%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %% %% %% ============== %% %% PLANT POISONS! %% %% ============== %% %% %% %% An article from: %% %% The Poor Man's James Bond! %% %% By: Kurt Saxon %% %% %% %% Typed by %% %% --==**>>THE REFLEX<<**==-- %% %% [Member: Omnipotent, Inc.] %% %% %% %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Plant poisons are very easy to administer and are hard to trace. A few leaves in the salad aren't noticed and the victim dies without knowing why. Rhubarb, for one, is a deadly poison. The stalks are fine but if you eat of the leaf, you'll die. Cooked, the leaves take an hour or so, but in a salad they kill almost immediately. The rhubarb bought in stores has all the leaves taken off so you will have to get the leaves from a farm or grow your own. You don't have to be stingy with rhubarb and most other plant poisons like figuring grains and grams. Just chop up some leaves and put them in the salad or stew or among the lettuce on hamburgers and you will hit the jackpot. Castor beans are a good poison as they are almost tasteless when ground and only three or four are enough to kill. They're easy to get, especially in Southern California where they grow wild. They cann be put into almost any food. Oleanders are common flowers but are about as poisonous as any plant. The heart is affected very quickly and severly. Both the leaves and branches are lethal. A couple on poisettia leaves will kill just about anybody. Better use three. Yew is a conifer, or cone bearing evergreen tree or shrub. Any nursery man can take you out in back and idetify it for you. But he will get pretty surly if you start stripping off branches so you should buy a small tree, if you don't know where a big one is growing. It's the foliage that kills so forget the berries. It is so poisonous and so quick that at one time the Secret Service considered for suicide pills. The beauty of it is that it kills almost immediately without any symptoms. You take it and, splatt, you're on the floor, dead. I'm not sure of the dosage but it's not that much. The way to refine it is to fill a coffee percolator with the ground up foliage and put eight ounces of alcohol in the pot. Percolate it for about a half hour. if the alcohol boils off, put in some more. Cheap rubbing alcohol is good enough once you have distilled it off from its water content. When the process is finished, put the alcohol and what went through the percolator into the still. You then distill off the alcohol until you have only a couple of teaspoonfuls of residue left. Pour this out into a saucer and let it evaporate. You can use the same process for a finer grade of nicotine from tobacco. Always strive for quality. Laurel is another evergreen that can cause death by eating a single leaf. It is best percolated and distilled but it can be used as it is and put in stews and as a garnish on hors d'oeuvres.