Tainted Tobacco

Honestly! Who accepts a cigar from the Joker?

There are multiple ways of poisoning someone. The classic is Tampering with Food and Drink, but you can also poison their eating utensils, tamper with their medication, or poison something they are likely to lick.

Or, if they are a smoker, you can poison their tobacco. This has the advantages of being a substance they will willingly take into their body without any urging from you, and may smoke it some time after you poison it; meaning there is no immediate link between you and their death.

This is most commonly done with cigarettes, but can also involve cigars, pipes, chewing tobacco, snuff or even E-cigarettes and vapes.

See also Explosive Cigar for another way to kill (or prank) with smoking materials.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• An early episode of Case Closed had a victim who was given cigarettes with poisoned filters. However, this turned out to just be a Red Herring, as the victim smoked unfiltered, and was actually poisoned in a different way, by a different person.

Comic Books

• Batman: Although more famous for his lethal Exploding Cigars, The Joker has been known to use poisoned cigars as a weapon as well, using everything from ammonium nitrate to a special version of his Joker formula.
• Captain Britain Weekly: Nick Fury has a very special cigar. It’s poisoned, but in the form of a one-shot poison dart.
• The Red Skull often used a variant, with his trademark "Dust of Death" contained in a gimmicked cigarette holder, and sprayed on victims via Second-Face Smoke.

Film — Animated

• In Asterix Conquers America, the Indian medicine man tricks Asterix, Obelix, and Getafix into smoking a tainted peace pipe to knock them out. Getafix even anachronistically says "He's slipped us a mickey."

Films — Live-Action

• The Batman (Serial): In "Embers of Evil", Daka kills Marshall in jail by having Bernie deliver a pack of poisoned cigarettes to him. Bruce finds a half-smoked cigarette on the floor and makes off with it. he determines that the cigarette was poisoned and calls Captain Arnold as Batman to tell him about the cigarettes and Bernie's involvement. And just in time, too, because Captain Arnold apparently routinely helps himself to the personal effects of dead prisoners and was just about to light up one of those Medusa cigarettes himself.
• In La Cigarette (1919), a Parisian museum director believes his wife has lost interest in him and so places a poisoned cigarette in the box on his desk - thus allowing chance to decide the moment of his death.
• In Fallen, Det. Hobbes commits suicide by lighting up a poisoned cigarette: allowing him to kill himself in front of Azazel without the other being aware of what he is doing.
• Friday: Smokey tells Craig about the time he smoked with his Latino friends in the back of their Lowrider, only to find out the blunt was laced with PCP, and ended up running naked down the street and hiding in a pidgeon coup.
• In The Handmaiden, Fujiwara prepares a self-inflicted variation, always carrying cigarettes that are poisoned with mercury, so if things ever go really wrong for him, he can light one up and die on his own terms. In the end, he pulls a Taking You with Me when he knows he's lost and will be murdered (slowly and painfully) by Kouzuki—once they're both locked down in the basement, he asks for permission to have one last smoke.
• In Hopscotch, one of the anecdotes of embarrassing incidents that the CIA would really rather not talk about that Kendig puts in his Compromising Memoirs was an attempt to off Fidel Castro by sending him a box of tampered cigars. Amusingly, while they haven't admitted to actually doing it, declassified CIA documents from the sixties have revealed that they at least considered doing that in real life.
• In In Like Flint, Norton drugs Cramden using cigarettes treated with a soporific substance and stages a compromising scene with a prostitute at a hotel.
• In A Jolly Bad Fellow, Professor Bowles-Ottery murders Delia by replacing her cigarettes with ones treated with his Perfect Poison. He is later Hoist by His Own Petard when his wife refills the cigarette box in the sitting room with cigarettes from his laboratory, not knowing they are poisoned.
• Mindhunters: Nicole, being a chain smoker, ends up being killed by an arsenic-laced cigarette placed by the serial killer that burns through her lungs.
• Murder Ahoy: Shortly after joining the board of management of the Trust of HMS Battledore, Miss Marple witnesses the sudden death of a fellow trustee, who has just returned from a surprise visit to the ship, much disturbed by something he has discovered there. He dies without being able to reveal his discovery. Miss Marple manages to obtain a small sample of his snuff, which is found to have been poisoned.
• In Pathology, Griff murders a hitchhiker by giving him a poisoned cigarette.
• Training Day: Alonzo makes Jake smoke the weed they took from a set up sting, saying if a situation like that came up in the streets, he needs to be willing to bend the rules. However, after a while, Jake starts noticing things aren't normal, at which point Alonzo reveals it was laced with PCP.

