[kragen]

Drinking them is usually how fatal doses are reached, yes. There isn't much risk topically, as you say, or by inhalation. I have read in the literature of one fatality from topical oil of wintergreen, I believe a teenaged marathon runner who was treating her muscle pain. I don't know if her preparation (an FDA-approved over-the-counter patch from a mainstream pharmaceutical company, if I recall) used DMSO or similar excipients. But such topical fatalities are very unusual.

But we are specifically discussing ingestion of non-recommended substances here.

To correct a minor misconception that could arise from your comment: essential oils do not contain active ingredients. They are, generally speaking, the active ingredient. Some, like oil of wintergreen, are an almost pure compound, while others, like oil of peppermint, are mixtures, but generally they do not contain inert or nontoxic components.

One specific way that a fatal dose could be ingested is if the person ingesting it had previously obtained adulterated essential oils from an irresponsible drug dealer, containing an active ingredient but consisting mostly of something like canola oil, and then switched to a pure essential oil without realizing it.

[throwup238]

I don’t think people are ingesting peppermint oil to ward off rats in a plow truck.

It really doesn’t matter how you classify the active ingredient (and there is absolutely an active ingredient). It’s not getting absorbed in five gram quantities unless you snort it, drink it, or apply a stupid homeopathic topical with DMSO that penetrates the skin.

Edit: you’ve edited your post several times since I’ve made mine and I’m just not going to bother. There a dozen everpresent household chemicals that are deadlier than essential oils by a long shot. Nobody seems to have a problem except the kids who eat Tide pods, and they solved that with a zipper.

[kragen]

People who are handling chemicals whose lethal dose is less than a teaspoon need to understand the hazards involved. That is as true of common household chemicals like lye, sulfuric acid, and hydrochloric acid as it is for essential oils (though I would not describe any of those three as "everpresent").

However, it is worth noting that most household chemicals have a much larger lethal dose (are much less toxic) than commonplace essential oils! Such less-toxic chemicals include not only Tide Pods, but also everything else commonly used for laundry (even liquid bleach), window-cleaning ammonia, kerosene, unleaded gasoline, hair-bleaching-concentration hydrogen peroxide, most paint thinners, and even industrial degreasers like trisodium phosphate. I thought bleaching powder (calcium hypochlorite) was an exception, but I just looked up its LD50, and it's 850mg/kg orl-rat. So the lethal dose for an adult human is probably about 50 grams, which is an order of magnitude less toxic than oil of peppermint.

(Lye, sulfuric acid, and hydrochloric acid aren't toxic per se. You can safely add unlimited quantities of them to your food if they're dilute enough. But in reasonably concentrated forms they're corrosive enough to cause fatal injuries if ingested, even, potentially, at the teaspoon quantities we're talking about. Your mileage may vary, though, and you may just end up permanently maimed.)

It is possible that you don't appreciate just how small a quantity five grams is, or you have a vastly exaggerated idea of how dangerous commonplace household chemicals are. I have no idea how you could get to a dozen. Are you poisoning your rats with strychnine and sodium cyanide? There are much safer options now, you know. Most people stopped keeping those in their houses decades ago, even in poor countries.

(Yes, I edited my comment, just as you did, because I think it's important to make it a high-quality comment so that people who read it are not misinformed.)

[true_religion]

For the record, 5 grams is a teaspoon worth, and it’s pretty easy to accidentally splash that around if you’re pouring something.

Essential oils aren’t obviously caustic like bleach and since it’s food product someone might think that getting a little in their mouth or food they’ll eat is no big deal.

[kragen]

Usually people don't transfer oils like oil of peppermint by pouring, but rather drop by drop, a drop typically being around 20mg. That is a fine quantity to put in your mouth or your food. Turpentine (essential oil of pine resin) is the main exception. If you have enough essential oils in one place that splashing teaspoonfuls is common, you need to take additional precautions, probably at least a suitable respirator or active ventilation.

[hilbert42]

"Lye, sulfuric acid, and hydrochloric acid aren't toxic per se. You can safely add unlimited quantities of them to your food if they're dilute enough."

Right. Decades ago when I was in highschool and learning chemistry the chem teacher brought out reagent bottles of HCl, HNO3, H2SO4 and NaOH (in soln.) which he intended us students to smell and taste. He also had boxes of brand new test tubes and he issued everyone with four thereof for the demonstration/experiment which he insisted that we wash thoroughly under running water despite them being brand new.

His stated reasons were that as chemists that (a) we needed to become familiar with these common reagents as they were ubiquitous in chemistry labs and industry, and (b) we needed to know and experience the acidity of acids and to clearly distinguish them from the soapy character of the alkali. He also had a more important motive that I'll come to in a moment.

He then diluted the reagents to a safe level (I think it was about 1/40 Normal but I can't remember for sure). Then we students all lined up and he poured a few ml of each of the reagents into our test tubes for us to first smell then taste, which we all did.

Afterwards when we were all back in the tiered seats of the demonstration lab he made a statement in the sternest tone that shocked the wits out of lot of us:

"You're all dead!"

—long silent pause—

"Don't you ever do that again. You don't know whether the reagents are true to label, for all you know I could have given you poison and you'd be none the wiser until it was too late. And even if the bottles are true to label then you've still no idea how pure they are—they may contain impurities that are highly toxic."

He then went on to point out that these bottles of reagents were new and that he'd unsealed them in front of us and asked if anyone of us had noticed that.

He then pointed to print on the label that said BP—British Pharmacopeia grade and then to the assay list of impurities which were many decimal places below one percent (the minutest of a trace).

