"The Poisoner's Handbook" with Author Deborah Blum Pt. 2

which she very kindly did. As we mentioned in our intro to the last episode, Deborah is the author of the New York Times notable book The Poison Spot, as well as the New York Times bestseller The Poisoner's Handbook. So there was no other guests that we could think of having. She had to begin. Yeah, the the absolute perfect one. And this is part two of our chat with Deborah. So if you missed part one, be sure to give that a listen. And now let's jump right

back into our fun discussion with Deborah Blum all about poison. Okay, so I'm gonna take us back to Arsenic for a minute. And you've said before that Arsenic is your favorite poison. As it turns out, it may be my favorite poison as well after our first season of Griminalia. But I was wondering if you would share why you prefer it to something like strychnine. Perhaps, I mean, arsenic is still

my favorite poison. Yeah. The reason when I say that people think I sound creepy, I don't understand it because it's really really a cool poison. I don't find you creepy when you say it at all. You're at the right audience here. I've been having such a good time guys. Our slicks a naturally occurring element, and uh it's about the thirty third most common element in the Earth's crust. So and we started making use of it really early

as a poison. Well, I mean one of the things that's really it's got so many interesting layers, and the things I like about it are both it's wonderful versatility, is a homicidal poison, but also the fact that it's really dangerous. Uh as at the park pavilion level. Now, there's almost no other poison that you know kind of sand bags you on two different levels the way Arsenic is because there's an old famous saying in medicine that the dose makes the poison, but with arsenic, in fact,

that's not entirely true. So it's really fascinating. Elemental arsenic. It loves to bond with other atoms and and and when it bonds with carbon and becomes like something like an arsenic sugar, it's not particularly dangerous to us. UM. And in fact, we eat a lot of arsenic sugars, like our seno bin team which comes up, which is in fish, because there's a lot of arsenic and ocean water, and we just cabitalize that a way. They actually just

follow up on that for a minute. There was a really interesting study in which they were looking at whether pregnant women we're eating enough fish as part of a healthy diet because people were avoiding fish because of mercury, speaking of poisons UM, and they were able to tell that these women had cut out fish because there was no sentimenting in there. You're in right, it just wasn't there.

And so we know that we're exposed to these organic arsenic compounds all the time, and they were big nothing um. But inorganic arsenic, which you know in chemistry means without carbon is all um is really dangerous and the worst form of it for us is m arsenic trioxide, which if you think about what that means, it just means one atom of arsenic with three I mean, yeah, one atom of arsenic three of oxygen arsenic three oxygen's trioxide, and arsenic crioxide is in fact the poison that was

called the inheritance powder in the nineteen century. And if you go and you look at the labels of pharmaceutical bottles for that them that time, that's what you see our snic trioxide. And we just cannot handle that at all. It gets into your cells, It disrupts the um, the part of the cell that is actually metabolizing, provides energy the metabolic process and cells. And so it's a broad spectrum really lethal poisonous and not that much I mean

not as poisonous acutely poisonous as strychnine or cyanide. So you're talking, you know, in the teaspoon ish and up kind of range. It'll kill you because it attacks every cell. It's really hard to diagnose, right, So people got in the nineteenth century got away with arsenic murders all the time.

And plus that it's odorless and tasteless. It's all these wonderful studies from the nineteenth century with scientists mixing into vanilla pudding and other things and proving that you know, you know, you can put it in anything and people can't tell as opposed to something like strychnine or cyanide that's really bitter. And until James marsh the chemist about mid nineteenth century came up with the first super simple test to try to detect arsenic in a body, you

couldn't detect it. So, I mean, it's just such a storied, amazing poison from the Borgias into the early twentieth century. And one of the poisoner speaking of women poisoners in my book, is an arsenic murderous Fanny Creighton, right, and uh, and she does exactly the kind of things I'm describing, you know, she just gets it as a domestic supply and kills people that are annoying her in the way

