Carbon tetrachloride - The sweet smell of hepatotoxicity

• saccharine-smelling (akin to the scent of a dry cleaner's) synthetic halomethane widely used in the early 20th century to extinguish fires, help cool things down (it is a good refrigerant), and dry clean clothing
• was replaced by tetrachloroethylene in the 1940s because it was making people tremendously ill
• currently used to make other refrigerants
• much like the infamous chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), it is really good at annihilating the ozone layer
• used as an insecticide in the good old US of A up until the 1970s, at which point it was finally banned
• when subjected to high temperatures, it can form the toxic gas phosgene
• if you get a lot of it in you somehow, it'll wreck havoc on your liver, kidneys, and central nervous system
• the liver is particularly sensitive, likely reflecting the presence of a tonne of xenobiotic-metabolizing enzymes such as CYP2E1 that are capable of changing a whole bunch of it into highly reactive free radical intermediates
  
• has been shown to cause cancer in lab animals when either swallowed or inhaled
  

Weber LW, Boll M, Stampfl A. Hepatotoxicity and mechanism of action of haloalkanes: carbon tetrachloride as a toxicological model. Crit Rev Toxicol. 2003;33(2):105-36. Review.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tetrachloride
http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/tfacts30.html