Highly-Concentrated Chemicals

Chemicals like bitterants or dyes or stink bombs can often be perceived at doses of milligrams or less—small enough that they can be dropped covertly in small packages powerful enough to affect large areas. Stink bomb-like chemicals have been used in riot control, but you can also play funny pranks with dyes… like public pools.

Edward O. Thorp (A Man For All Markets) tells an anecdote about a prank during his early enthusiasm for chemistry & physics:

One great trick began when I read about a powerful dye called aniline red. It turned water a deep blood color in the astonishing ratio of 6 million grams of water for each gram of dye! I obtained 20 grams of the dye for experiments. … My homemade chemistry lab, as I’ve mentioned, was located in the laundry room tacked onto the back of our garage, which in turn opened onto our backyard. And in the middle of that yard was our kidney-shaped goldfish pool, about 10 feet by 5 feet and 1 foot deep. That’s a little less than one and a half cubic meters. Now, one gram of this dye would color 6 cubic meters of water a deep red, so a mere pinch, 0.25g of dye, ought to do the job on the pool.

To be sure, I put in 4 times that much [into our pool], a whole gram, stirring the water vigorously as I scattered it, and the goldfish pool turned a satisfying blood red. The color was so dense that plants could no longer be seen except where they broke the surface. The only sign of the fish was when they stuck their mouths up to feed. I returned to work in my lab. Several minutes passed before I heard my mother scream and scream and scream. She thought someone, probably me, was in the pool bleeding to death. It took a long time to calm her down.

I was sorry to have scared my mother, but it gave me an idea. 8 miles away in the city of Long Beach was an enormous swimming pool open to the public. The Long Beach Plunge was part of the Long Beach Pike, an old established amusement complex. A World War II “orphan” who more or less raised myself while my parents toiled in war factories, I had bused to the pike and had used the plunge many times. The largest heated indoor pool in Southern California, it was 120 feet long and 60 feet wide, with an average depth of 5 feet. That’s a volume of about a thousand cubic meters. My remaining 19 grams of aniline red would intensely color only about an eighth of that. I decided to go ahead anyhow. To help me with my plan, I picked a thin, pale, nerdy classmate with thick glasses and a shock of straight light-blond hair who liked to hang out during my experiments. Making a pouch out of waxed paper and filling it with all of the dye, I sealed it with candle wax and fastened two strings to the top in such a way that when they were pulled in opposite directions the pouch would open into a flat sheet and dump out all the dye. On a beautiful summer Saturday morning we boarded a bus for Long Beach. Arriving at the plunge, we bought our tickets and went to our lockers, changed into our suits, then made our way to the pool, with the dye pouch hidden under my bathing trunks. A hundred or so swimmers were already enjoying themselves in and around the pool. I put the pouch in the water, then we each took a string. We walked to opposite ends of the pool and drew the lines tight, but not so tight as to release the dye. Whimsically, I wanted a swimmer to do that for us. Soon one obliged. He hit a string unawares. The pouch opened, released the dye, and created a tiny red cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. All was quiet. We raced to our lockers and changed. With alarm my “assistant” noted a red dye smudge that somehow had appeared on his bathing suit: evidence of the crime. As we sped to the viewing balcony above the main pool and deck, I urged him not to worry.

Now the opaque red cloud was the size of a basketball. It was still quiet. Then another swimmer churned it up to about three feet in diameter. The deep blood-red irregular cloud was still so thick you could not see into it. Then the first scream came, followed by cries of alarm and more screams. A hero dove into the cloud, stirring it and expanding it. The pool emptied in a panic. Within minutes everyone was out. They were given free passes to return. Entranced by the commotion, we neglected to collect ours. As the plunge employees searched through the crimson cloud, it eventually grew large enough to become semi-transparent. Meanwhile, someone held up the waxed paper and strings, looked puzzled, and discarded it as meaningless debris.

That afternoon, after a pleasant day in the surrounding amusement park, we checked the plunge from the viewing balcony. About half of it was the color of strawberry Kool-Aid. A few swimmers had returned and it was quiet—quieter than usual, because so few people wanted to swim in the red water. The next day the Long Beach paper carried a small article: “Unknown Pranksters Dye Long Beach Plunge Red”.

One could imagine more harmful pranks, like taking a tiny liquid container of bitterant (eg. thioacetone) onto an airplane on a long flight, applying it to surfaces in the bathroom, and then sitting back, waiting for people to track it all over and begin projectile vomiting… (I advise bringing a good mask, to avoid being hoist by one’s own petard.)

Overdoses

First, it is part of why ‘research chemicals’ and analogues like carfentanil are so dangerous: with such small therapeutic windows an imperceptible dose error can take a dose straight from fun to fatal.

Opiate users’ accounts are rife with instances of experienced users, who have successfully safely used many other drugs with techniques like volumetric dosing, who took especially elaborate precautions in working with a stash like full body gear, masks, sealed containers etc, and still waking up a day or two later to discover they had passed out from an overdose. Similarly, psychedelic manufacturing laboratories for highly potent substances like LSD¹ can be so contaminated (like Leonard Pickard’s reportedly was) that merely walking through it would be enough to produce a low-level psychedelic experience.

More amusingly, one buyer of the sugar analogue Neotame who spilled a tiny amount noted that “to this day I encounter items in my kitchen with visually imperceptible amounts of residue. After touching it and getting even microscopic quantities of the stuff on a utensil or cup, bowl, plate, whatever, it adds an intense element of sweetness to the food being prepared, sometimes to our delight.”