of money. Um. So you know, even in the twenty early twentieth century, when they did have some tools, you could still get away with an arsenic murder because it looked so much like a natural illness. And I just loved the whole devious nous in the way I really do it, so I know, right, Like, we had one woman this season who mixed it into egg nog and I was like, yeah, fantastic. Don't you love creative. It's a poison that allows poisoners who are devious to be

so entirely creative. And how they're going to deliver it, right, and at what does sore? You're gonna slowly make the person sick, or you're gonna try to kill them over. I had a arsenic mass murderer in UH Poisoner's Handbook in which and what they believe was an angry, vengeful baker who had been fired just mixed arsenic into the dove for the next day and it was really I mean, people just died, right. So although you can do this gradually,

it can just wipe you right out. And then finally, because it is naturally occurring, it turns up in drinking water and UH in rice, right, rice is the one right that really pulls arsenic and at the part per

billion level, it does real harm. So the e P a standard for arsenic and drinking water inorganic right again, UH is ten parts per billion, which sounds like a big nothing, but the actual recommendation was three, and so the tam parts for billion was a compromise, you know, in which utility systems were saying, we think we can, you know, without breaking the bank, get this down to town.

But three would be really impossible. But if you go over to countries where it took them a while to figure this out, like um taiwan Uh back in the I want to say, about thirty years ago had an outbreak of something called blackfoot disease. They had arsenic in the drinking water at about up to one part per million, and it was so destructive to people's circulatory system that they developed gangrain in their feet, and which was called

blackfoot disease. And so we know from actual these unfortunate you know, human guinea pig examples of arsenic exposure, that arsenic at this very small amount above fifty parts per billion can cause real Right. So it is in many ways one of the most versatile um and common poisons on the planet, and it serves as a reminder to all of us that we live on a poison poisoness planet. Then we make use of those poisons in all kinds of interesting ways, right, and that we need to like

going back to my point about finding the tools. You know, where should I worry? Where should I shouldn't? There's nothing better than arsenic. It's the world's great at poison. I absolutely came out of our first season thinking the exact Yeah, it definitely is kind of the star of the season for sure. There's no side stepping it. It shows up everywhere.

It is the number one character. Uh. And I was glad that you brought up the Marsh test because of course, Uh, that as well as your work talking about kind of the beginnings of forensic science, makes me wonder how quickly the rise of forensics science stemmed the tide of homicidal poisonings. Oh, that's such a good question. So not as quickly as you might hope, right, I mean, the Marsh test was a really primitive test, right, and which work most of

the time, but not all of the time. And and then then they later came up with refinements on that um. But even after the Marsh test, uh came into more popular use about mid nineteenth century, people did not know how to detect organic compounds, right, organic poisons like cyanide

or strychnine in a corpse and in Poisonous Handbook. I quote this prosecutor from France saying, well, why doesn't everyone just kill with plant poisons then, since nobody knows how to find them in a corpse, right, I mean, so poisoners who are, like I said, really poisons are you know, the coldest of killers. I mean, they have to plot and plan everything. All poisoning is premeditated, as opposed to

almost any other weapon. And so you see this really interesting shift in the crime statistics in which poisoners shift to plant poison's because they're not detectable, right. And it's not till thirty to forty years after the March Test that we figure out how to detect first nicotine in a corpse and we take that on. So we're slowly building this knowledge base that then is overwhelmed by the tide of industrial chemistry, right, which arises in the late

nineteenth century. And this is really the setup for the story I tell in Poisoner's Handbook, because I was surprised to realize what a very young science, forensic science is, right, Um, you know I'd always imagined I mean partly because you know, you get this sense from some of the early crime fiction in particular that we were right on top of

this and everyone was running tests. But in fact, the for in the United States, the first forensic medicine program was started in the nineteen thirties by Galler and Norris, and it was the first in the country, followed by rob in Boston shortly later. Um, there was no training in that. I mean, people didn't even use the term.

They call it legal medicine, right. Um, so even the use of the word forensic science, Um, you know, really began in the nineteen thirties, which is less than a hundred years ago, in spite of you know, the fact that we're building this knowledge, right, I mean, actually forensic chemistry was one of the earliest branches of forensic science, right, people were not I mean the ability to understand um, gunshots and gunshots, batter and bullet rifling is fairly new.

