2015/05/22

Guardian May 19, 2015: Polonium, ‘heartbreak grass’ or good old-fashioned cyanide: what’s your poison?

No matter which toxin you choose, it’s getting more difficult to dispatch your enemies without detection as forensic technology improves – just ask Russia’s secret service

As an undetectable means of bumping someone off, poison has fallen steeply out of favour in recent times, forensic technology having advanced to such a degree that the presence of even the smallest quantities of any toxic agent in a corpse will now almost inevitably be detected.

Water-soluble, tasteless and formerly widely available in the form of rat poison and weed killer, white arsenic was once so popular that it was known as “inheritance powder”. Strychnine, made from the seeds of the south-east Asian Nux vomica tree, was equally fashionable, as – in the Middle Ages – was atropine, aka belladonna or deadly nightshade: the juice of a few berries could be lethal.

The fastest-acting of all the classic poisons, cyanide, had its day, of course, and the last century also saw the emergence of a host of other less familiar but even more deadly toxins, each more fearsome than the next: sarin, anthrax, botulinum. All, though, are eminently identifiable. more