Literature

• In Margery Allingham's Albert Campion novel Police at the Funeral, one victim is killed by cyanide being placed in the stem of a pipe, so that he will be poisoned when he sucks on it to check for obstructions.
• The Beau Brummel Mysteries: In The Tainted Snuff Box, Sir Simon, an obnoxious parvenu who has ingratiated himself as the prince's food taster, samples a new blend of snuff belonging to Lord Petersham at a dinner party with fatal results. Believing he was the intended victim, Prinny orders Beau to find out who put the poisoned snuff in Lord Petersham's box.
• In the Hildegarde Withers novel The Puzzle of the Silver Persian, a gift of a box of poisoned cigarettes provides a blind for the murderer. This apparent murder technique is only plausible because Everybody Smokes.
• Joe Pickett: In In Plain Sight, J.W. Keely murders a prisoner by smuggling him a can of chewing tobacco laced with cyanide.
• Masked Dog by Raymond Obstfeld. Devane tries to murder former rockstar Price Calender using his well-publicized smoking habit, by spiking his cigarettes with pure nicotine. Price however has cut down on his smoking over the years, so doesn't use the packet before a friend bums a cigarette off him and dies horribly before his eyes.
• Parker Pyne Investigates: In "The Gate of Baghdad", the killer, having been exposed, lights a cigarette and delivers their Motive Rant and then keels over dead. Parker Pyne sniffs the cigarette and declares that is was laced with prussic acid.
• Philo Vance: In The Gracie Allen Murder Case, criminal Benny the Buzzard is murdered by a poisoned cigarette.
• The Sherlock Holmes Stories of Edward D. Hoch: In "The Adventure of the Domino Club", a Professional Gambler drops dead at the gaming table. After eliminating other possible means of administration, Holmes correctly deduces the man was poisoned by having cyanide injected into his cigar.