Blood tests are nude. Of course, DNA analysis much newer. Right. So, really, this slow beginning of figuring out the chemistry of poisons, the slow beginning was one of the first parts of forensic science, but the field itself didn't always start assembling itself until the nineteen thirties. And when you look at the Nora Skeetler program. You see other people at the New York City Medical Examiner's Office, UM, who are blood specialists or um plants specialists or right, all of these

different parts that they're putting together to build a professional field. UM. So it's slow, and there's no wonder that you know, you can find even arsenic poisoners into the nineteen thirties because the field is really playing catch up with the

killers themselves. Welcome back to criminalia. Do you happen to have a favorite story from the development of forensic science as it relates to poison or or do you really kind of like a lot of a lot of the I mean, um, so, one of my other favorite poisons because it's so efficient, it's carbon monoxide, and I actually have two carbon monoxide chapters and Poysoner's handbug um too,

because it, you know, plays into so many different aspects. UM. But one of the carbon monoxide chapters involves this extremely failed murder I guess because it makes me laugh. I like this story. It's creamely, extremely frustrating and somewhat incompetent

murder syndicate that forms in the Bronx and UM. The early nineteen thirty sort of towards the end of prohibition, in which they this group of I mean I wouldn't call them nearer to wells, but definitely shady characters who are you know, marginally getting along, come up with a scheme to um ensure the life of alcoholic garrel, like it kind of floats through the speaking that one of the moans, and then take out insurance policies on him and then have him die, you know, with various different

schemes that they come up with and cash in and the money, and so they pick this Irish alcoholic drifter Mike malloy and Mike Malloyd came to be known in the New York Press is Mike the Durable, Which will tell you why I think this is so funny, because they try all of these different ways to kill him, you know, poison alcohol and running over him with a

cab and pouring cold water on him. And I shouldn't leave, but it is so hard, right putting him out soaked in water in a in a park in February, hoping he'll get pneumonia, and and none of it works. He just you know, bounces back from every single attempt until

they finally kill him. I won't give away the Hallwilian where with carbon monoxide, and carbon oxide is such an efficient killer, right, it works so amazingly well, has this fabulous chemical reaction with your bloody which it just shoves oxygen out of your blood in a kind of muscle man kind of way, speaking of my tendency to animate poisons, and right and uh and Getler had really looked at all of these different issues with carbon monoxide, in part

because there had been a charge, a murder charge against someone who actually hadn't killed someone with carbon monoxide, and he was able to figure that out. And and there were people who tried to fake um murders, pretending that there had been like a carbon monoxide leak, which and

he was able to sort that out. So carbon monoxide is so interesting because it's so good at what it does, and because when you look at how they figured it out, it's kind all these amazing stories like Mike Malloy and you know a guy who tried to kill his wife and um and was caught through chemistry. And so I'm especially fond of that as well, just the whole fabulous way that you see science Peel apart this long time poison um and provide us with tools to protect ourselves

against it. So carbon oxide is oderless, which makes it like arsenic, really dangerous. It's leaking into your room, but you don't smell anything, right, you just get sleepy. Um. So we add a compound chlora piccron to it now so that if, for instance, you know, the gas went off on your burner, on your stuff, and you had a sleep of gas, you would you smell that weird, slightly awkward smell. But that's the chlora piccren, that's not

the carbononoxide, right, And so we learned from these. It's also an example of what we've learned and done better in a public health sense. So yeah, that's another I like them all, actually loves all the poison. They're so fascinating. And you know, I'll say to people, I mean here, I am like, you know, walking ball of chemicals, inhaling them and drinking them every day, and most of them don't do you any harm. So the ones that do

chemically are really clever. They unlock different locks in your body. They take advantage of um, you know, natural symptoms, natural systems in an interesting way. Radium deposits to your bones because the body processes that like calcium. Thallium is distributed by potassium channels, because the body potassiut you know, distributes it like potassium. And and the way that poisons can take advantage of the Simpson systems that mostly you know,

