Ingesting gasoline is deadly in far smaller doses due to something called hydrocarbon pneumonia. My dad very nearly died as a result of having a tiny amount get past his throat while siphoning gas to a small engine’s tank.
If you must siphon gas, go buy a cheap “pump siphon” from Canadian Tire.
This is what I was referring to. There are a number of variations on the theme.
If you are really in a pinch:
Feed a length of hose into the source until only a small amount is left clear of the liquid.
Put your thumb over the exposed end, or otherwise make the end as close to airtight as possible.
Rapidly pull the hose out of the liquid, moving the end down to the destination container. The end must be below the top surface of the source, the further the better.
Release your thumb/seal. If you’ve done it all correctly, the hose will be nearly filled with liquid and enough of it will be below the surface of the source to start the siphoning process.
If the source liquid is too far below the opening for this to work with the length of hose you have, you can manually pump it far enough to start a siphon, by rapidly submerging and lifting the hose while alternating the closing of the top. Open top while submerging, closed top while lifting. You have to push down faster than what gravity pulls the liquid back down. Ideally, you’re lifting fast enough to get some help from the liquid’s own inertia when you reverse course.
Uranium is pretty toxic, just like a large part of the periodic table. As long as we’re talking about the usual isotopes, the toxicity will get you long before the radiation does.
This only compares the risk of death, not other health problems. Also, gasoline is way more readily available in pure form than most other substances, and nobody would drink it voluntarily.
Ingesting gasoline is deadly in far smaller doses due to something called hydrocarbon pneumonia. My dad very nearly died as a result of having a tiny amount get past his throat while siphoning gas to a small engine’s tank.
If you must siphon gas, go buy a cheap “pump siphon” from Canadian Tire.
I legit cannot imagine consuming 1g of THC let alone 1g/kg, you’d literally be eating thousands of gummies if you’re doing edibles (10mg seems to be the strongest edibles I can get) which would be really expensive, rough for a 70kg person would be nearly 9000 10mg gummies which are like $4 cad each, would cost $36,000.
I guess you could do it, but practically, no one is going to do that much
At that point just get a crack spoon, warm up some resin, and go to town on your veins. It’ll be easier, quicker, cheaper, and probably won’t make you want to die from consuming all that food… You’ll still die, just not because you stabbed yourself to relieve the bloating.
Exactly. just listened to something about the EU allowing a chemical during growing that stunts stalk length so plants are stiffer and lower to grouns for agriculture. US doeant allow it for agriculture but allows import of EU grain. Some articles trying to be alarmist state that urine analyais is ahowing increase in this chemical of people eating breakfast cereal. What the article left out (and podcaster calculated) was you would need to eat 85000kg of oats daily, to sustain a lethal dose.
You’re confusing 50% lethal dose (medical property of a substance in relation to the body) with death rate (property of a death cause, obtained statistically from a population at a specific time). This is pure medical data which still may be slightly inaccurate, but you can easily check relevant scientific papers for their estimate of the LD₅₀. I think all values presented here are correct within a factor of 2, unless you find a reputable journal stating a very different result. Each substance is available in different concentrations and humans’ exposure to them also varies. You can get lots of pure water, sugar or gasoline easily but not a gram of viruses. Nobody would voluntarily consume a substantial amount of gasoline but nanograms of viruses come and go in the air all the time.
It is somewhat misleading to group poisons, radioactive isotopes and viruses as they work in very different ways, but the gist is correct. And yes, the LD₅₀ is still a statistical estimate dependent on the humans studied, but not on society etc. like the death rate.
Edit: some substances will be ejected by the body relatively fast (water), some bioaccumulate (heavy metals) and some “biomutiply” (viruses). This is why you haven’t died despite having drunk lots of water.
It is somewhat misleading to group poisons, radioactive isotopes and viruses
Far as I can tell there aren’t any viruses in there? There’s a few bacterial toxins, but they’re… well, toxins.
Also, the grouping isn’t misleading. Not only is eg. plutonium fairly toxic (because it’s a heavy metal) in addition to giving off ionizing radiation, but calculating an LD50 for something doesn’t require it to be toxic, just that some dose of it kills. There’s some µg/kg ingested (or inhaled or whatever) dose of polonium that will kill 50% of a study animal population dead, regardless of what the mechanism that kills them actually is
You are right, those aren’t viruses. But you can imagine that a virus or prion (like botulinum) might have a very small LD₅₀. I discussed the radioactivity/toxicity in another comment, you are correct - but a tiny amount of any element can quickly kill you from decay radiation if it’s a very unstable isotope.
