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dheera

Uh, except the stuff you shove on your toothbrush?

The high-dimensional surface of "threat to life" vs. molecule structure is super, super, non-convex.

Like H2O -> yay, H2O2 -> die, H2 + O2 -> fire

Like methanol -> die, ethanol -> fun, propanol -> die, butanol -> die, heptanol -> die, octanol -> die

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1-Propanol acts like ethanol, but stronger, so you'll be fine if you don't ingest too much. 2-Propanol on the other hand (isopropyl alcohol) gets metabolised into acetone, which isn't great. And the only difference between the two is the way the atoms are arranged!

Acetone is in the breath of people who are on a keto diet.

That's likely a far lower concentration.

The dose makes the poison.

How different is the LD-50 between EtOH and 1-propanol?

My high-school chemistry teacher had this joke: "If you drink Ethanol you dance around people, if you drink Methanol, people end up dancing around you". For context, certain communities in India have people dancing around the funeral procession.

The rhyme I was taught: Little Johnny was a chemist, little Johnny is no more. What he thought was H2O was H2SO4.

> Uh, except the stuff you shove on your toothbrush?

Fluoride is an exception, only in small quantities, and only topically (lots of salts are toxic, and so are concentrated solutions).

By and large fluorine chemistry is a giant pile of nope, so staying away from it is an excellent rule and quite far from a “super, super, non-convex”.

Many marketed small molecules have fluorine in them, organofluorine compounds are sometimes in fact preferred because they are metabolically more stable than the non fluorinated compound. example of some drugs that have more than 1 billion $ sales/year net that contain fluorine: bictegravir,enzalutamide,elexacaftor,paliperidone,sitagliptin,olaparib,teriflunomide.

Some amyl alcohol isomers have been investigated as ethanol replacements because of the similar effects, albeit at lower doses, and an absence of a hangover due to less toxic metabolites. They're also commonly found in fermented beverages. Dose makes the poison and all that.

And that’s why I said “most”.

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