protect our health. They're just really interesting, devious chemical compounds. And and in a way that probably does make me sound creepy, there's a part of me that steps back and admires deviousness right related to every one being made of chemicals. I was recently researching an incident in sixteen sixties Paris, which, of course there was that big debate going on in the French academy over whether or not it should be allowed for doctors to treat people using

chemical means. And the whole time I'm reading it, I'm like, they're they're already doing it, they just don't call it a chemical. Uh So I was glad you mentioned it. Um. As we have worked our way through our list of poisoning this season, of course, we've been kind of picking apart the ways that some of these stories have been told over the years, and then comparing that to the historical record, to see whether there's really support for it,

and sometimes there's not. There is clearly a case where someone has gotten this reputation when they maybe did not deserve it. Um. Have you been surprised by any of the instances of poisonings that you've studied over the years, either because it turned out poison was not the case, or just the way it was it was handled or discussed or characterized was a little bit surprising. You know. One of the things I tackled in Poisoner's Handbook was

people being falsely accused of poisoning. Right, so there's a Mercury poisoner who did not poison his wife, um, but was accused of it publicly. Um. There was, as I said, a man who was accused of poisoning his one of his neighbors and he in that turned out to be an accidental death. And so one of the points you raise here that I that from my perspective, is really important is that, you know, investigations that find innocence are

just as important as investigations that find guilt. And you know, too, we should not just assume that the criminal justice system is there to you know, send people to prisoners or send them to execution. It's also there in a justice sense to take these cases apart and show when people work guilty or wherever the story doesn't hold up, and

and in some cases it it genuinely doesn't. I have also thought, you know, about the sort of mythology we built around certain poisons and how misleading that can be.

And and one of those is, of course rice, and which was a big hero of Breaking Bad as you know, everyone's favorite lethal poison, and gave people the impression and I wrote about this too over at Wired, but gave people the impression that man, they just had to you know, mess around with castor beans or whatever and and gin up a little ric in and they could take out anyone they didn't know without at all understanding how ricin works.

And the fact that it's actually lethal in a very narrow targeted sense, right, and just really insane uses of it. And of course rice and powder. Since when if you are you know, an espionage agent, which is where really famous rice and killings come from. Um and you carefully injected,

of course it's going to kill you. But the other methods, like you know, rice and pizzas are really nearly as dangerous as people like so people partly through you know, popular shows like Breaking Back, get these ideas about poisons and how they work and and then use them. And and that also happened in an interesting way, although it

is unexpectedly dangerous. There was one of these shows in which someone uses vizine to make someone sick at a wedding party the wedding um and vizine is really dangerous if you swallow it, right, And so there was then

this rash of visine poisonings. Right. So I think the other part of this story is that when we're telling poison stories and putting that information out, you know, you know, we're trying not to instruct people on how to poison other people, right, but you need to be aware that they're always going to be people who are going to read this um and poisoner's handbook. Actually, and this was really appalling to me. I should tell you, Uh ended up in a criminal trial of a guy in um.

He was in the Navy, I think that in San Diego, and he tried to kill his wife with salium. People wrote me about this when they did the criminal druve. The one book he had on his phone was Poisonous handbook. So when you look at that chapter, it talks a lot about the fact that it's certainly in the nineteen thirties, which is a hard to detect poison, right, I mean, that's a nineties and that's that's in the nineteen thirties.

This guy clearly took it into the twenty first century thinking he could get away with it, and he got the dose completely wrong, right, and so he you know, his wife survived and he went to prison. But and literally, anytime I was at a party and people say, what are you working on, I say, I'm working on a book about, you know, something relighted to poison. And people would always say to me almost every party, they said, well,

how would you poison someone. I said to my editor at Penguin, I'm like this, this is starting to really make me nervous, and she said, I absolutely forbid you to ever tell anyone out to poison anyone um. And so, you know, I was really careful in the book, but people, but it is a reminder that when you write about these things, or like in the case of breaking Bad, when you kind of glorify a particular poison um, you can drive this kind of activity and so to be careful.

