DEADLY DRUGS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 205, 22 April 1932, Page 2

DEADLY DRUGS

LOST BY SYDNEY CHEMIST ON SUBURBAN TRAIN I DANGER TO FINDER SYDNEY, Tuesday. Picking up the sickly-sweet crystals, the child took one in its mouth. The rest of the story would he told in the Coroner's Court. A package of chloral hydrate (or hydride) crystals is at large somewhere in the city and suburbs, having been lost by a Concord chemist in -a train. With. the paeket is an 8oz. bottle of Fehling's Solution No. 2, a testing reagent used in examination for sugar in the system. Both are poisonous, hut espeeially so the chloral. It is the drug which was the favourite sleep-producer of the nineteenth centry. Deadly Slumher The crystals are exceptionally heavy, and, as five grains only is an overdose for a child, one crystal placed in the mouth might have fatal results. The drug has a weakening action on the heart. The result of an overdose is a sleep from which the patient cannot be roused. The other lost chemical (Fehling's No. 2) is in liquid form — in an ordinary medicine bottle. It contains solution of sodium-potassium-tartrate, to which caustic .soda has been added. . It is the latter that is the danger. A month ago, for example, a Forbes child, aged three, drank a mouthful of caustic soda solution. The mother was unaware the child had taken the caustic, and as a result the child lingered some days in terrible agony. Chloral would hardly be tasted by an adult, owing to its peculiar odour and taste Oreminiscent of chloroform, but with a peculiar sickly tang added), hut a small child might easily imagine it some form of sweets. Children have often swallowed such repellent drugs as quinine, strychnine and cocaine, whose bitterness would warn an adult immediately. Anaesthetised When chloral was a favourite sleeping draught, chloral-takers abounded — people who had the "habit." Tolerance of the drug being rapidly established, the chloral-maniac could take enormous doses in a day (in one case, 300 grains — nearly three-quarters of an ounce). Such addicts became pitiful wrecks, crawling about shakily with cold extremities and weakened heart-action. The brain became sunken into a state of torpor. They were really I semi-anaesthetised, chloral actually turning into chloroform when it gets into the system. Anyone picking up the packet of this dangerous drug (30 grains has poisoned an adult) is advised to give it up immediately at the nearest poliee station.