Chemicals active at the nanogram scale are invisible, difficult to observe, and near-impossible to clean or remove; but they are still psychoactive enough to torment you like demons.
Chemicals at the nano-scale, which are invisible to ordinary thinking, can still have large effects at the human-scale: examples, despite all precautions, include the bizarre phenomenon of “disappearing polymorphs” (crystals which can ‘infect’ other crystals, causing severe harm to drug production) and highly potent drugs which cause overdoses.
Such mysterious behavior could be abused. I dramatize this by speculating on how the spicy chemical resiniferatoxin (RTX) could be employed as a nanotech tool of psychological warfare due to its sub-microgram dosage—it would be an ineradicable, invisible, inexplicable curse on the victim, who would suffer continuously in confusion, almost supernaturally.
But it would be completely natural: merely a very small bit of Nature.
Chemicals which are active at tiny doses in the microgram or nanogram range have counterintuitive properties: even if a solid, they act more like gases in terms of contacting everything around them and being almost impossible to remove.
Too Powerful For Our Own Good
Someone who gets a tiny contaminant on them can change all their clothes, burn their belongings, take long showers, and fail to remove every trace of it—they are cursed. This has serious implications: while more potent may seem better (it’s more efficient! less caloric value! fewer possible contaminants!), after a certain point sheer potency alone is dangerous.
Examples
Overdoses
First, it is part of why ‘research chemicals’ and analogues like carfentanil are so dangerous: with such small therapeutic windows an imperceptible dose error can take a dose straight from fun to fatal.
Opiate users’ accounts are rife with instances of experienced users, who have successfully safely used many other drugs with techniques like volumetric dosing, who took especially elaborate precautions in working with a stash like full body gear, masks, sealed containers etc, and still waking up a day or two later to discover they had passed out from an overdose. Similarly, psychedelic manufacturing laboratories for highly potent substances like LSD1 can be so contaminated (like Leonard Pickard’s reportedly was) that merely walking through it would be enough to produce a low-level psychedelic experience.
More amusingly, one buyer of the sugar analogue Neotame who spilled a tiny amount noted that “to this day I encounter items in my kitchen with visually imperceptible amounts of residue. After touching it and getting even microscopic quantities of the stuff on a utensil or cup, bowl, plate, whatever, it adds an intense element of sweetness to the food being prepared, sometimes to our delight.”
Research chemical chemists often base their experiments on published research of exceptionally potent drugs developed for biological research, where extremely selective effects on specific receptors in small doses are critical for experiments on cells or model organisms (for some background, see Drugs 2.0).
Infectious Crystals
Second, the contaminants need not be active purely as drugs. In chemistry, “polymorphs” are alternative crystallizations of a particular chemical (not to be confused with isomers like stereoisomerism, which can also be metastable but are within-molecule). There are often many possible polymorphs.
Bizarrely, like the fictional Ice-Nine, polymorphs can “disappear” and be ‘infectious’ (1995/ et al 2015/Lowe commentary): one polymorph form can be thermodynamically superior to an alternative polymorph, and if any of it is present as a seed, all the others may gradually convert to the other form. Since polymorphs can chemically behave quite differently, particularly in biology, this means that sometimes, a valuable polymorph will be discovered, begin to be manufactured in a facility, and suddenly, every batch comes out useless. Worse, because even a single crystal may be enough to trigger infection, the other manufacturers may soon be infected themselves—a crystal somehow got carried there.
Even facilities set up from scratch may suffer this fate. Did it hitchhike on a chemical sample, on the body of an employee or visitor, on a piece of paper sent to HQ which could then travel there, through a supplier, or just blown there by the wind? There is no way to know: at the nanogram or microgram level, everything gets everywhere. Extreme levels of purity are exceptionally difficult to achieve (which is part of why lead pollution was so hard to study). Worst of all, this can happen at any time! There are so many possible polymorphs which are spontaneously arising that a new mutant could emerge any day and turn out to be superior and start an infection.
This is primarily a concern in pharmaceutical manufacturing, with a notable example being the AIDS drug Norvir™ (ritonavir) in the 1990s (IAPAC archives), where a polymorph spontaneously emerged for a key AIDS drug years after manufacturing began, threatening countless patients, and fighting the polymorph took years. Another example is Bell Labs manufacturing glycerine & ethylene diamine tartarate (EDT) crystals (1950) crystals for electronics—fortunately, the new polymorph turned out to be itself unstable at higher temperatures, which were feasible to manufacture under.
(But this is also an increasing issue with DNA sequencing, in terms of over-sensitivity: we may not realize it, but we shed cells constantly, and those cells get everywhere. Because DNA sequencing can now detect DNA from just a few cells, left by nothing but a touch, eg. touching a bullet to load a gun, there can be issues like the “Phantom of Heilbronn”: a serial killer linked to scores of murders by DNA sequencing, who turned out to be a worker in the cotton swab factory.)
RTX: A World Of Suffering In A Grain Of Sand
With this in mind, consider a chemical like resiniferatoxin (RTX), a capsaicin analog. (We’ll pass over psychedelics and opiates as examples: as terrifying as the prospect of EA-3167 may be, psychedelics may have too distinct an effect, and opiates would be primarily useful for killing but there are more effective agents for that. But given how tiny the necessary doses are, a cocktail of various drugs would be even more devastating.2) WP helpfully informs us that RTX:
has a score of 16 billion Scoville heat units, making pure resiniferatoxin about 500–1000× hotter than pure capsaicin…It causes severe burning pain in sub-microgram (less than 1⁄1,000,000th of a gram) quantities when ingested orally.3
It is, in fact, so potent that it can easily destroy your pain nerves (which might be useful for treating chronic pain; see 1997 for the history).