That is a fascinating aspect I had not. I mean, we think about it and we joke about how Maria and I should anyone ever look at our search history are going to be like, right, I mean, why are you asking how much our stink it takes to kill a two hunder pound right, exactly exactly. I've googled it more than once. You know, I always thought to myself there was a point where I starts the FBI ever

looked at my searches story, I feel the same entirely homicidal. Right, So you are, as we mentioned at the top, the director of the Night Science Journalism program. I'm wondering what advice you give to up and coming journalists about writing on the subject of historical science. And it maybe don't tell people how to poison people, but I bet there

are other lessons also. That's a great question. And you know, when I do, when I'm talking to our fellows or when i'm you know, talking to other journalism groups, particularly talk about the importance of writing about science history. And so, going back to when I got my grad degree at Wisconsin, my adviser had a joint appointment in journalism and why life biology. And when I went there, he said to me, you have to study history of science. And I had

never occurred to me. I had worked for newspapers for five years. I was interested in, you know, modern environmental toxicology, and um, I'm like, huh. And he said, the most important thing about understanding the history of what you cover is that you people will not be able to shine you on. You know that you're going to interview scientists who will say I'm the first person who've ever thought of this, and you'll know that's not true because you

actually know something about the history of the field. So one of the things I do when I am talking to journalists is I talked not only about my you know, philosophical idea that we're always smarter if we know how we got here, but about the importance of understanding the history of the field, because when you do understand that, you really can put what's going on in context right. And there's so many examples of that beyond um poison.

You know, the obvious example today is if you actually take a look at some of the things that arose in the nineteen eighteen influenza pandemic um, they're predictive of some of the things we're going through here. They obviously we're a long way from a flu shot at that point, but mask wearing, social distancing, the hostile response to that, the the second wave of that. Right, there's just so much that you can look and say to yourself, what have we learned and what mistakes are re repeating and

how could we be smarter about this? And so you know, I remind people all the time that, um, there's all these amazing facts from history that we've forgotten. Um, if

you go into an archive. I one of the books I did was on the history of the idea that love matters, which in science, right, going through this arc from the early twentieth century and look in which scientists argued that love didn't exist in that relationships between same mother and child too just to be called proximity to the period where we say, I mean, it was crazy to to the other side of that paradigm shift in

which we say love is. You know, we need a solid foundation of love and affection in healthy human development. And when I was doing that, I went to the archives of the history of American psychology, which are in

acron Ohio. In that archive. As I was researching this changing idea, I found so many scientists who had been famous in their time, who are forgotten, who have made discoveries about how we think and how we relate to each other, that if we just remembered them, if we just had that history of time, we wouldn't be making

some of these mistakes. Again that I mean, in the nineteen thirties, they were actually looking at the connection between affection and intelligence and the importance of right having that solid family background in the development of how you think and how you thrive in intellectual settings. I mean, when I read it, I just thought, oh, I wish right that we had not just put that into some archive, right, but continue to keep that at the forefront of the conversation.

So history makes us so much smarter about poison's right, but about the world we live in ourselves, and and you know, the last thing I'll say about that is it's really interesting. You know. I don't know if it's a failure of the way we teach history in the K twelve system, but once you get into like his into history, you you just find yourself going, this is such an amazing story of who we are. And I

would like everyone to think that way. On our show, normally at the end of every episode we do a segment called What's Your Poison, where we make a cocktail that is the to the subject at hand. So I do not know if you are a drinker or not, But if you are or if you're not, what's your poison? What's your favorite beverage? Oh, I'm like a journalist. I've been drinking in newsrooms for decades. Um So I really love some of the nineteen twenties cocktails. Um and and.

