Talk:Poison

Poisoning example

Arafat Poisoning inconsistent with Death of Yasser Arafat article: Note that liver cirrhosis is inconsistent with brain hemorrhaging etc. Furthermore, the diagnosis of the French doctors does to my knowledge not state cirrhosis as a reason for Arafat's death. Thus: where does the "reputedly" come from? Please do something about that.

Note 12th Jan 05: Nobody seems to object, so I have changed the detail in the article accordingly. JB

13th Jan 05: Changed portion has been reverted. I won't go into a revert war. But note that Arafat's diagnosis does not state liver cirrhosis as the reason for his death, and that there are also people not supporting Arafat that feel that it is unlikely that he was killed by alcohol abusus. JB

Possibly missing: Contact poison

At the moment the only categories containing the word "contact" are corrosives, acids and bases. I think contact poison (skin contact) should have a section.

The amount makes the poison

I think there needs to be a clarification also that not only certain substances are generally considered poisonous, but that the toxicity of a substance very much depends on its amount, such as salt or salt water, very much needed but in large amount deadly... 193.145.39.154 (talk) 08:06, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

There is already a mention of this in the "Terminology" section. 72.94.166.193 (talk) 11:17, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

Aware of the adage "The dose makes the poison", I came here to see the exact, possibly legal, definition of poison (because it's just true that everything is a poison). The only sentence about that just says "The law defines "poison" more strictly.", but doesn't clarify. I felt the entire article hence lacks a single definition of poison. Anyone could expand the strict legal definition (even if I guess it may differ depending on the country) ? Thanks!2A01:E35:8BE9:F580:5486:79AB:C68A:755F (talk) 23:25, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

Secondary poisoning

There's an article Secondary poisoning that is brief and unreferenced. Should it be merged here? Tony Holkham (Talk) 13:37, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

Poison is a huge, sprawling topic

Poison is a huge, sprawling topic. Must of my background is linguistics, and I suffered a bout of logical positivism in my callow youth, so I'm acutely aware of words as they are actually employed as opposed to their more straight-laced, denotative isolation.

Poison suffers from a severe problem of being both scientifically precise, while also conveying—both explicitly and implicitly—all manner of colloquial value judgements (see also weed).

If a lead is going to properly summarize this state of affairs, it needs to leave the reader feeling like this is a big, sprawling subject with many offshoots and overtones.

In bulking out the lead today—besides trying to cram as much of this larger context into the text as humanly possible—I was mainly concerning myself with trying to keep the natural/unnatural beats in close alternation. I've expending more text than one normally might to put forward specific examples of both natural and unnatural analogues. (Adducing parallel specifics is one of the few viable tactics to cut through a predisposition toward ideological categorization.)

I'm not protective of my edits, and I suspect I won't return to this article any time soon. But I do ask that the next editor bear in mind that close alternation is an explicit feature (in service of a certain form of balance), and not a bug. — MaxEnt 20:09, 20 March 2018 (UTC)