I had to give this chapter a lot of thought, for several reasons. First, lots of people start getting sick and dying. I’m not a particularly bloodthirsty individual, but a background in chemistry gives a person a lot of information on making people dead. A second reason was my own history as a chemist.
DMSO is an excellent solvent, with all the issues mentioned. I personally encountered it when, back in the late 1970s, my father asked me to get him some. DMSO was being investigated as a treatment for gout, which he suffered from. I got him a bottle, but I am not sure whether he used it or what he did with it.
In college I was given an assignment to develop a procedure using phase transfer catalysis as a future lab experiment. The technique used sodium cyanide as one of the reagents and was successful. My grad adviser took my process and wrote a paper, with my name on it as well, and submitted it to the Journal of Chemical Education. A few months later we learned it was rejected on the basis that cyanide was much too dangerous for undergrads to use. We really scratched our heads at that. In most chemistry labs cyanide was so common we almost stored it in barrels! It was one of the basic chemicals we used routinely. There are many chemicals much more dangerous than cyanide. Many of those chemicals can be obtained legally or procured without too much difficulty in nature. Snake venom and aconite are two such substances.
Anyway, enjoy!