On one of his radio shows, G. Gordon Liddy told how the CIA taught him how to get pure nicotine out of cigarettes because you could use it as a field tool - something improvised - to commit assassinations.RealNC wrote: ↑Sat Mar 04, 2017 2:25 am Also, at the end of the day, nicotine is not very dangerous. Well, it can be dangerous in the same way caffeine is dangerous. But neither of them kills you or otherwise affects your health in such a negative way smoking does...
So even though I know that nicotine is not harmless (it's a vice, not a virtue,) I'm keeping it for now, since the plan is to stop inhaling smoke (and making sure I don't go back to it) and nicotine helps with that.
The LD50 - the amount at which 50% of people will die from consumption - for nicotine is 1mg/kg or about 60 mg for an average person*. Note that the capacity of a teaspoon exceeds 5,000 mg. If you've ever noticed ads for cigarettes will say something like "5 mg tar, 0.1 mg nicotine avg. per cigarette by FTC method." This is why smoking is not extremely dangerous because individual cigarettes do not have large amounts of nicotine; the vaping liquid, however, may be dangerous if handled because nicotine can be absorbed through the skin, as anyone who uses patches is aware.
The asterisk is because in 2013 these numbers were questioned as being too low and the actual lethal level is about 500-1000mg, meaning the current estimates for lethality are too low by a factor of ten.
The LD50 of caffeine is 150-200 mg/kg, or about 80-100 cups of coffee, or about 150 cans of Mountain Dew.
The LD50 of water is about a gallon and a half.
