I work as a geneticist and, in 2003, was doing my graduate work at the University of Florida.  One of the consequences of working in a lab is being surrounded by lots and lots of chemicals.  Working with so many different kinds of chemicals creates some unusual hazards and yields some unusual stories.  This is one of them.

Among our lab’s repertoire of chemicals were some rather exotic agents that were considered controlled substances.  For example, the anesthetics we used to render animals unconscious prior to surgeries required a special license to order.  Having these drugs also made us subject to somewhat regular site inspections by both university officials and the DEA.  Thus, it was no surprise when two unsmiling agents from the latter agency strolled in and asked us to show them where we kept our injectable anesthetics.  No big deal; they examined our stocks and asked a few questions.  Everything was going well until one of the agents began poking through some of our shelves while the other talked to me and our lab manager.  This was nothing to fear until the second agent emerged from a back shelf with two glass bottles, one large one containing white powder, the other a slender cylinder of green glass, filled with a thickish liquid and stopped with a cork.  I had never seen either of these bottles before and I smelled trouble.

One agent showed the bottle to the other, whose demeanor quickly changed from friendly to professional and icy.  My ‘Oh Shit!’ meter was pinging loudly, and only intensified when the agents split us up to talk to us individually.  The one who had found the bottle escorted me down the hall to a small break area.  We sat down on opposite sides of the table and silence fell as the agent waited for me to say something.  Long ago, my father told me that the person who’s first to break the silence is usually the more nervous.  I held my tongue.  Finally, the agent reached out, spinning the glass jar with the white powder so I could read the label.  “Care to explain this?” he asked.

Oh shit.  The bottle’s label professed the contents to be sodium thiopental.  You might know it better as sodium pentothal.  Another name is truth serum.  We had several pounds of a potent barbiturate listed as a schedule III drug on the DEA watchlist, right below cocaine, heroin, and oxycodone.

One gram of sodium pentothal sells for $3900 in biomedical catalogs, probably much more on the streets.  We had well over a kilogram.  What we didn’t have was a license, or even a reason for needing it.  Someone’s ass was getting nailed for this.  The agent was leaning on me, asking where we got it.  Was it mine?  Was someone in the lab selling it?  I communicated as well as I could that I didn’t know anything, and I’m sure this was just a big misunderstanding.  My totally original defense wasn’t flying.  While I was being threatened with a loss of my freedoms, my eyes roamed to the bottle and I saw something.

“Hold on a second,” I said, “the manufacturer isn’t in business anymore.  How old is this stuff?”  I grabbed the bottle, the agent letting me, probably gleeful that I was leaving my prints on the evidence.  “This was made in 1954,” I said, reading the manufacture date.  At this point, you may be asking yourself why a gigantic fifty-year-old bottle of powerful barbituate might have found its way into a twenty-first century laboratory.  If you’re unfamiliar with research, this might not be immediately apparent.  You see, nothing is thrown away in a research lab.  This lab still had photo enlargement equipment from the early 80s.  I sure our lab had inherited the bottle from a lab that had inherited the bottle from another lab, and so on.  That wasn’t the point.  The point was-

“Hey, did the DEA even exist in 1954?” I asked.  The agent scrunched up his face, looking perplexed.  “I’m not sure,” he admitted.  We returned to the lab and I, finally off the defensive, googled the origins of the DEA.  The Drug Enforcement Administration was formed in 1973 and was formerly known as the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, which dated only back to the late 1960s.  We were in possession of a drug that wasn’t even illegal to buy back then.  Though they would confiscate our cache of drugs, I (and my anus) were saved from 10-15 years in a federal penitentiary.  I wasn’t even sure they had the authority to confiscate the drug (and some great ideas on using it had leapt to mind), but it seemed impertinent to argue.

The other bottle containing the corked liquid was also from 1954.  “Oleo ex Oreganum” was the only inscription on the label, giving precious little clue to what it was.  With all looking on, I violated one of the most basic safety rules in the lab and opened the bottle.  Rather than releasing a stream of toxic hydrogen gas, a pleasant if somewhat stale odor permeated the room.  “I know that smell,” said the other DEA agent. “It’s oregano oil.  My wife uses it for cooking.  Why would you use it in a lab?”  

“Why indeed?” I said, trying to sound mysterious.  They let us keep the oil.  For the hell of it, I brought it home and sauteed a meatball.  It tasted deliciously of freedom and liberty.  But it was a bit stale.