Pink Liquid Knockout Drug: Chloral Hydrate

Experts say there is a pink-colored drug that could have knocked out Kari Tupper, and it would not have been detected by the hospital tests conducted on her urine afterwards.

Two other women also have told The Times that they were made unconscious or woozy by a pink or reddish liquid served to them by Adams. They had no drug tests.

The prescription drug is called chloral hydrate, and at the time of Tupper's alleged incident with Sen. Brock Adams in 1987, it was sold as a pink, sticky syrup called Noctec, according to a spokesman for Bristol-Myers Squibb, the company that made the drug.

Chloral hydrate has been used as a sleeping potion and sedative for a hundred years, and when mixed with alcohol it is what is known as a Mickey Finn.

"This is your classic knockout drop, the classic Mickey," said Dr. Robert Willette, a Maryland drug-abuse consultant who once headed the chemical program at the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Although chloral hydrate is no longer popular on the market, it is still available.

Chloral hydrate produces a byproduct in the body called trichloroethanol, a substance that resembles alcohol but is much more powerful, sort of "like a super alcohol," said Pat Friel, a forensic toxicologist for the state of Washington.

Trichloroethanol can't be detected using the drug-screening methods that were applied to Tupper's urine at the Arlington Hospital in Arlington, Va., in March 1987, a little more than 12 hours after she says she ingested the drink.

Hospital records show that Tupper was not tested for trichloroethanol or chloral hydrate. And according to Tupper's attorney, Jeff Robinson, the screening tests that were used on Tupper's urine included an immunoassay test designed to detect certain commonly abused narcotics and a more general examination known as a "thin-layer chromotography." Representatives of the companies that manufacture these tests say they aren't designed to detect chloral hydrate.

Most hospital emergency rooms limit their urine tests to what was done in Arlington, says Dr. Arthur Zebelman, a clinical chemist at the Laboratory of Pathology in Seattle. They don't look for chloral hydrate unless they've been given a reason to do so, he says. Almost nothing will pick up the drug except a "spot test" designed for it, or a more complex, expensive and time-consuming general test called gas chromatography, he says.

When emergency rooms handle a poison case, doctors don't usually have time to conduct extensive tests, and they don't really need them since most poisoning cases are treated with similar techniques.

Playing around with chloral hydrate can be dangerous. An overdose can induce a coma, says Dean Forbes, a spokesman for the Poison Control Center at Children's Hospital and Medical Center.

Two other women say Adams gave or tried to give them pills. One says she saw what appeared to be a ground-up pill in a glass of wine Adams handed her. She didn't drink it. Another says Adams gave her two pills he described as vitamin C tablets, but when she felt "strange" later she suspected they were a narcotic.

It's hard to say what those pills might have been, say experts, because there are so many possibilities.