Live-Action TV

• Colonel March of Scotland Yard: In "The Stolen Crime", the murderer douses the Victim of the Week's cigarettes in a new insecticide that is colourless, odourless and tasteless and vaporizes easily when heated. After she is dead, the killer removes all of the cigarettes from the room and empties the ashtrays to disguise the cause, but doesn't realise that the victim had been using a cigarette as a bookmark.
• Columbo:
  • "Lovely but Lethal": Shirley implies that she knows that Viveca Scott is responsible for Karl Lessing's death and tries to blackmail her for silence; Viveca invites her out to her complex that afternoon to talk things over. At her complex, which serves as a spa and home to a weight loss program, Viveca poisons a number of cigarettes. When Viveca and Shirley meet, Viveca slips the poisoned cigarettes into Shirley's bag without her noticing. Shirley smokes one of the poisoned cigarettes and succumbs to the toxin while driving away, crashing her car and killing her instantly.
  • "Caution: Murder May Be Hazardous to Your Health": When Wade Anders' longtime network rival, anchorman Budd Clark, tries to blackmail him into resigning as the host of Crime Alert! by threatening to expose his past as a porn star, Wade decides to murder him. Knowing that Budd is a heavy chain smoker, he adds concentrated nicotine sulfate drops to a pack of cigarettes, then swaps them with an untainted package while having a secret meeting at Budd's house to discuss the terms of his departure from the show. After the poison kicks in and kills Budd, Wade takes back the poisoned pack and stages the scene to make it look like Budd had a heart attack at his desk while reviewing a potential story.
• Criminal Minds: In "Unknown Subject," this is how the Piano Man rapist dosed his victims. It worked against him in a few cases: one victim realized her cigarette didn't taste right, so she stopped smoking it and didn't get a full dose, and another victim recognized the unsub and got him to let down his guard by asking to bum a cigarette before tasering and abducting him.
• Father Brown: In "The Time Machine", one Victim of the Week is killed when the killer places several drops of strychnine in the bowl of his pipe.
• In the Series Finale of Goodnight Sweetheart, Gary celebrates VE Day with Phoebe, Reg and company, and saves guest-speaker Clement Attlee's life when a foe tries to kill him by dripping poison into Atlee's pipe.
• How to Make It in America while meeting with an artist they want to work with, Ben and Cam are offered a hit from his blunt. Ben takes it but Cam declines, and later Ben starts freaking out in the subway. We never learn what exactly was in the blunt, but we know it's not just weed.
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent: In "Ill-Bred", a wife spikes her husband's chewing tobacco with fertility drugs while simultaneously sabotaging his condoms to ensure that he knocks up his employer, with whom he is having an affair, in an elaborate variation of the Baby Trap.
• Midsomer Murders: In "Happy Families", the first Victim of the Week is killed when the murderer spikes his vaping solution with a slow-acting poison.
• Murdoch Mysteries: In "Rigid Silence", an inmate is murdered when caustic lye soap is concealed in a plug of chewing tobacco. When he bites into the plug, the caustic lye causes his throat to swell shut and he chokes to death.
• NCIS: In "Dead Man Walking", the victim who seeks the team's help to identify how he was exposed was poisoned by radioactive material added to his cigars.
• NCIS: Los Angeles: In "Glasnost", Mary Reynolds, a dialect coach, is accosted at a cafe by a homeless man, while another man switches out her cigarette pack. Deeks and Eric interrogate Artem Fedor in prison, and he tells about a plan to assassinate Mary, who is now hospitalized in a coma. Blood tests reveal that Mary, previously known as Katerina Polunin, was poisoned with Polonium 210.
• Sister Boniface Mysteries: In "Scoop!", the murderer uses poisoned tobacco as half of the the murder weapon. Their cigarettes are laced with one half of a binary nerve agent. They exhale the tainted smoke over the victim, and when the victim applies the second half of the nerve agent—which has been added to her perfume—it completes the reaction and triggers the nerve agent.
• Whodunnit? (UK): In "Death at the Top", the Victim of the Week is poisoned, and one of the mysteries the investigators have to solve is how the victim ingested the poison. The victim did smoke a cigar before dying, and one theory is that the suspect who opened the box stabbed the cigar with poisoned blade of the penknife he used to open the box. Being a Fair-Play Whodunnit, eagle-eyed viewers would have noticed he stabbed the box at the opposite end to the one the victim took the cigar from, so even if the blade was poisoned, the cigar he smoked wasn't.
• Yellowjackets: As Jessica drives away from Misty's home in "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi", she lights a cigarette. Shortly after, she gets dizzy and realizes Misty laced her cigarettes with Fentanyl, like with the chocolates she threatened to send to Jessica's dad. She manages to cuss out Missy before collapsing at the wheel.

Music

• Kendrick Lamar on "Good Kid, Maad City"
  Cocaine laced in marijuana
  And they wonder why I rarely smoke now
  Imagine if your first blunt had you foaming at the mouth
  • corraborated by guest rapper MC Eiht
  Cocaine, weed
  Nigga's been mixing shit since the 80's, loc
  Sherm sticks, butt-nakeds, dip
  Make a nigga flip

Video Games

• Criminal Case: Pacific Bay: In "Dead Carpet", the victim ends up dead when he smokes a poisoned cigarette.
• The Testament of Sherlock Holmes: After finding the body of the man missing a finger, Holmes and Watson look around his home and find eveidence that he was involved in the murder of the bishop. They also find opium paraphernalia. They perform an autopsy and discover that his opium had been laced with the same poison that had been used on the Bishop.

Real Life

• In a non-lethal variation, the FBI once gave a captured Mafioso cigarettes that had been laced with THC (the chemical in weed that makes you high). As a result, he revealed valuable information that he likely would have otherwise kept secret.
• Another non-lethal variant, possibly apocryphal: British intelligence officer Richard Meinertzhagen claimed in the diaries he published that during World War I, the British on the Middle East front would airdrop cigarette packs wrapped in British propaganda to the Turks. While the Turks laughed off the "surrender now" flyers, they really appreciated the cigarettes. On one occasion, a cigarette drop was made the day before the Brits were to attack a Turkish position. The cigarettes had been laced with opium, and the Turkish soldiers were too stoned to fight. Given that Meinertzhagen is pretty much the only source of this story and the dubious accuracy of said diaries, it's entirely possible this story was entirely made up (though it's certainly an amusing story nonetheless).
• Not apocryphal, however, are the opium-laced cigarettes the Japanese distributed in occupied Manchuria/China prior to and during WWII.

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