Tea is an excellent way of poisoning somebody
And it's completely legal!
Recently, I was thinking that tea is an excellent way of poisoning somebody. I discussed my idea with a friend of mine.
She did not immediately understand. She asked me whether I meant mixing a poison into the tea and using the flavor of the tea to disguise the poison. Before I could answer, she immediately criticized the idea and said that the flavor of tea is not strong enough to conceal poison.
Clearly, she had occasionally thought about poisoning people in the past. Some people are just wicked like that.
I replied by clarifying that I meant purely tea alone. 100% normal tea. I said that tea is an excellent poison with multiple advantages.
She was dumbfounded. She could not believe it. Clearly my plan was far simpler than the plans that she had imagined in the past. She sought to understand. She asked me whether I meant black tea or green tea.
I began answering her question, but she interrupted me. She cancelled her own question. She said, never mind, because it makes no difference whether it is black tea or green tea.
I nodded and agreed, of course. Indeed, it makes no difference whether I use black tea or green tea to poison somebody. They are equally effective.
She thought that I had gone completely mad. She wanted to know whether I actually meant some type of herbal tea containing a toxic herb. I said that I meant regular tea using regular tea leaves from the tea plant (Camellia sinensis). Black or green makes no difference, because the same plant is used for both.
She could not believe that I could be seriously insisting that regular tea is a good choice of poison. So, I began explaining it. I said that tea has multiple advantages as a poison.
Firstly, it is not illegal. This is a biggie. Legality is important if you do not want to be jailed for serving tea.
Secondly, tea tastes good. It has no bad aftertaste, unlike many other poisons.
She was getting annoyed for some strange reason. She said that I was talking nonsense, and the fact that tea has advantages such as a good flavor and a legal status does not mean that it is suitable for poisoning people.
I retorted by saying that she was clearly madder than me, because she was debating the efficacy of tea as a poison instead of being appalled by the immorality of it. At this point, it would have become physical if we were men, but fortunately this was an estrogen-fueled argument.
Eventually, she demanded a proper explanation, so I started with an example. As you know, lead is a poisonous heavy metal. Imagine you are an employee somewhere, and your boss is a sadistic asshole that enjoys torturing the employees with sick psycho-games embedded in superficially-polite statements, and you wish to poison him, and so you put lead in his food. Everybody agrees that this is an act of poisoning somebody, and it is highly illegal.
She interrupted me at this point. My example just served to worsen her annoyance. She complained that my example does not come even remotely close to proving that tea is poison. She insisted that tea is merely a delightful drink to share with friends.
Keep in mind that she actually had a cup of tea at this time. She took another sip from her teacup defiantly.
I told her to stop interrupting and let me finish. I continued my explanation: You could poison the sadistic boss by encouraging/manipulating him into forming a habit of drinking six cups of black tea every day. This is a brilliant plan, because everybody would insist that you did not poison him at all, and that you should receive no punishment whatsoever, and that you are totally innocent, despite the fact that the tea plant naturally accumulates lead in its leaves (and also aluminium, fluoride, and manganese).
She was thunderstruck and speechless. I interpreted this as an additional sign that she had indeed thought about poisoning people on multiple occasions in the past. Such a wicked woman she was! Quite unlike myself.
I continued explaining: According to everybody, lead is poison, but black tea is (as she said) a delightful drink to share with your friends, despite the fact that it naturally contains lead and other toxic elements.
Therefore, if you serve all your coworkers with a cup of tea during your next meeting and then at the end of the meeting, you stand up and loudly announce, “My friends, I must inform you, tea is poison”, then your chance of receiving a promotion will be forever ruined, but not because you deliberately poisoned all of your coworkers, but rather because they will view you as having gone totally mad, despite the fact that they (not you) are the ones who continue to drink black lead every day even after you inform them.
Even if you go so far as to find an especially delicious brand of loose-leaf black tea and mix a few vanilla beans into it (also black) and place it in a very prominent location in the kitchen at your workplace, and if you turn up the temperature setting on the hot water unit to maximum in order to produce more aromatic steam, and if you secretly mix cream and a little bit of caramelized high-fructose corn syrup into the low-fat milk carton every week, and your asshole of a boss just loves creamy slightly-sweet vanilla-spiked black tea so much that he cannot stop himself from raising his consumption to 15 cups per day, so much that he has changed from sipping his tea in the manner of the Queen of England to a new habit of slurping it down greedily and unconsciously emitting little grunts of satisfaction whenever the hot steam carries the vanilla backnote to the depths of his nasal cavity, then everybody will still insist that you did not poison him at all!
