This week’s FFFF is a tribute to one of the coolest things you can find in medical blogging…
Tox Tunes!
Leon Gussow’s cracking blog ‘The Poison Review‘ is a fantastic resource for tracking the clinical toxicology literature and obtaining freely given expert analysis. But it also irregularly serves up a quirky feature called ‘Tox Tunes’, which forms the intersection of two of Leon’s great loves: music and toxicology.
Let’s press on and find out how well you know your tox tunes!
Question 1
Which American band ‘wanted to be sedated’ and in the process created what Rolling Stone magazine considers to be the 144th greatest song of all time?
- The Ramones
- As Leon said in Tox Tunes #35: “Not bad for a group that knew only 3 or 4 chords and whose entire play list contains few works much longer than 2 minutes.”
- Don’t believe it was the 144th greatest song of all time? Here’s the proof.
Question 2
“If you’re down, he’ll pick you up” if you “take a drink from his special cup”. Who were the Beatles singing about?
- Doctor Robert
- The song by The Beatles is based on “a New York doctor who habituated his socialite clients to narcotics by mixing methedrine with vitamin shots”.
- Leon featured this track in Tox Tunes #6.
Question 3
Reputedly the first punk band, these guys got together in the early ’60s and while ‘some folks prefer water or wine, they prefer straight strychnine’… Who are they?
- The Sonics
- They featured in Tox Tunes #24, where Leon notes that, among others, they were a big influence on the White Stripes. They hailed from Tacoma, WA, a stones throw from what would become the epicentre of the Grunge explosion many years later.
- Now might be a good time to check out our Strychnine Tox Conundrum too…
Question 4
What would “bore me terrifically too, yet I get a kick out of you”?
- Cocaine
- As Leon tells us in Tox Tunes #10: “This Cole Porter song was introduced by Ethel Merman in the 1934 musical Anything Goes. At that time, apparently, no one had problems with the second verse”:
“Some they may go for cocaine,
I’m sure that if I took even one sniff
That would bore me terrifically too,
Yet I get a kick out of you.”
- The line was changed for the movie version to: “Some like the perfume from Spain”…
Question 5
What is “Jake Leg”?
- aka Jake Walk or Jake paralysis, the term refers to an organophosphate-induced delayed paralysis caused by consumption of Jamaican Ginger aka Jake.
- Jake leg affected thousands in the American South and Midwest during prohibiton due to the adulteration of bootlegged Jamaican Ginger (~80% ethanol) with tri-ortho cresyl phosphate.
- Leon mentions Jake Leg here, in the context of the recent phenomenon of levamisole-adultered cocaine.
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About Chris Nickson
Great FFF. loved this one. inspiring even…….but don’t hold your breath