Can you poison someone with visine

But now, court documents say the year-old mother of two confessed to administering the poison to him in his water over a three-day period. The chemical in eye drops, tetrahydrozoline, works great on the eyes, but if swallowed in significant quantities, it can attack the nervous system and be deadly.

But in real life, the prank is no laughing matter. Medical literature reports other cases of small children brought to the brink of crisis by ingestion of tiny amounts of over-the-counter eye drops. The danger is real, and parents are well advised to keep eye drops away from children. Yet it is not only toddlers who risk central nervous system shutdown or other dire results if they swallow Visine, as demonstrated by the following examples:.

It matters not if actual harm results from the attempt — the act itself is enough to land one in the hoosegow. Fact Checks. A few drops of Visine brand eye drops taken internally will induce uncontrollable diarrhea.

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You should NOT select "Remember me for 30 days" if you are on a public or shared computer. Learn more. There's a reason, actually, why this is an eyes-only formula, why the Visine labels state : "If swallowed get medical help or contact a poison control center right away.

Anyway, the active ingredient in these products is a compound called tetrahydrozoline, which turns to be a neat little arrangement of carbon, hydrogen, plus a little nitrogen. Or to be more specific it has the chemical formula: C 13 H 16 N 2. It belongs to a family of compounds known for their ability to induce chemical reactions that either relax or constrict blood vessels.

The former tend to end up in medications used to reduce blood pressure. The latter, which includes tetrahydrozoline, often go into nasal sprays or in eye drop formulas that are designed to "get the red out. This is not, by the way, a simple blood vessel squeeze. It derives from the way these compounds bind to receptors in the sympathetic nervous system, altering signals to the vascular system, triggering the change.

It's this action on the nervous system which puts tetrahydrozoline in the "neurotoxic" category on the Material Safety Data Sheet required of all manufactured chemical compounds. And this neurotoxicity tells us why eyedrops are indeed fraught with hazard if you swallow them -- or if you sneakily induce others to swallow them.

Used as directed, they may indeed give you that clear-eyed look but that's mostly due to the constriction of blood vessels in the eye. Internally they also induce vasoconstriction as Toxnet calls it.