poisons is fairly scary, both for a national level, where people may be exposed en masse to particular agents that are exposed either to water supplies or into the air,
00:54:23
Speaker
That is something that I don't think we can always be prepared for. That's something that it is of concern because then it becomes really hard to know how to counteract those measures. Dr. Neil Bradbury, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. It was a pleasure.
00:54:42
Speaker
You've been listening to How to Get on a Watchlist. Our guest for this episode was Dr. Neil Bradbury. A link to his book, A Taste for Poison, could be found in the show notes for this episode. Our producer for the episode was Edwin Tran. Our researchers were Alex Smith and Simon Schofield. And to our audience, thank you very much for listening.
00:55:01
Speaker
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