This chemistry lesson was by far the most important one we ever learned—nothing at university was ever the equal of it.

It's a great tragedy that these days health and safety rules preclude students from ever participating in such a demonstration. Students must be taught not to fear chemicals but nevertheless to treat them with care and great respect lest they bite.

These days much of society has an almost irrational fear of chemicals despite the widespread teaching of chemistry. That tells me there's something terribly wrong with the way we teach the subject—a matter that I've covered on HN previously.

[kragen]

I agree. (Nitric acid is somewhat toxic as well aside from its corrosivity; accidental fatal poisonings with neutralized nitrates are well known in the literature.)

Essential oils are generally not at high risk of deadly impurities, for three reasons. First, they are mostly intended for human consumption (whether BP grade or not), except for turpentine; second, their production process is just steam distillation and so doesn't normally involve any highly-toxic impurities; third, because the essential oils themselves are sufficiently deadly that most potential impurities would have to be present at very high levels before they were a concern.

[hilbert42]

"Nitric acid is somewhat toxic…"

Agreed. Whilst the lesson played out almost to the letter as I described it (I well remember the experience) some of the fine minutiae/details may be a bit unclear (after all, that lesson was in the 1960s). Thus, it's possible the 'odd-man-out' in the lineup wasn't HNO3 but rather H3PO4, but don't think so.

Remember, the amount the teacher put in the test tubes was at most only a couple of ml and most just barely tasted the samples (you can imagine, there was much ooing and arring at the bitter taste) so the amount tasted was actually minuscule). Incidentally, there was general agreement that the most objectionable reagent to the taste was NaOH, 'yucky' was the most common description.

Whilst I said the dilutions were about 1/40 N. that was almost certainly so for HCl but not necessarily so for the others which may have been more highly diluted (HCl's dilution specifically comes to mind because the teacher mentioned it in connection with stomach acid).

The reason I don't think it was H3PO4 is that we didn't do much chemistry with it although I do remember it being discussed in connection with Coca-Cola in that we shined up pennies with it.

I'd also point out there were other 'safety' lessons of a similar nature. Ones that come to mind Immediately include the need to take great care when handling aqua regia and H2SO4, especially so if heated in a retort, another was the preparation of H2S in a Kipp's generator/apparatus—the mandatory use of the ventiated fume cupboard and that H2S is particularly dangerous as it desensitizes one's sense of smell in even quite small concentrations. Then there were the strict rules surrounding the use of Hg (of which the lab had many litres thereof).

It's interesting you mention turpentine as an exception. I occasionally do a bit of woodworking and I know others who are more avid woodworkers than I am. One thing that characterizes a small subset of them is that they insist on using real oil/spirit of turpentine rather than the mineral (white spirit) variety for no other reason than it's 'natural' whereas the mineral stuff is 'unnatural' as it comes from the petroleum industry.

Frankly this horrifies me. As you'd know oil of turpentine is a catch-all name for any number of terpenes—of which there are hundreds if not thousands—all mixed in ill-defined ratios, what you get depends on where it's sourced.

There's no telling these guys that many terpenes are both irritating to the skin and quite toxic—and that some are known carcinogens. What surprises me is that woodworking suppliers are actually allowed to stock and sell the stuff.

If I had my way I'd ban it for that purpose (there might be some excuse for its availability if mineral turpentine was actually inferior in this application but that's not the case).

[kragen]

Yeah, phosphoric would be another great example of "corrosive but not toxic per se." But even nitrate is something you could ingest a reasonable amount of, and is commonly used in food. Too much and you turn blue and die.

As for turpentine, it depends on the person and the particular turpentine, but generally turpentine on your skin isn't particularly irritating and may even be therapeutically beneficial. Like many other essential oils, it's a broad-spectrum fungicide, bactericide, and antiviral, but isn't absorbed particularly well through the stratum corneum, and it's a pretty decent solvent for removing other chemicals that may be more toxic and are commonly used in woodworking.

I think there are two good reasons for preferring natural turpentine, despite its variability, to mineral spirits:

- as with cyanide, the humans evolved with frequent exposure to small amounts of plant terpenes, from chewing pine needles and other leaves and from dermal exposure to broken and crushed plant matter and to pine resin. So you'd expect them to have reasonable ways of clearing out the terpenes that occur naturally, and in fact they do. Mineral spirits might just contain the same compounds (and other well-tolerated ones like octane and xylene) but they also might have novel compounds humans don't tolerate as well. And you can't usually tell from the label; just as with turpentine, what you get depends on where it comes from. Typically the MSDS will tell you the major components, but not the impurities thought to be harmless.

- culturally, there are millennia of traditions about how to use turpentine safely, due to its extensive use in shipbuilding, painting, and woodworking, so we can be reasonably sure that the health risks are small when handled in traditional ways. Mineral spirits are only 200 years old or less, and the processes for producing them today aren't the same as the processes used 50 years ago. So it's much more plausible for them to contain impurities that turn out to be dangerous. Indeed, many such novel nonpolar solvents widely used in the past turned out to be unexpectedly dangerous, such as benzene, carbon disulfide, polychlorinated biphenyls (used as solvents for woodworking in old Fabulon; see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2267460/), and "cleaning fluid" (carbon tetrachloride). It would be much less surprising to find some novel hazard in mineral spirits than in turpentine.

I used mineral spirits last month to clean oil off my immersion blender. They're probably pretty harmless. But we can have a lot more confidence in the exact degree of harmlessness of turpentine.