So today, I was wait­ing for my uncle to work, and hopped onto the down­stairs com­puter after hav­ing break­fast. Saw on Comcast’s por­tal that there was a health sec­tion with a spe­cial on Botox. Specif­i­cally, two of the arti­cles were “Can Botox cause brain dam­age?” and “Can Botox kill?”

The answer to both of these ques­tions is a resound­ing “YES!” Botox is a neu­ro­toxin. It is from the bot­u­lism dis­ease that plagued the food indus­try in the last cen­tury, and it works by block­ing neu­ro­mus­cu­lar sig­nals. Amer­ica devel­oped it as a chem­i­cal weapon (Agent X) in WWII. We found a vial of it in Iraq dur­ing the war. (Bush’s WMD… Sad­dam claimed they had enough to kill the entire pop­u­la­tion of Earth, but we never found that much.) One gram of pure toxin, prop­erly dis­persed, can kill one mil­lion people.

Why would you pay huge sums of cash to have that injected into you? To remove a few wrin­kles or to sweat less? (And actu­ally, it doesn’t remove wrin­kles that well, Botox is bet­ter as a pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sure.) I guess “dying young” is more pop­u­lar than ever. And more literal.