Who the Hell has RICIN???

[cthulu2016]

I am hoping there is just a persistant false postive on the Wicker letter becaiuse seriously... if somebody has some ricin handy to send to a Senator who votes the wrong way on something that means they have ricin handy.

Who has ricin handy? It is not all that easy to make. Al Queada was always said to be trying to, yet somehow it never came into play in Iraq that I recall. (I expected it to make it into some food bound for American troops there at some point, but I don't think anything like that happened)

And more to the point, what are the odds that somebody with some ricin handy sent it all to Wicker?

Geez... ricin is an extremely nasty poison. It's pretty much incurable once taken into the system in sufficient quantity. (We have a vaccine, and the UK says they have a treatment that hasn't been tried on humans yet.)

Forget bombs. Just wait until ever person who ate at a given Applebees dies to see some real fear. Or some nut running around subways with a misting spray bottle.

Castor bean regulation—I guess it's where we are heading.

[JustFiveMoreMinutes]

1. I doubt Wicker ordered it from Amazon.com

[shanti]

2. Walter White?

*running* sorry, couldn't help it,

[RiffRandell]

3. Beat me to it!

I can't wait until June!

[shanti]

5. me neither!

[tammywammy]

10. That was my first thought!

[dipsydoodle]

4. To a certain extent

its in the waste of any factory producing castor oil. Why anyone would want to mess with it defeats me.

[oldhippydude]

7. the toxin of the has beans....n/t

[bluestate10]

18. Because when concentrated, it is a lethal poison. Evil people find use for it and even our

own government had/has a stockpile.

[dipsydoodle]

20. Saw a TV documentary about it once here in the UK.

Guy making it in his kitchen. Apparently a large bag full would be sufficient to take out a large city. The program also showed some nutjob trying to get anthrax spores from dead and buried animals which had died from it. Needless to say it was all filmed in the US .

[Shankapotomus]

6. Why Republicans, of course

They keep a stash hidden just for these, ahem, public relations nightmares.

[Cooley Hurd]

8. NK?

[Retrograde]

9. The plant is easy to find

Ricinus communis - the castor bean plant - is an attractive houseplant, occasionally grown outdoors in mild climates. The seeds are easy to find.

[slackmaster]

11. Anyone who is unlucky enough to have castor bean plants naturalized in their yard

They're very difficult to get rid of. The seeds can sprout several years after they've fallen on the ground.

[Downwinder]

13. And the sap is unpleasant.

[slackmaster]

21. It's really a nasty plant once it gets loose. We don't have hard winters where I live, so it's...

...evergreen and perennial.

I have seen castor plants in a canyon below a commercial flower greenhouse, that have grown into trees with foot-thick trunks from the constant supply of fertilizer-rich runoff.

[Downwinder]

29. Worse than oleander, but not much.

[slackmaster]

36. Most of the oleander in California has died out. Killed off by Oleander Leaf Scorch.

It used to be very common. Now you hardly ever see an unaffected shrub. Most of the plants have been killed, or taken out because they were dying.

[Downwinder]

38. I didn't know that.

It has been a long time since I was in California.

Even the smoke from oleander is poisonous.

[slackmaster]

40. When I was an undergraduate, I was out for a walk with my girlfriend one day and noticed...

...that she was sucking on an oleander flower.

I told her to stop, spit it out, and make herself throw up immediately.

She laughed at me.

10 minutes later she was heaving her guts out, and I was laughing.

[RedRocco]

30. I had always heard them called "mole plants"

supposedly planting a couple in your garden keeps the moles out. My Grandfather always planted a couple

[slackmaster]

31. In a Mediterranean climate, all they need is a semi-reliable water source to become invasive.

They grow FAST.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

39. I just planted some in hopes of keeping a gopher out of my roses.

I've never grown it before but my neighbor said it may work so I tried it. I'm totally rethinking it now. I knew the seeds were poisonous, but I don't have small kids and I was told the deer won't touch them.

We get hard freezes here and not enough rain to make them invasive. But damn, I had no idea they we're some kind of evil plant.

[haele]

12. Anyone with a castor plant. You can pick them up at almost any nursery.

Ricin is made with ground and dried pods of the castor bean - you know, the one they make castor oil from that used to be given to people regularly for constipation. It's one of the easist deadly natural poisons to make.

Ricin poisoning used to be fairly common when people didn't teach their young children not to chew on the very pretty castor beans when they made necklaces out of them, as kids did back in the day. I apparently lost a great-great-grand cousin that way in 1897.

