How many drops of visine does it take

An act of spite that forces the victim into making repeated visits to the john is regarded as not only extremely inconveniencing to him, but degrading as well. Yet all is not well in revenge land. The active ingredient in Visine eye drops is Tetrahydrozoline HCl 0. Swallowing this substance can result in a number of nasty effects, including:. One thing tetrahydrozoline has not been known to do is to cause sudden onset bouts of severe diarrhea. Of all the Visine poisoning cases studied by medical observers, we found none that mentioned diarrheal output brought about by the drug.

Drinking it can and has caused severe depression of the central nervous system. In , a two-year-old child who ingested at most 2 to 3 mL of Visine eye drops became dangerously lethargic and unresponsive to every stimulus except deep pain.

The poisonous effect made headlines when Lana Clayton, 52, was charged for murdering her husband by adding redness-relieving eye drops to his drinking water for three days.

While eye drops can be dangerous if swallowed , experts say the chemical used to get the red out of your eyes is safe when used correctly.

Commonly used drops marketed to reduce redness in the eyes typically contain tetrahydrozoline, which was approved by the U. The chemical is found in Visine, Murine Plus, Altazine, Clarine and some other over-the-counter eye drops, according to Drugs. Intentionally or accidentally drinking eye drops can lead to toxic blood levels. When used in the eyes as directed to reduce redness, these types of eye drops are not absorbed systemically in amounts that lead to toxicity.

When consumed orally, tetrahydrozoline passes quickly through the gastrointestinal tract, rapidly reaching the blood and the central nervous system. Symptoms of an overdose of tetrahydrozoline include drowsiness, slow breathing or absence of breathing, slow heartbeat, hypothermia and possibly even coma. Most cases of poisoning are not criminal, but accidental by children or pets who find the small bottles of odorless, clear solution.

Clinical pharmacologist and president of PharmaLogic Development, Inc. A typical bottle of eye drops contains anywhere from 15 to 30 milliliters of solution. Putting two drops in both eyes six times a day would only equal about one milliliter of fluid. 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. The resulting symptoms are nothing, nothing at all like the Hollywood version of events. They include rapid heart beat, nausea, blurred vision, drowsiness, convulsions. The Toxnet entry, based partly on cases of children who swallowed a bottle of eyedrops or nosedrops left carelessly on a table or counter, notes that "drowsiness and mild coma" often alternate with periods of thrashing and hyperactivity.

What does this tell us, aside from the obvious home precautionary warnings don't leave your eye drop bottles lying around the house and, by the way don't drink them? The record tells us that tetrahydrozoline while poisonous is not a top-of-line-lethal substance. LD50 stands for lethal dose 50 percent, meaning the amount of a toxic substance that will kill half of a test population. And that difference means that while people do end up the hospital, they tend to survive the stay.

This is good news for victims and also for perpetrators, as so many of them end up arrested thanks in part to the very characteristic symptoms of eye drop poisoning.

Still as I also said earlier this is not really a tale of a classic homicidal poison like cyanide or one of devious plotting. This is more a tale of impulse, of anger, of grabbing a handy bottle.

And, the California case I cited at the top of this story also reminds us that some people take movies like Wedding Crashers way too seriously; those incriminating texts of his indicated that idea was to make the girlfriend "crap for talking crap," basically a scenario right out of the movie.

We could make a case here that entertainment comedies aren't really the most reliable source of toxicology information.