Medicine: Built-in Lifeguard

In Hollywood, M-G-M Director Chester M. Franklin worried about the increasing number of deaths from sleeping tablets. He got an idea, talked it over with Pharmacist Herschel R. Hoskins. Why not put something in the tablets to make them harmless? The result, which Franklin hopes to patent: a sleeping tablet with a built-in dose of that old emetic, ipecac. Taking up to three tablets would cause sleep; more than three, vomiting.

Franklin, who never took a sleeping pill in his life ("I can sleep standing or walking"), hopes to put ipecac in rat paste, and other poisons that people sometimes take by...

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