Without the least fear of prosecution, you can freely say to him:
“Here, let me make another cup of tea for you. Lately you’ve been working so hard [at torturing us]. I should do something for you in return. You deserve it.”
My friend was speechless. It was like the lights had been switched on in the deepest darkest recesses of her mind.
She realized that whenever she encounters somebody that she dislikes, she can smile and say, “Would you like a cup of tea?”
Certain types of murder are fully legal. For example:
Murdering people by selling cigarettes is a legal form of murder in most countries of the world. But please do check it with a lawyer before you use tobacco, tea, or ethanol to murder people.
You know, the laws do vary between different countries, and they do change over the years, and there may also be special “gotcha” cases in the laws. It really is important and necessary to visit a lawyer and get professional advice about the legal methods of murdering people. Working people to death is another one, but certain rules and conditions apply.
The following is a quotation from a study (DOI:10.1155/2013/370460) published in the Journal of Toxicology in 2013 by researchers at the University of Alberta, Canada and the Luleå University of Technology, Sweden.
“All brewed teas contained lead with 73% of teas brewed for 3 minutes and 83% brewed for 15 minutes having lead levels considered unsafe for consumption during pregnancy and lactation. Aluminium levels were above recommended guidelines in 20% of brewed teas. […] manganese levels were found to be excessive in some black teas. Conclusions: Toxic contamination by heavy metals was found in most of the teas sampled. Some tea samples are considered unsafe. […]
The organic teas had significantly higher levels of lead contamination if left steeping for more than 15 minutes than the regular teas. Otherwise there was no significant difference in levels of contaminants between organic teas and regular off the shelf teas. Organic teas did not appear to have less toxic element contamination than regular teas even from the same company. […]
Of the trace minerals manganese is the only mineral found in substantial amounts in teas and some teas will supply more than the total daily requirements. Black tea achieved the highest level in this study. Excess manganese can result in interference with the absorption of iron and may result in ADHD-like symptoms in children exposed in utero […]
Although manganese is an essential trace mineral, levels in black tea are quite high and may result in toxic levels when adjusted for total daily intake from multiple sources. […]
Consumption of tea needs to be severely limited during pregnancy. The consumption of this and some prenatal vitamins [manganese] may easily exceed this daily limit and result in significant bioaccumulation over time especially in the fetus. As well when the additional lead from the tea cup was added, 100% of all teas had more than the acceptable limit of lead.”
In addition to the lead, tea drinking can account for a high proportion of the toxic aluminium in a person’s diet.
Another toxic element in tea is fluoride. Tea plants absorb fluoride at a greater rate than other plants. All tea leaves contain fluoride. Mature leaves contain as much as 10 to 20 times the fluoride levels of young leaves from the same plant. Mature leaves and old leaves are likely to contain an unacceptably high amount of fluoride, especially in the case of pregnant women drinking tea.
Use of compressed tea “bricks” has led to fluorosis (a form of fluoride poisoning that affects the bones and teeth) in areas of high compressed tea consumption such as Tibet.
Overall, tea is more harmful than coffee. Pregnant and breastfeeding women should strenuously avoid consuming tea, coffee, and ethanol. Non-pregnant people would also be wise to avoid these harmful substances.
References
“The Benefits and Risks of Consuming Brewed Tea: Beware of Toxic Element Contamination” (2013). Schwalfenberg, Gerry; Genuis, Stephen J.; Rodushkin, Ilia. Journal of Toxicology: 1–8. doi:10.1155/2013/370460. PMC 3821942. PMID 24260033.
“Total content and speciation of aluminium in tea leaves and tea infusions” (2007). Streeta R, Drábeka O, Szákováb J, Mládkováa L. Journal of Food Chemistry. 104(4): 1662–1669. doi:10.1016/j.foodchem.2007.03.019
“Potential exposure and risk of fluoride intakes from tea drinks produced in Taiwan” (2008). Lung SC, Cheng HW, Fu CB. The Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology. 18(2): 158–66. doi:10.1038/sj.jes.7500574. PMID 17410113.
“Assessment of fluoride concentration and daily intake by human from tea and herbal infusions” (2008). Malinowska E, Inkielewicz I, Czarnowski W, Szefer P. Food and Chemical Toxicology. 46(3): 1055–61. doi:10.1016/j.fct.2007.10.039. PMID 18078704.