Free The Darwin Awards Next Evolution: Chlorinating the Gene Pool by Wendy Northcutt

and though one feels sorry for the family, his death serves as a warning to others. If a doctor tells you not to smoke, there’s a very good reason.
    Reference: The Mirror, Yorkshire Today, The Guardian

    Reader Comments:
    “Up in Smoke”
    “You Light Up My Life”
    “Another smoker goes down in flames.”
    “He suddenly had this burning desire for a smoke.”
    “Dying for a cigarette.”

Darwin Award: Going to Seed
    Unconfirmed
    1999, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA
     
    Darren was dumb even for a junkie, but what he lacked in IQ he made up in creativity. In the supermarket, he noticed a bag labeled BIRDSEED 100% POPPY SEED . A hundred percent poppy seed equals a hundred percent opium! Figuring he was onto something good, he seized his chance to circumvent the stranglehold of the international drug cartels. He bought a bag of birdseed, boiled it into a thick black paste, and proceeded to inject the paste into his vein.
    Nothing happened, so he did it again.
    An hour later he was brought unconscious to the emergency room, as sick as it is possible to be. His chest X-ray showed thousands of tiny seedlike objects scattered throughout his lungfields. The working diagnosis was miliary tuberculosis, so called because the TB deposits resemble millet seeds. Little did the medical team realize the X-ray revealed actual seeds!
    Only two weeks later, after he recovered from life-threatening septicemia and multiple organ failure, did the true poppy seed story emerge. Darren survived but subsequently died of a garden-variety overdose.
    Reference: Eyewitness account by MedicineMan

Darwin Award: Pining Away
    Unconfirmed

    Rare Double Darwin!
     
    Three hale and hearty young soldiers had finished their basic training. Before heading out to their respective assignments they decided to spend their few days of leave with one’s grandmother, who lived in the town where they had completed basic training. The men descended upon Grandmother, who filled them with home cooking and gave them soft beds to sleep in.
    Grandmother had a swing job to make ends meet, so the privates were left alone late into the night. They wondered how they could repay her for her kindness. A plan began to coalesce from their late-night discussions.
    Grandmother had three children. To commemorate the birth of each child a pine tree had been planted in the front yard. In the fifty years since the last tree was planted, the pines had grown considerably, and the middle tree now blocked the view from the living-room window. The privates decided they would cut down that tree, letting the sun and the view into the room.
    ----
    “A case of beer went into the planning.”
----
    A case of beer went into the planning.
    To keep the fifty-foot tree from crushing the house the privates reasoned that they would tie a rope to the top of the tree and pull the rope away from the house as the tree was cut.
    The middle pine, the doomed one, was slightly closer to the house than the others. Two privates climbed an end tree, wound a rope through its upper branches, and threw the rope to a private in the middle tree. He tied the rope around the trunk. By this device they could pull the rope from the ground. The middle pine tree would fall away from the house, and the privates were also clear of the path of the falling tree.
    Climbing a pine tree is very sappy work, and scrapes and gouges are inflicted by the natural roughness of its bark. But the hale and hearty privates completed the preliminaries without complaint. The middle tree was lassoed and levered by the rope running through the end tree.
    So far, so good.
    Two privates were situated on the ground, each straining to pull the tree away from Grandmother’s house. The third private revved his thirty-horsepower chainsaw and started to cut. Lo and behold, the tree actually fell away from Grandmother’s house! However…
    The rope-pulling privates had wrapped the rope around their waists, not considering that the falling pine weighed