Do poisons exist that don't take serious time (under an hour) to work?

August 15, 2017 10:00 AM

In movies a character will drink poison or be poisoned and the effects are nearly instantaneous, well within 5 minutes. I know about cyanide, arsenic, and the usual suspects, but I'm still wondering if there ever was, or is, poisons that work in a fast acting fashion similar to what you see on the screen.

This question was inspired by Game of Thrones. I do not want to poison anyone. I was thinking about this on my way to work this morning and it seems like nearly all toxic substances have a pretty serious time frame during which you could get "the antidote" or otherwise get help. Anything you can't get help for?

posted by anonymous to Grab Bag (7 answers total)

You are going to VERY QUICKLY be in VERY BAD shape if you drink Drano. You will die if you don't immediately get serious medical attention.

It wouldn't be a tidy death.
posted by phunniemee at 10:04 AM on August 15, 2017

Definitely. Cyanide can kill within minutes. Tetrodotoxin (found in the puffer fish and blue-ringed octopus) can show its effects within a minute, but can take longer than that to kill you.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 10:10 AM on August 15, 2017

It will depend on dosage and method of administration (ingestion, IV, etc). A hydrogen cyanide concentration of 2000 ppm, for example, can kill an adult in under one minute.
posted by Defying Gravity at 10:11 AM on August 15, 2017

Yeah, I was going to say there are any number if modern chemicals that can cause quick death. But most of the ones I know of are quite caustic: example, you will likely notice that you're drinking drain cleaner. It might be FORCED on a victim, though.

Does it have to be consumed, rather than injected? Because here are any number of nasty naturally-occurring venoms that act quickly, and have historically been tinkered with by humans to make them faster-acting (example: curare)

I don't know how stable box jellyfish venom is outside the originating creature, but getting some in an open wound would pretty much do it, for a GoT type scenario.
posted by Nancy_LockIsLit_Palmer at 10:15 AM on August 15, 2017

I believe (someone else can probably confirm) that the cyanide "hollow tooth" option actually works pretty close to as pictured in movies - an eighth of a teaspoon of poison causes quick death. (Google, google... 50 or 60 milligram ... loss of consciousness in 10-20 seconds and death in 4-5 minutes.)

Fugu - pufferfish - has a deadly neurotoxin; eating the wrong part is also nearly-instant death. Plenty of ocean critters have toxins that aren't normally ingested but could be used to kill someone if you could get it to them.

The movie drama about poisons involves trying to find something that won't be detected before or after. Finding things that kill quickly isn't a problem; slipping them unnoticed into food is.

Five deadly kitchen-able poisons - botulinum toxin is the most toxic of that batch; it's a paralytic (and the core of "BoTox" treatments).
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 10:17 AM on August 15, 2017

Wolf's Bane tincture could work, too. Again, applied through a wound or injected rather than consumed. I think it takes longer to manifest if you drink it.
posted by Nancy_LockIsLit_Palmer at 10:18 AM on August 15, 2017

Not that kind of doctor, but organophosphates like sarin or VX can kill in a few minutes.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:26 AM on August 15, 2017