In fact, while I was working on Poisoner's Hand, but I like was trying to drink my way through the famous cocktails of the twenties, that's all I thought to myself, I'm really becoming an alcoholic here um and, because they were really interesting cocktails, because a lot of some of them were designed to cover up the taste of ethel you know, methyl alcohol and boot like bathtub gin and some of the really horrible tasting you know, sort of

homebrews of the nineteen twenties, so oh, different kinds of flavoring. So my two favorite cocktails from that period are a Sidecar and the Bee's Needs, which is a fairly simple cocktail of fresh lemon juice and gin and honey, or a simple servant sirrup and you can add some different herbs to that, and I highly recommend them their wonderful cocktails. I love it, Deborah. We can never thank you enough for spending all this time with us. Oh that's so

nice of you, guys. I mean, this was really fun for me. And you have such smart Debra, take a minute and thank questions. I really enjoyed it. It was really fun for us to Yes, you guys, take care out there. You much, deb It's almost impossible to say how much we want to thank Debrae for joining us and spending a ton of time just chatting about poison and poison and more poise and and not even just arsenic, right, it was a little bit of like an arsenic fan.

But uh. We also cannot recommend her books highly enough if you have not read them, As is completely obvious from listening to her talk. She is so knowledgeable and so good at talking about science in a way that is accessible for non scientists and really really compelling. Highly recommend So we do have one What You're Poison following this interview that I'm going to throw over to Holly. Yeah, so as you as you know, we asked Eva what

her favorite cocktails were. If you listen last week, we you know, you know, we did a sidecar, and this time I'm doing a bes knees. Similar to the sidecar, you'll see recipes for bees knees that are all pretty similar, but with slightly different variations and amounts of of each particular component. So you'll see anywhere from one and a half to the most. I was two and a half ounces of gin. That seems like an awful lot to me. I would hit right around to um half an ounce

to an ounce of lemon juice. Three quarters is where I tend to land, and then most call for about a half ounce of honey syrup. I like a whole ounce of honey syrup because it takes the edge off the gin a little bit. For me, I'm not a gin person. I'm not either. I was wondering when this came up. I was trying to think if I'd had these knees before, but because it's gin, it is highly unlikely. YEA, Yeah, I have had them before, and I it's one of

those things I'm always like I'm gonna have that. It sounds fun, and then I'm like, why did I order this? It's not really my drink there I mean, which is no shade at all to any bartender that's ever made one. It's just gin is not I'm I have one of those palettes to whom gin tastes very much like I'm chewing on pine bark. Um. A good gin will help that, but even so I still get pine flavor. So, uh, that's last time I talked about how you can kind

of switch things up. This is such a simple recipe um that for me, it's just becomes a matter of like throttling the amount of honey syrup that's in it. If you don't have you know, uh, if you did not know, honey syrup is one of the easiest things on earth to make. It is just like a simple syrup.

It's one part honey to one part water. You throw it in a saucepan and let it just reach a boil, so it's completely easy to um for the sugar and the honey to dissolve, and then you let it cool off in your golden I do very small amounts when I make batches of honey syrup like literally a third of a cup to a third of a cup because I just don't use it in that much stuff. But it doesn't, It really doesn't come up a lot doesn't.

But then it's one of those things that once you have it on hand, you'll just start throwing it in cocktails and then discovering because one of the things it really does is it like warms it up. It just gives it this nice extra body and it it um. It does take the edge off of things. And if there are harsh flavors your your spirits, it will help kind of soothe those. Uh. And so for me, it's just a matter of adding that bit of honey to make this a yummy or drink. So that is the

bees Knees. And again we cannot say thanks enough to Deborah, so we will raise the beas knees in her honor. I'll drink the gin just for it, right absolutely, And we also want to make sure that we thank you are listeners for listening this season. Our next and last episode on Lady Poisoners is going to be our review of the whole season. But do not fret, we're going right into a season two. It won't be about Lady Poisoners.

It will be about stalkers instead. But we're gonna, we're gonna keep right on going, and so in that next episode, we are going to cover some of our favorite episodes from the season, as well as our favorite cocktails that we've had this time around. Thank you again for listening. We can't wait to meet back here next week. Criminalia is a production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with

I Heart Radio. For more pod casts from Shondaland Audio, please visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H