Security against "truth serum" by means of a drug poisonous in combination with sodium thiopental
The secret police of my fictional country (unoriginally) uses sodium thiopental in medical interrogations, usually in combination with various forms of physical torture.
An antagonist (a courier of smuggled goods) who is detained by them and injected with a thiopental-based serum suddenly dies before the questioning officer arrives. The doctors determine that death occured due to the lethal effects of combining sodium thiopental with a certain substance the courier was injected prior to the mission.
My question is:
Which medical substance or drug is
- lethal (leading to a quick death) in combination with sodium thiopental (or one or more other truth serums), unleashing its effect if it is already present in the body when thiopental is injected,
- stored in the body for at least several hours after initial injection or ingestion, retaining its "latent combinative lethality" during that time and
- has no strong noticeable negative effects without the presence of sodium thiopental.
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1 answer
Pentoxifylline when co-administered with sodium thiopental causes death by acute pulmonary edema - or at least it does in rats! and is reasonably well-tolerated in most humans, with serious adverse effects being uncommon
Stress to the body (I think torture counts!) will increase the effects and pulmony edema sets in ~2 hours after administration.
The problems with this though are:
Timing: it has a relatively short half-life in the body - only 1 - 1.6 hours, doesn't give a lot of time to work with. You could have the courier be taking regular doses of it through the mission I suppose, but if they don't get him or her shot up with Thiopental rather quickly following capture you're going to struggle to have enough to work with. You also need a plausible reason to have them get injected and then wait to question them for a couple of hours.
Dosages: I'm not sure if the dosage of Thiopental used in a truth-serum scenario would be sufficient to interact lethally with the Pentoxifylline, the rat example I gave earlier was where the Thipental had been used as an anesthetic and since unconscious people don't answer many questions it's safe to say they aren't going to be using particularly high doses of it.
So if you're prepared to bend the rules a little bit around some of the finer details this would at least be a plausible mechanism.
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