Now, what would happen if someone like a Russian intelligence agency were to break into someone’s house and spray it with a small amount of highly dilute (in alcohol, since it’s water-insoluble—which would make cleaning fun) RTX? (And perhaps breaking in is not even necessary, given such tiny doses…)
Invisible And Omnipresent
Regardless of delivery mechanism, it would contaminate most of the building and everything in it. A solid substance would regularly migrate around, contaminating dishes and hands; the victim would, like all humans, touch their face & mouth far more than they consciously realize, potentially inflicting suffering each time. No matter how much they scrubbed or washed, sooner or later, their hands would be contaminated again, ‘proving’ that the problem couldn’t be anything involving dirty hands, but it must be something else—brain cancer? The treatment would last for quite a while; Di et al 2004 reports a degradation of a third over 6 days at room temperature on glass/plastic in the dark, so it could have a half-life of months; given its sub-microgram efficiency, a large dose of a gram or two could easily cause harm for years to come.
It would be impossible to remove all the RTX; possibly the best thing to do would be to condemn the building, seal and burn it, and keep it off-limits for a few decades. It would be absolutely invisible since it would be present at any point in nanogram quantities; it may be possible to detect it with ultra-sensitive chemical techniques like gas chromatography, but it would never occur to anyone to use such exotic (and expensive) things, much less to look for a specific chemical like RTX.
The power of sub-microgram doses is so deeply counterintuitive that it’s hard to see how one would ever think of it as a hypothesis, much less look for it. One detection risk is that visitors may be contaminated too, in which case the oddness of a cluster of individuals sharing visits to a single location may finally raise the hypothesis of contamination (although even then an investigator would probably focus on more likely hypotheses, like mold), but this can be reduced by trying to concentrate the contamination to locations frequented only by the targeted individual—spray just their clothes in the bedroom, perhaps.
Poison-Induced PTSD
The effect on the inhabitant would be traumatic: at random times, they will be struck, on various parts of their body, by eruptions of burning pain of various intensities (due to randomness in dosage and body part sensitivity). It will happen with no clear pattern, and the poisonous uncertainty will cause ‘superstition’ in that they may believe all sorts of strange theories, like food allergies, and go on long fruitless hunts for cures—cures which may seem to work for a while, until another sudden pain attack. If they are lucky and properly test treatments, they will fall into despair as nothing makes a difference; if they are unlucky, they will think that things work which don’t, and will spiral into ever more extreme alternative medicines and New Age therapies and religions. (Entertainingly, the true explanation, that “I’ve been poisoned by The Man!”, will itself strike outsiders as a clear symptom of their spiral into crazy conspiracy theories.) Their suffering will continue no matter where they go (because their body, clothes, and belongings will all be contaminated); relocating entirely may somewhat reduce the attacks, but will not eliminate them (even assuming their new residence is not also sprayed).
Because ‘pain’ is such a generic symptom, doctors will be baffled, and may resort to increasingly invasive (and harmful, and expensive) diagnostics leading to iatrogenics, or write off the pain attacks as ‘psychosomatic’ (and for them, therapy & psychiatric drugs will do nothing—good, anyway). Opioid prescriptions might assist with attacks, but are dangerously addictive.
Between the sheer randomness of attacks, the helpless cycling through doomed theories & treatments, the stigmatization of being ‘crazy’, the sufferer may well go crazy and develop post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or trigger latent mental illnesses. The victim might well envy someone in a concentration camp, because at least they understand where their torment is coming from, what rules there are, and can navigate a world that makes sense.
The Treachery Of The Ordinary
Thus, a single attack, with no direct contact, using perhaps dollars’ worth of the right substance, could disable & discredit a target for decades in a way far more subtle than a blunt poisoning attack with polonium or Novichok.4 If it did become known (perhaps via a deliberate leak), the psychological effects might be just as intimidating as those attacks were: anyone who developed chronic pain or related issues would have to wonder if they were perfectly healthy and being poisoned, and would have no way of being sure.
A Haunted Universe
Fortunately, as far as I know, chemicals have never been used in microdose poisoning attacks like that. But it does seem possible, if not with RTX for whatever reason, then with something else in the vast pharmacopeia of weird drugs. Such is life at the meso-scale, in between gluons and galaxies. There’s plenty of room at both the bottom and top, and we can be haunted by syntheses as easily as spirits.
See Also
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Whose psychoactive effects were famously discovered by Albert Hofman accidentally getting a contact dose & then grossly overestimating how much he needed for an effect, yet which is a weakling in needing whole hundreds of micrograms for a proper trip.↩︎
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The 2020 poisoning of Alexei Navalny apparently used a nerve agent with anti-cholinergic effects.↩︎
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WP doesn’t seem to provide a reference for this claim, but efficacy at the nanogram-microgram scale is consistent with all the dosages used in studies for things like destroying nerve endings (to eliminate pain).↩︎
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Dramatizing the extent to which chemicals leak everywhere in trace amounts, once British investigators knew they were looking for Novichok specifically, they found traces left by the Russian assassins all over the place.↩︎