Hemlock, anyone?

When Socrates was made to drink his own cup of crushed hemlock (a lethal "tea"), to realize his own death sentence for being, in sum – "reasonable" – his friends who were with him, understandably all broke down and wept. He calmed them down by saying, "What a way to behave, my strange friends." It was said that Socrates drank the cup "perfectly calmly…without a tremor or without any change in colour or countenance…with good humour and without the least distaste." Then, he slowly perished. Only a Master philosopher could die from poison resting on laurels of calm and dignity. This is not your typical image of an incident involving poison so do not try this at home thinking it would be heroic. Physicians often use "toxic" to describe a level of medical alert that has to do with a patient’s condition that has "eternity" written all over it and seldom is it "socratic." If you still need more clues, note the universal symbol for "poison" which is the skull. And as if that were not suggestive enough of certain death, note that the symbol "X" is even written over it. 

"Toxic" has its origins in Greek "toxicos" where it refers to the bow-and-arrow that delivers the "pharmakon" (Greek for "drug, medicine or poison"). But in truth, what is "toxic" depends largely on who will ingest it, the condition of the one who will ingest it and the dosage. For example, chocolate may be a cure-all for me, but for Maggie, the Labrador I should be getting soon, it is lethal because theobromine, the active substance in chocolate, is poison to all dogs. There are many other factors depending on the kind of poison ingested. Much as we like things to be easy so we could label something as "good" or "bad," toxicity is not as clear-cut as the crossed skull that symbolizes it. Toxins are everywhere, occurring in Nature as the adaptive response of plants and animals to their environment, which means that they are part of what we may call "defense mechanisms" of plants and animals, necessary for competition and survival. Toxins can also be man-made. Modern living, in the form of industries, has produced both benefits and hazards to our bodies, other creatures and the spaces we love and live in. Some of those hazards, in large doses, can kill us quickly, while others creep stealthily and slowly for many years till we die from the havoc they wreaked.

Cathy Newman’s excellent cover article entitled "Poison: 12 Toxic Tales" in the June issue of the National Geographic Magazine contains 12 tales where poisons feature prominently. While Socrates’ cup of hemlock was not one of them, the Borgia dinners were. The Borgias were, shall we say, the "holy toxic tandem," Pope Alexander VI and his son, Cesaré, who regularly invited their appointed bishops and cardinals (formerly wealthy individuals), whom they also allowed to amass wealth, to dinner that exquisitely served and laced with pomp but also thoughtfully, with arsenic. This was so because by church law, the death of the dinner guests promptly placed their properties under the ownership of their gracious dinner hosts. The other tales by Newman included the many faces of poison, not just the Jekyll and Hyde dyad. The first one begins with the paradox tale of toxins being both good and bad for us; that it mostly depends on how much of them we take. Chemotherapy, for instance, is a cocktail of toxins that targets cancer cells. I also liked the reminder that even too much oxygen is bad. This we can clearly see because how we age is caused by all that oxidation happening in our cells when we breathe. I could not help but smile at the scientific sarcasm quipped by Dr. Michael Trush of Johns Hopkins University in the article. He said, "Aging is the biochemical price we pay for breathing." So to those who are so frustrated with their inability to reverse time’s arrow – lo and behold the ultimate anti-aging solution from science: do not breathe!

The rest of the tales that grabbed me included the yet unresolved mystery of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte, who died in exile. There were five possibilities named and one of them was arsenic poisoning from his wallpaper. Knowing how exciting a life Napoleon had before his exile, I am quite surprised that "boredom" from exile was not one of the possible causes (if not contributory) of death identified. Next tale was a comic strip on snake venom, stating, "Venom strength varies depending on the snake’s age, when it last ate, the time of day the strike occurs, how deeply the fangs penetrate, and how much venom is injected." While I do value scientific wisdom like this, I really think that "getting the hell out of the snake’s way as fast as you can" is a better antidote than having to ask the snake if it already had dinner. The third tale is a feel-good toxin tale where a pianist virtuoso benefits from botulinum toxin (a toxin produced by bacteria Clostridia Botulinum) which, in highly diluted form more commonly known in the form of a drug called Botox, relaxed two of his fingers that without the drug, involuntarily curled under. The fifth tale is a fish-tale with a Japanese backdrop with the Fugu, or pufferfish, which if not prepared properly by a state-certified chef, can still leave the diner with inedible parts that contain tetrodotoxin which really ought to scare the living daylights out of the diner because it will simply halt all his nerve impulses, which means paralysis and certain death since there is no known antidote. The sixth tale is a la "CSI" where it featured medical examiners Marcella Fierro and Alphonse Poklis, who specialize in deaths caused by suspected poisoning. They revealed to us the varying pathways that poisons can take that lead to deaths. Poklis stopped short of revealing the "perfect poison" for murder, although he admitted to having a couple of ideas. Most fascinating to me was a tale about the Japanese monk who virtually embalmed himself by unwittingly drinking from a spring that contained arsenic which was maybe poison but also a preservative. This, he coupled with a diet of bark, nuts and berries and even sap from the urushi tree, used to form lacquer solutions. At the time his corpse was discovered, it was a shiny lacquered skeleton garbed in a red monk’s robe. There is also the tale of a career option I am so glad is not open to me. It is the tale of the food taster for kings, queens and other rulers. To these food tasters, "eat as if it were your last" is more of a warning than an inspiration.

So-called prohibited drugs that cause intoxicating behavior and even seemingly benign substances, can commence the process of slow death in humans in relatively small amounts but can cause sudden death in cases of "overdose." As we saw in other substances like oxygen, too much of anything can be dangerous or eventually be fatal. Writer Honoré de Balzac met eternity in a cup, and not as a metaphor. He was said to have taken 50 cups of coffee a day, which ultimately killed him. According to Michael Pollan’s book, Botany of Desire, in medieval times when sorcery was in fashion, psycho-active mushrooms that were combined in potions that could kill ordinary mortals were said to be responsible for those haughty witches’ laughs as they rode their brooms. The witches even supposedly added toad skin that contained a toxin that was a powerful hallucinogen as well. I leave it to your imagination as to where the drug was supposedly applied that could have the witches laughing the way they did while riding their brooms. Again, unless you trust the "wisdom" of the "dark ages" when people seemed to have had difficulty thinking clearly for about 1,000 years, do not try this at home. Like everything else in Nature, "good" and "evil" do not really apply to poisons. It depends on who is using them, the purpose and the dosage. But for precaution, in case of uncertainty or ignorance, I think the crossed-skull symbol for poison can stay.

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