Nasally taken poisons?

[Pentagon]

Dear all,

It was my understanding, from a drugs perspective that 'snorting' drugs such as Cocaine is considerably more 'effective' as it gets whatever your taking into your blood, without having to go through the stomach and all the bodies natural defenses that are there to stop you... well dying from food poisoning.

Accordingly, if I have a character who is concerned about a suicide pill killing them as quickly as possible, is it reasonable to have them snort their suicide powder, as opposed to swallow it?

Whilst I assume that there are enough poisons that will kill you sufficiently quickly that it doesn't really matter, but the premise is that the character in question is 'superhuman' and is therefore concerned that they will be 'too tough' for conventional poisons?

Thoughts,
Pentagon

 

[Venusian Broon]

I believe certain medications are designed to be absorbed in the mouth and I'd heard that placing a pill or some other chemical under tongue would bypass the stomach and get the effects much quicker.

But some poisons/medications may in fact work better in the acidic conditions of the stomach (see cyanide)

However, have you looked up suicide pills? Odd question, I know, but this is about the pills given by UK and US governments to their spies in WW2 and the cold war:

Suicide pill - Wikipedia

The trouble with powder is that, if you are incapacitated - say bound and helpless - how do you get your secret stash of powder and snort it? Having a fake tooth with a suitable nasty liquid in it means you always have it handy. And I guess a liquid would be preferable to a powder.

As for the superhuman abilities, something like cyanide really works on a base level that binds to crucial enzymes that the cells need to get energy. However, if he/she is so superhuman that they can scrub themselves clean of a large quantity of this extremely quickly, why can't they design a chemical that is tough enough to overcome the person's defences? It is a suicide pill after all, they presumably would have put a bit of thought into it!

 

[Mirannan]

What sort of tech level are we talking about here? The reason I ask the question is that I just thought of a device that isn't going to pay much attention to your high-tech enhanced immune system. A tooth, much like the suicide tooth already mentioned, that has in it a miniaturised containment system for something a lot nastier and less easy to counter than cyanide (or nerve agent, or...)

OK, here it is. The tooth contains a Faraday cage (reason soon obvious) and inside that cage a microscale magnetic bottle containing a microgram or so of antimatter. Bite down on the tooth hard enough, and the containment is disrupted, and...

 

[tinkerdan]

Remember this? ::

A Poisoned tooth was a weapon of assassination during the time of the Faufreluches. It consisted of a false tooth with a cavity and false cap. The cavity was filled with poison gas. It was designed so that, when the bearer bit down hard on the cap and breathed out hard, the cap would break and the poison gas would be expelled into the immediate area.

It was designed to be virtually undetecable, short of close scrutiny.

Dr. Wellington Yueh planted such a tooth into the Duke Leto Atreides as a means for killing the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen after Yueh had delivered the Duke to the Baron through betrayal.

The tooth only partially worked. The Duke managed to kill the Baron's Captain of the Guard, his Mentat Piter de Vries, and several others, but not the Baron.

::
Poisoned tooth

 

[Rider of scaled wing]

The only 'nasally' administered poisons I know of are aerosolized, and they don't enter your bloodstream through the nose, it happens in the lungs.

Basically, poison gas works through complete inhalation down into the lungs, not just entering the nose.