DNP, the Deadly Internet Diet Drug That Cooks People Alive

However no matter skinny future Parry thought she was selecting for herself, she was mistaken. Relatively, she was the right foil for DNP, a lethal little bit of chemistry that has feasted for many years on our fixation with the right physique. As water follows the trail of least resistance, so does DNP. Solely as a substitute of cracks within the cement, it flows alongside our warped views of what we appear to be and what we predict we should always appear to be—that, and alongside the underbelly of the web.

The munitions employee deaths intrigued two physicians at Stanford College, who started researching the chemical quickly after WWI. Windsor Reducing and Maurice Tainter, on the college’s College of Medication, puzzled why weight reduction preceded the extra dangerous results of the explosive. Their query got here at an excellent time. Weight problems had grow to be a medical subject. “Overeating,” doctor William Osler had written in 1905, was “a vice which is extra prevalent than and solely a little bit behind overdrinking in its disastrous results.” Through the 1920s, life insurance coverage corporations started factoring weight into their insurance policies. By the 1930s, being fats was now not the signal of prosperity it as soon as was; it was a well being downside. Reducing and Tainter knew that DNP someway elevated metabolism, the speed at which the physique burns energy. Maybe, they thought, it may very well be made right into a remedy for weight problems. Their dream was easy: flip the explosive yellow powder into the world’s strongest food regimen capsule. 

Whereas Reducing and Tainter had been making an attempt to harness its metabolic items, the chemical was seeping into the world at massive, with disconcerting outcomes. In 1934, they reported the dying of a doctor who used DNP to deal with an imaginary case of syphilis. Two others deaths had been additionally reported in 1934: a younger woman who’d obtained it from a pharmacist, and a psychiatric affected person who was supposedly taking “therapeutic” doses of DNP. But the Stanford duo was undaunted. They believed they might make DNP protected and thought that these one-off, oddball deaths wouldn’t stand of their approach.

Their first research, revealed in 1933, bolstered their case. 9 individuals with weight problems handled with DNP misplaced a mean of 20 kilos every by the tip of the 10-week research. That very same 12 months, they offered their findings to the American Public Well being Affiliation. By then they’d safely handled 113 individuals with weight problems, Tainter informed the viewers. The unintended effects had been minor: an itchy rash amongst a couple of, lack of style amongst some others, and gastrointestinal ache amongst simply three sufferers. The success had led them to start dishing out DNP straight from their clinic, he defined. He estimated they’d offered about 1.2 million capsules, every containing zero.1 grams of DNP, to physicians and sufferers with prescriptions. Mixed with different corporations promoting the chemical, Tainter estimated that about 100,00zero individuals had been handled with DNP. The whole fatalities from these doses stood at three, Tainter proudly declared. Europeans and Australians had additionally begun taking DNP. “It will probably now be mentioned that dinitrophenol is of particular worth as a drug for treating weight problems and maybe another metabolic problems,” he and Reducing wrote in 1934 within the American Journal of Public Well being. In 1935, they reported that 170 individuals with weight problems who had been handled with DNP for a mean of three months had every misplaced about 1.5 kilos per week, with no alteration of their food regimen. One particular person had misplaced 81 kilos from the remedy.

By then the general public was shopping for DNP by the bottle, packaged below names like Nitromet, Dinitriso and Slim (which featured the silhouette of a woman with long, wavy hair and a perfectly taut physique). But the medical community didn’t entirely share the enthusiasm. Some physicians believed DNP offered nothing beyond what dieting could. One concerned doctor insisted that no safe dose existed, noting that some users suffered severe toxicity to the liver, heart and muscles. In studies of DNP between 1933 and 1937, up to 23 percent of patients developed skin lesions. Others had ear complications, plummeting white blood cell counts, numbness in the feet and legs, jaundice and other issues. Nine people died between 1934 and 1936, three from overdosing, all with nearly instant rigor mortis. Cutting and Tainter did maintain some caution, calling for federal regulators to list DNP as a poison that could be used only with physician supervision. Medical authorities, however, simply refused to accept the therapeutic benefit of DNP. In 1935, the American Medical Association declined to add it to the list of New and Nonofficial Remedies.

But fear of fatness had the collective American mind in a chokehold. By the 1920s, the image of the perfect body had transitioned from plump to thin. Pudge had become unattractive. People now knew about calories and how to count them. Seeking to parse the reason for this new obsession, one physician wondered if it was the advent of working outside the home that had made women concerned about their figures. “A fat girl gets lots of bumps from office furniture in modern designs,” he wrote in The Saturday Evening Post. By the time the AMA had refused to acknowledge DNP as a legitimate treatment, it was already a fixture on pharmacy shelves. In 1934, a savvy physician partnered with a slick advertising agent named Harry Gorov and created Formula 281—capsules containing 1.5 grains of DNP—that was sold widely. A year later, they launched a new-and-improved version containing an even more potent form of the chemical. If customers developed a rash or discoloration, the packaging warned, they should stop the treatment and drink water mixed with a teaspoon of baking soda three times a day. “Here, at last, is a reducing remedy that will bring you a figure men admire and women envy, without danger to your health or change in your regular mode of living,” an original Formula 281 circular stated. And with its next incarnation: “Now literally burning the fat away.”

Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration was powerless to stop a chemical it knew very well to be a danger. Despite the health risks of being overweight, obesity was still classified as a cosmetic issue, not a medical problem. Thus the law governing medication—the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act—viewed DNP the same way it viewed lipstick and hand cream. A traveling exhibit designed to illustrate the shortcomings of the Act, nicknamed the “American Chamber of Horrors,” included DNP as a prime example. And the damages were mounting. A nightmarish spike in cataracts was traced back to DNP. The ophthalmologist who publicized the phenomenon in 1935 estimated that 2,500 Americans had gone blind as a result of the drug. Only when Gorov made the mistake of touting Formula 281’s health benefits on the label, in 1936, did the FDA finally have the grounds to accuse him of fraudulent claims. Attempts to convict Gorov fell apart, but in 1938, under the newly passed Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, DNP was finally ruled too toxic for human consumption. By 1940 it had disappeared.

Or so the agency thought. At least two deaths by DNP poisoning made their way into the medical literature between 1940 and 1960. Reports of DNP cataracts continued. And the Russian military is rumored to have given the chemical to its soldiers during World War II to help them stay warm. DNP had not died—it had just gone underground.

An enterprising Russian physician named Nicholas Bachynsky made sure of that. He’d learned about DNP translating Russian medical journals for the U.S. government and, 20 years later, was selling it under the name Mitcal and prescribing it at a chain of weight-loss clinics he founded in Texas. He sold DNP to more than 14,000 people. In 1986, he was convicted of violating drug laws and prohibited from dispensing DNP. The measure did little to stop its scourge. In prison, he met bodybuilder, author of The Underground Steroid Handbook, and convicted felon Dan Duchaine, who started his own DNP business in the 1990s. In 2008, Bachynsky was arrested again in connection with a company aiming to develop DNP as a treatment for cancer.