The use of poison to kill and threaten dates back to
the very beginnings of human civilization,
and it has held a powerful position in our history ever since.
A silent threat posed through everything
from mushrooms and flowers to radioactive substances in ricin.
And of course arsenic, once used so regularly to get rid of unwanted relatives
it became known as "the inheritance powder."
The premeditated nature of poison means it can
and has been delivered to its victims in the most imaginative and devious of ways.
In Canada, the first half of the 20th century saw stories of murder by poison
spilled liberally across the pages of the country's newspapers.
Because of its ease of administration, poison has often been known as a women's weapon,
A powerful addition to the arsenal of black widows or
"Lady Bluebeards" who could unknowingly
slip substances to their targets without so much as breaking a nail,
or a sweat.
Italian Giulia Tofana was executed in the 1600s
after allegedly confessing to killing 600 men
through the sale of her Aqua Tofana,
a powerful and undetectable poison she sold to unhappy wives
in the packaging of a women's cosmetic.
But while access to poisons increased,
so did both their detection and treatment and a broader public awareness
of poison as a weapon.
At some point, store clerks began to get suspicious
when someone asked for enough gopher poison to kill a man,
and "poison books" were increasingly used
to record purchases at druggists and hardware stores.
The decline in poison deaths in Canada was significant enough
that by the spring of 1954, Dr. H. Ward Smith declared at a conference in Regina
that poison murders were becoming "unfashionable", and that poison was
rapidly going out of style as a murder medium.
But while easier detection may have dissuaded some from a poisonous path,
in other ways, poison's lethal history was just getting started.
In 1984, members of the Rajneeshee community in Oregon
attempted to hijack the results of a local election
by launching a food poisoning attack, which sickened more than 700 people
and remains the largest bio-terrorism attack
in the history of the United States.
in 1995, members of a Japanese doomsday cult
killed 12 people and injured hundreds more
with a sarin attack on a Tokyo subway.
Recent years have also seen the renewed rise of poison
in a number of high-profile international incidents.
Picture Viktor Yushchenko,
seriously disfigured after being poisoned with dioxin
while a candidate in the Ukrainian presidential election in 2004.
Or former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, lying in his hospital bed in 2006
dying from exposure to the radioactive isotope polonium-210,
believed to have been slipped to him in a pot of tea.
Alexey Navalny was on his way back to Moscow in August
when he ordered a cup of black tea at the airport in Tomsk, Russia.
It wasn't long before the 44-year old opposition leader,
and vocal critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin,
was rendered violently ill, forcing an emergency landing
to rush him to hospital.
Mr. Navalny has since been transported to Germany for treatment.
And officials there have confirmed the attack
was committed with Novichok, the Soviet-era nerve agent that was also
identified in an attack on former KGB spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in 2018.
The Kremlin has denied responsibility.
Poisons have seen enough of a resurgence that a fall 2016 feature in the New York Times
asked whether official tasters could once again
become a practice for the powerful,
noting "poison has come back in vogue in the shadow world of espionage,
a privileging of subterfuge over brute force
in keeping with the insidious expansion of warfare to the virtual world,
lending everything the sheen of falsehood and conspiracy."