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Old 03-08-2003, 11:33 PM
Martin Brown
 
Posts: n/a
Default Banned Herbicides & Pesticides

In message , Alan Gould
writes
In article , Martin Brown
writes

Very nasty stuff.


Only if you are daft enough to drink it. And enough people were...

It also happened by accident in lots of cases.


Something that would definitely be avoided by adding bitterex.

It is insane to store toxic garden chemicals in lemonade bottles, but
people do and it is impossible to legislate against stupidity.

I thought they latterly added bitterex or something similarly vicious
tasting to prevent would be suicide cases using the stuff. Nasty choice
of poison too. ISTR it is metabolised and almost completely removed but
destroys vital organs like the liver and/or kidneys in the process.
Similar problems also occur with natural Amanita toxins.

Another now banned substance which used to be popular with gardeners was
nicotine. A few fag ends infused in water overnight would make a very
effective insecticide, but it caused a lot of health and safety
problems. People understood the need to ban that because of its known
dangers to smokers, but some still risk using it.


News to me. I thought so far the limit of state intervention on nicotine
was to prevent the explicit advertising of the tobacco products to
addicts. Using nicotine extracts as a pesticide was always ill advised
because the LD50 for humans is about the amount you can solvent extract
from just one cigarette. Lucky really that smoking the stuff is so
inefficient.

Major problem with it is you get tobacco mosaic virus as a freeloader.

There are endless versions of fake Organic(TM) "kitchen sink" chemistry
recipes on the net using fag ends that are quite literally lethal if
executed correctly. Fortunately, most of them use the wrong solvent for
extraction.

Regards,
--
Martin Brown