And yes, if you understand what LD₅₀ means, the mechanism is the confusing part. Ingesting naturally occuring uranium will not kill you primarily from radiation despite the ☢️ symbol on the infographic, and vitamin D won’t kill you if you only get it from the Sun. And I was primarily correcting the misunderstanding in the above critique, not defending everything about the picture.
Keep in mind: a single extra strength Tylenol is 500mg. A standard dose for a headache is 2 pills, or 1000mg.
Weed gummies come in doses of 1mg to 100mg. 1mg is a microdose people might take for mild pain or stress, while 50+mg is a dose for cancer patients often take. A standard dose for occasional recreational highs is 5mg; they recommend first timers start at 2.5mg.
LD50 compares things by weight, rather than dose. By weight, THC is slightly more toxic than acetaminophen. But in terms of the number of therapeutic doses it takes to kill you, it’s way, way safer.
Yes, I came here for this conversation. What’s the ratio of effective dose to LD50 again, because that’s typically what matters. That’s where cannabis and ethanol are in totally different categories. And how high do you need to get before dying from LSD?
700 to 1000 μg. Full out-of-body experiences. Synesthesia more likely. Religious imagery often strong. Entire loss of rationality, lack of ability to walk or interact in any meaningful way.
1500 μgs+ Experiences may be similar to DMT but extended. Basic body functions are challenging. Vision is consumed by hallucinations. No sense of self remains. Audio hallucinations may be strong. Standard reality no longer applies. Merging with objects likely. No type of rational thought left.
A deadly dose is around 800x higher than that. You wouldn’t be as high as a kite. You’d be as high as Voyager one.
That dose of 16.5mg/kg ld50 is for rats.
Mice is lower at 0.3mg/kg.
There have been no know deaths from humans overdosing on lsd, even when people have taken ridiculously high amounts by mistaking it for cocaine and railing lines of it up their nose.
Sure, a little coma, hypERthermia and light gastric bleeding but nothing a short stint in the hospital didn’t sort em out with no lasting effects.
I think the reason this chart doesn’t feel right is because for substances we regularly ingest, a more useful scale would be the ratio of the lethal dose to the effective dose, since we use a different mg amount to get high on THC than we use to lower pain on acetaminophen
Aye, I’ve always liked the ratio better. It really puts into perspective how fast and loose some of our entertainments are. Compare the health warnings on OTC drugs like tylenol/acetaminophen/paracetamol to the bare minimum labeling of alcohol, yet alcohol’s equivalent (or much less, in some estimations) to the painkiller.
This is why grapefruit is so dangerous for so many medicines. Those medicines take bioavailability into account and can be a massive dose in some cases. Grapefruit keeps the same mechanism that lowers effective dosage busy, substantially increasing the effective dose - straight into overdose territory in some cases.
It’s probably all correct, but super misleading. There’s probably no way to overdose on THC other than drinking loads of highly concentrated oil. Just like there’s no way to overdose on LSD, since it gets taken smaller doses.
You consume grams of salt, milligrams of meth, vitamin D, …, and micrograms of acid.
So the important part is “how close is the usual dose people take to the lethal dose, and will your body rebel before you get there (e.g. it’s hard to eat that much salt or drink much water)” or in other words “how likely is it to accidentally overdose”.
Most of the numbers used in this data are also extrapolated from studies using rats and mice so the direct applicability to humans is uncertain at best.
It’s not “super misleading”. It’s just very simplified. It’s an infographic, and inherently lacks nuance. The creator tried with loads of fine print both before and after the pictures, but who reads fine print, right?
The rest of your points are correct, especially the likelihood of accidental overdose. And the OP of this thread is… I’m gonna be generous and stay they are childish. Hopefully they learned something from all of the responses here
Death rate is society-dependent. If we only paid with lead coins and never washed our hands, cases of lead poisoning would skyrocket even if the element and our bodies remained the same (and so would LD₅₀). Thankfully, our society knows about the danger and limits the intake of lead to small amounts and/or small concentrations.
