This week British police authorities have arrested six bioterrorists and are searching for others who may be Al Qaeda operatives that produced quantities of the deadly toxin known as ricin. This substance is five times deadlier than VX nerve gas, 6,000 times more poisonous than cyanide and 12,000 times more poisonous than rattlesnake venom. Overseas, ricin was used in the highly publicized 1978 assassination of Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov. In the US, ricin has been manufactured by individual terrorists as well as militia groups with names like the Minnesota Patriots Council as well as The Covenant and the Sword. A virtually invisible speck produces irreversible pneumonia-like symptoms and kills within days; there is no antidote. A pound of ricin dumped in a city’s water supply or blown around in the ventilation system of an indoor Super Bowl arena would not be a good thing.
Although ricin as a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) seems like a topic ripped from 21st century headlines, few people realize it is an old and not even particularly exotic threat. Ricin was isolated and discovered in the late 1880s and used in Agatha Christies’ 1929 mystery “The House of Lurking Death”, in which the heir and heiress die from a castor bean poison mixed with fig paste. Ricin comes from the Indian Ricinus communis plant, commonly known as the castor bean plant. This plant is widely cultivated in Italy and California in the industrial production of castor oil for use as a chemical additive and anti-constipation medicine. Worldwide, one million tons of castor beans are processed annually in the production of castor oil and the mountains of waste produced by this process are five percent ricin by weight. Purifying and isolating ricin from castor beans takes only alcohol, paper towels and foolish courage to risk accidental death by following widely available instructions like US Patent 3,060,165 or other, cruder recipes available on the internet from white-supremacy groups like Odin’s Rage. Since the castor bean plant is in widespread cultivation and is now both a common weed and an common ornamental plant, the challenge for the US Department of Homeland Security now is to tell the WMD terrorists from the backyard gardeners.