In the Pink

摘要

Most modern medicines are carefully synthesized organic molecules so potent that each pill contains only a few milligrams of the active inredint. Pepto-Blsmol is a fascinating exception, both because its active ingredient is bismuth, a heavy metal commonly used in shotgun pellets, and because there is a lot of it in each dose. So much, in fact, that I was able to extract a slug of bismuth metal from a pile of pink pills. One two-pill dose of Pepto-Bismol contains 262 milligrams (more than a quarter of a gram) of bismuth subsalicylate, and about an eighth of that weight is bismuth. It's not just bits of ground-up bismuth metal, though. The bismuth is combined chemically with salicylate, an organic molecule.