Haele

[Codeine]

14. I thought you were asking if anyone was holding.

[patrice]

15. Ain't anonymity great? Fuck the rights of the collective. nt

[2ndAmForComputers]

17. I remember reading a Batman comic ages ago

in which he was trying to stop a terrorist from poisoning Gotham's water tanks with plutonium. It was not about radiation, but about its chemical properties. Extremely powerful poison.

[onehandle]

19. I have rice.

Jasmine rice.

[LeftInTX]

22. Plants are supposedly illegal to sell, but I see them in nurseries

And they have them at the botanical gardens too.

I guess after this, they will clamp down on them.

The plants are very attractive and hardy in parts of the south.

Here's from the ricin wiki:

Ricin is several orders of magnitude less toxic than botulinum or tetanus toxin, but the latter are harder to come by. Compared to botulinum or anthrax as biological weapons or chemical weapons, the quantity of ricin required to achieve LD50 over a large geographic area is significantly more than an agent such as anthrax (tons of ricin vs. only kilogram quantities of anthrax).[45] Ricin is easy to produce, but is not as practical nor likely to cause as many casualties as other agents.[2] Ricin is inactivated (the protein changes structure and becomes less dangerous) much more readily than anthrax spores, which may remain lethal for decades. Jan van Aken, a Dutch expert on biological weapons, explained in a report for The Sunshine Project that Al Qaeda's experiments with ricin suggest their inability to produce botulinum or anthrax.[46]

Ian Davison, a British white supremacist and neo-Nazi, was arrested in 2009 for planning terrorist attacks involving ricin.

In 2011 the US government discovered information that terrorist groups were attempting to obtain large amounts of castor beans for weaponized ricin use.[47]

On November 1, 2011 the FBI arrested four North Georgia men and charged them in plots to purchase explosives, a silencer, and to manufacture the biological toxin ricin from castor bean.

[backscatter712]

23. I remember the KGB used ricin at one point.

AHA!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgi_Markov

The KGB jabbed Markov with an umbrella with a tip loaded with micropellets of ricin. He died three days later.

These days, they use polonium.

[littlewolf]

24. they had a guy get exposed to Ricin poison in Vegas a couple of years ago

he was in a coma never heard what happened to him.


http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/02/29/ricin.hotel/index.html?_s=PM:US

[enlightenment]

27. He survived.

Was charged and convicted on a plea deal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/us/05ricin.html?ref=ricinpoison&_r=0

[LeftInTX]

25. The ricin terror plot in Georgia

It was an anti-govt, militia, Timothy McVeigh type group

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2011/1102/Ricin-terror-plot-Four-in-Ga.-accused-of-planning-attacks

[cthulu2016]

28. That's my point. They didn't have any

It's something people talk about, but never seem to actually get in a usable form. Thus my alarm at the idea of one of these groups actually having it, versus threatening, seeking, plotting, etc..

Because if you are set up to actually produce it you can probably produce a fair amount.

Two of the men are also accused of trying to seek out a formula to produce ricin, a biological toxin that can be lethal in small doses.

[Posteritatis]

26. The terrorists win once more. (nt)

[muriel_volestrangler]

32. Neo-Nazis, of course:

Neo-Nazi Ian Davison jailed for 10 years for making chemical weapon

Andrew Edis QC, prosecuting, said Ian Davison had made enough ricin to kill nine people and kept it in a jar in his kitchen for two years. It was seized in a police raid last June and is now at the government's chemical weapons centre at Porton Down in Wiltshire.

Edis said Davison had assembled easily-obtainable ingredients and followed online instructions to arm the ASF for a terror campaign. He told the court: "The purpose ... was the creation of an international Aryan group who would establish white supremacy in white countries.
...
Toby Hedworth QC, in mitigation for Ian Davison, said that a psychological report showed that he was a pathetic character who tried to impress others by talking big. He told the judge: "The more he did so, the greater esteem he appeared to be held in by these people.

"A very small amount (of ricin) was eventually produced and nothing was done with it."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/may/14/neo-nazi-ian-davison-jailed-chemical-weapon

[Recursion]

33. US Patent 3060165: preparation of ricin

You can extract it from castor oil.

http://www.google.com/patents/US3060165?printsec=abstract#v=onepage&q&f=false

[HiPointDem]

34. "Ricin is easily purified from castor oil manufacturing waste"

[JHB]

35. I suppose a factor would be the quality/purity of what was in the letter

Was it "low grade" ricin (however that might be defined), enough to trip the detection method but not as concentrated as, say, the assassination by the KGB where the dose fit in a small pellet?

[mainer]

37. I see those plants growing wild all over California

They're very striking and I can understand why you'd put them in the garden.

But if the feds are going to outlaw particular plants, you'd think they'd choose this over marijuana.