The Lede on current ricin incident(s)

The New York Times’ blog about news coverage, The Lede, has a good piece by Patrick J. Lyons about the current Las Vegas ricin incident. “Scary Stuff That Won’t Stay in Vegas

” updates the story concisely, and provides some context:

After all, nobody is known to have been hurt so far, though seven people — the room’s occupant, three workers at the motel and three cops — have been sent to hospitals for observation, just in case they might have been exposed to the chemical in question, which was found in a package in the room. Update: The occupant of the room is in critical condition and has been hospitalized for several weeks; it now appears that it was a friend or relative who went to the room on Thursday to retrieve his belongings who found the package and reported it.. The authorities are saying they have no reason to think the episode has anything to do with terrorism.

But this wasn’t just any nasty industrial byproduct, it was ricin — the stuff of mystery novels and cloak-and-dagger schemes. And that makes everybody’s ears prick up.

Ricin is certainly scary stuff: it’s so toxic that a pinhead’s worth can be lethal. That made it just the thing to put in the tiny metal pellet that an unknown assailant jabbed into the thigh of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi I. Markov, probably with the tip of an umbrella, as he stood at a London bus stop in 1978. He fell ill within hours and died a few days later, his doctors baffled by his illness and slow to believe his suspicions that he had been deliberately poisoned. Ricin is stable and non-descript, and can be handled safely without much trouble by a layman — unlike, say, radioactive polonium.

It does indeed come from the waste material left over from processing castor beans — the source of castor oil — and the police said that some of the beans were found in the Las Vegas motel room. Merely possessing the stuff is not illegal — it has some medical uses

in cancer treatment and research — but almost no ordinary civilian would have any legitimate reason to keep it around.

Patrick J. Lyons, “Scary Stuff That Won’t Stay in Vegas” The Lede, accessed 6 March 2008.

Further: