American Men Accused of Anti-Government Plot Involving Deadly Plant-Derived Poison

FWD 2 American Men Accused of Anti-Government Plot Involving Deadly Plant-Derived Poison

HerbalEGram: Volume 8, Number 12, December 2011

American Men Accused of Anti-Government Plot Involving Deadly Plant-Derived Poison

On November 1, 2011, 4 men were arrested in their homes in Toccoa, Georgia, for plotting to attack a United States government building and various East Coast locations with ricin, a lethal poison derived from castor beans (Ricinis communis).¹

Humans have been aware of the toxicity of castor beans—which are, in fact, seeds—for thousands of years. Ricin, a protein isolated from the beans, was developed for potential weaponization by the United States for usage in both World Wars.² “Compound W,” as ricin was once called, was even synthesized into bomb form during World War II by the United States and Britain; however, it was never utilized.²

Despite ricin’s deadly effect, depending on dose and delivery method, it is also a cancer therapy agent “first shown to inhibit tumor growth in 1951.”² And further, castor oil, also derived from R. communis beans, was used in ancient Egypt for laxative indications, and has been employed for lubrication to treat various diseases by peoples around the globe through recent history.²

One of the men charged in the Georgia terrorist plot, Ray Adams, 65, is a former federal Department of Agriculture researcher.¹ His driveway was lined with “a few dozen” castor bean plants, which were seized as evidence—though locals also plant it to deter moles—and toxic plant guides were discovered in his home.¹

“When you read about people throwing ricin out of the window of a car [which the Georgian men allegedly planned to do], it sounds like something out of Keystone Kops,” said Mark Potok—director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Information Project—to the New York Times, making reference to a bungling police crew featured in several silent film-era comedies.¹ “But the fact that this was hare-brained doesn’t mean there wasn’t a real risk of people being killed.”¹

News reports indicate that additional groups might try to use ricin for terrorist attacks. According to a recent Times article, an “Al Qaeda affiliate” operating out of Yemen appeared to have intentions to pack the toxin around bombs for targets in the United States.³Intelligence reports revealed that the terrorist group’s attempts to procure castor beans en masse began more than a year ago; however, there is no evidence of an attack on the horizon.³

Perhaps the most famous incident involving ricin occurred in 1978, when Georgi Markov—a novelist, playwright, and journalist who defected from then-Communist Bulgaria and impugned its government from abroad—was dosed with ricin by Communist operatives in London with an umbrella. The umbrella’s tip purportedly concealed a contraption meant to “shoot” tiny ricin-filled pellets into human targets. After 2 failed assassination attempts, the third and final took 3 days to kill him.² The same method was used on another Bulgarian dissident, Vladimir Kostov, in Paris just over a week before; however, due to a malfunction of the pellet in which the ricin was encapsulated, not enough of the toxin was released into his body to kill him.

“The symptoms for ricin poisoning are non-specific, so a diagnosis is not going to be made unless specific skullduggery is discovered that a ricin exposure may have occurred,” said Thomas Kurt, MD, a medical toxicologist and clinical professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. “Unless [ricin is] specifically known to be looked for in advance, a medical examiner or coroner would miss a ricin-poisoning fatality in autopsy (e-mail communication, November 22, 2011).”

According to Medical Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare, “Ricin is a 66-kilodalton (kd) globular protein that makes up 1% to 5% by weight of the bean of the castor plant… At the cellular level, ricin kills through inhibition of protein synthesis.”² It requires larger doses to be deadly when administered orally (as opposed to injection or inhalation), due to inferior absorption in the digestive tract.²

“To be effective, [ricin] needs to be delivered peritoneally [through the lining of the abdominal cavity], by injection, or via the lungs,” said Ryan Huxtable, PhD, a retired toxicologist and former University of Arizona-Tucson professor of pharmacology (e-mail communication, August 26, 2011). “[T]here are many agents which are far more toxic—palytoxin or tetanus toxin, to name but two.” Derived from coral and bacteria, respectively, neither palytoxin nor tetanus toxin originate in plants.

Michael E. Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, was quoted in the Times, saying, “The potential threat of weapons of mass destruction, likely in a simpler form than what people might imagine but still a form that would have psychological impact, from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen, is very, very real.”³

—Ashley Lindstrom

References

1. Severson K, Brown R. Georgia men held in plot to attack government. The New York Times. November 3, 2011:A18. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/us/georgia-men-held-in-plot-to-attack-government.html. Accessed November 7, 2011.

2. Franz DR, Jaax NK. Ricin Toxin. In: Zajtchuk R, Bellamy R, eds. Medical Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare. Bethesda, MA: Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the US Army; 1997:631-642.

3. Schmitt E, Shanker T. Qaeda trying to harness toxin for bombs, U.S. officials fear. The New York Times. August 13, 2011:A1. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2011/08/13/world/middleeast/13terror.html?_r=1&ref=alqaedainthearabianpeninsula. Accessed August 25, 2011