Research chemical chemists often base their experiments on published research of exceptionally potent drugs developed for biological research, where extremely selective effects on specific receptors in small doses are critical for experiments on cells or model organisms (for some background, see Drugs 2.0).

Infectious Crystals

Second, the contaminants need not be active purely as drugs. In chemistry, “polymorphs” are alternative crystallizations of a particular chemical (not to be confused with isomers like stereoisomerism, which can also be metastable but are within-molecule). There are often many possible polymorphs.

Bizarrely, like the fictional Ice-Nine, polymorphs can “disappear” and be ‘infectious’ (Dunitz & Bernstein1995/Bučar et al 2015/Lowe commentary): one polymorph form can be thermodynamically superior to an alternative polymorph, and if any of it is present as a seed, all the others may gradually convert to the other form. Since polymorphs can chemically behave quite differently, particularly in biology, this means that sometimes, a valuable polymorph will be discovered, begin to be manufactured in a facility, and suddenly, every batch comes out useless. Worse, because even a single crystal may be enough to trigger infection, the other manufacturers may soon be infected themselves—a crystal somehow got carried there.

Even facilities set up from scratch may suffer this fate. Did it hitchhike on a chemical sample, on the body of an employee or visitor, on a piece of paper sent to HQ which could then travel there, through a supplier, or just blown there by the wind? There is no way to know: at the nanogram or microgram level, everything gets everywhere. Extreme levels of purity are exceptionally difficult to achieve (which is part of why lead pollution was so hard to study). Worst of all, this can happen at any time! There are so many possible polymorphs which are spontaneously arising that a new mutant could emerge any day and turn out to be superior and start an infection.

This is primarily a concern in pharmaceutical manufacturing, with a notable example being the AIDS drug Norvir™ (ritonavir) in the 1990s (IAPAC archives), where a polymorph spontaneously emerged for a key AIDS drug years after manufacturing began, threatening countless patients, and fighting the polymorph took years. Another example is Bell Labs manufacturing glycerine & ethylene diamine tartarate (EDT) crystals (Kohman1950) crystals for electronics—fortunately, the new polymorph turned out to be itself unstable at higher temperatures, which were feasible to manufacture under.

(But this is also an increasing issue with DNA sequencing, in terms of over-sensitivity: we may not realize it, but we shed cells constantly, and those cells get everywhere. Because DNA sequencing can now detect DNA from just a few cells, left by nothing but a touch, eg. touching a bullet to load a gun, there can be issues like the “Phantom of Heilbronn”: a serial killer linked to scores of murders by DNA sequencing, who turned out to be a worker in the cotton swab factory.)

RTX: A World Of Suffering In A Grain Of Sand

With this in mind, consider a chemical like resiniferatoxin (RTX), a capsaicin analog. (We’ll pass over psychedelics and opiates as examples: as terrifying as the prospect of EA-3167 may be, psychedelics may have too distinct an effect, and opiates would be primarily useful for killing but there are more effective agents for that. But given how tiny the necessary doses are, a cocktail of various drugs would be even more devastating.²) WP helpfully informs us that RTX:

has a score of 16 billion Scoville heat units, making pure resiniferatoxin about 500–1000× hotter than pure capsaicin…It causes severe burning pain in sub-microgram (less than 1⁄1,000,000^th of a gram) quantities when ingested orally.³

It is, in fact, so potent that it can easily destroy your pain nerves (which might be useful for treating chronic pain; see Appendino & Szallasi1997 for the history).

Now, what would happen if someone like a Russian intelligence agency were to break into someone’s house and spray it with a small amount of highly dilute (in alcohol, since it’s water-insoluble—which would make cleaning fun) RTX? (And perhaps breaking in is not even necessary, given such tiny doses…)

Poison-Induced PTSD

The effect on the inhabitant would be traumatic: at random times, they will be struck, on various parts of their body, by eruptions of burning pain of various intensities (due to randomness in dosage and body part sensitivity). It will happen with no clear pattern, and the poisonous uncertainty will cause ‘superstition’ in that they may believe all sorts of strange theories, like food allergies, and go on long fruitless hunts for cures—cures which may seem to work for a while, until another sudden pain attack. If they are lucky and properly test treatments, they will fall into despair as nothing makes a difference; if they are unlucky, they will think that things work which don’t, and will spiral into ever more extreme alternative medicines and New Age therapies and religions. (Entertainingly, the true explanation, that “I’ve been poisoned by The Man!”, will itself strike outsiders as a clear symptom of their spiral into crazy conspiracy theories.) Their suffering will continue no matter where they go (because their body, clothes, and belongings will all be contaminated); relocating entirely may somewhat reduce the attacks, but will not eliminate them (even assuming their new residence is not also sprayed).

Because ‘pain’ is such a generic symptom, doctors will be baffled, and may resort to increasingly invasive (and harmful, and expensive) diagnostics leading to iatrogenics, or write off the pain attacks as ‘psychosomatic’ (and for them, therapy & psychiatric drugs will do nothing—good, anyway). Opioid prescriptions might assist with attacks, but are dangerously addictive.

Between the sheer randomness of attacks, the helpless cycling through doomed theories & treatments, the stigmatization of being ‘crazy’, the sufferer may well go crazy and develop post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or trigger latent mental illnesses. The victim might well envy someone in a concentration camp, because at least they understand where their torment is coming from, what rules there are, and can navigate a world that makes sense.

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