Tylenol is easier to overdose on than NSAIDs. I really don’t think this guide is accurate. I’m really questioning the placement of cocaine and especially ketamine. Vitamin D from the sun? Lethal? I don’t believe black widows are that venomous, either. How are they even measuring this? Cocaine will give you a heart attack, Tylenol will shut down your liver, venom acts like an infection… are they basing lethal dose on how much it takes to cause some kind of fatal reaction, or under a controlled administration with a defined “fatal dose” based on a specific measurement, like damage to a human cell?
LD50 is usually determined using rodent studies. How much Vitamin D causes an overdose in half of a population of mice?
The dose makes the poison.
And with drug safety, in practice LD50 is less important than how close a therapeutic dose is to a lethal one. If a drug takes 2g/kg to kill you but you need 1g/kg to work, that’s way more dangerous than one that takes .02g/kg to kill you but only needs .0002g/kg to work.
Based on www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8709011/, a therapeutic regime for very low vitamin D levels is taking 6k IU per day for 3 months, or 50k IU once a week for 2 months.
1 IU is 0.025 μg, or 0.000025 mg. 50k IU is 1.25 mg.
I buy bottles of 5k IU vitamin D pills. Each bottle has 90 pills. That’s 11.25 mg of vitamin D per bottle. I’d need to take well over 200 bottles of these pills to have a 50% chance of dying.
Yes, an objectively small amount of purified vitamin D will kill you. But it’s quite safe in practice because the environment only has objectively tiny amounts of the stuff. Even high dose pills contain a tiny amount of the stuff.
I think that you’re missing the dosages. Most of these are orders of magnitude higher than the most someone would consume. Like, the caffeine value per kg of bodyweight is as much as most caffeine addicts likely have in a day. So approximately 2 orders of magnitude higher than how much we consume.
MDMA is similar. An ecstasy pill is up to 100mg (apparently; I just looked it up), so an adult would need to pop something like 130 pills to hit the LD50.
Acetaminophen is 500mg/pill, so that’s like a Costco-sized bottle to kill an adult.
Vitamin D is crazy low. 1000 IU is 25 mcg, so 1000 pills is less than the LD50 for 1 kg of body weight. It’s hardly toxic at all, in the dosages we consume. You’d need to pop multiple cases of bottles of Vitamin D to overdose. All
Not possible to get 3-3.5 grams (based on bodey weigth) of d vitamin from the sun. Since the body produce about 25 micrograms in 10-15 minutes during peak summer. And would just flush the excess. To be leathal it would need to be in one single dose.
I think they are referring to Uranium with natural isotopic abundance. Which is complete bullshit when you put a picture of a nuclear power plant behind it – which in most cases can not function with the natural isotopic abundance (heavy water reactors being the exception, not the rule).
Depends on the isotope, of course. There are different ways it can hurt you.
If you put together a critical mass of ²³⁵U, it undergoes fission and you die in seconds without needing to ingest it.
Naturally ocurring uranium (²³³U-²³⁸U, mostly ²³⁸U) has a half-life of billions of years, so it’s very weakly radioactive. It would take a lot of it to harm you from decay radiation. Or very little if you pick a very unstable synthetic isotope outside the 233-238 range (but every element “has” such radioactive isotopes, though not in nature).
Uranium is chemically toxic, which is whal will kill you if you ingest a small amount of a common isotope.
If you’ve got more than 52 kg of uranium 235 on your hands, I would be alarmed to learn you didn’t understand how criticality worked. Although now that I think of it, there’s probably an awful lot of people who indirectly handle that much when they move around a nuclear warhead and most of them probably only had a single lecture on the concept.
The thing that always blows my mind is just how freaking dense uranium is. A sphere weighing 52 kg is only 17 cm across.
I wonder how they came up with the LD50 of all those materials, like THC and LSD. Is this based on theoretical calculation, in vitro tests, or on a (assumably) very small sample of known deaths?
Step 1: Feed/Inject mutliple rat populations with different concentrations
Step 2: See how many die.
Step 3: The concentration which causes 50% of the population to die is the LD50
Or aspects like arsenic staying in your body a very long time, or the fact that LSD is psychoactive in microgram doses, so you’d need thousands of tabs to die.
Exactly. Gasoline, for example, is remarkably non-toxic, but it will cause instant chemical burns to your throat and lungs, possibly killing you far below the (chemically) lethal dose.
Methanol will turn you blind at a quarter of the listed dose, and those two are just from the top of my head.
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