Through out history many cultures have used poison. Poison has been used so long, that its use started before written history. Most poisons come from nature in one way or the other. Cleopatra experimented with different poisons. She would give poison to her slaves and prisoners so that she could observe their deaths. She was looking for the most painless poison for her suicide. As we all know now. she settled on the bite of an Asp. It is said that this is a painless death that doesn't linger, but I wouldn't want to find out personally.

Can you imagine that when poison was first discovered, a person administrating it to another could have claimed to be a magician or sorcerer making someone die just with a wish or so it would have seemed. Later on, when poison was better known, it must have made a vicious weapon when spears and arrows were dipped into it, such as those used by some of the South American tribes. Some of these people can bring down very large animals with this type of weapon. Now as we know poison isn't all bad, it does have its uses in pest control. As bad as the rat problem is, it would be much worse if it were not for poisons. Sometimes people can get poisoned and not even know it. Two cases come to mind right away.

Napoleon's bones were examined a few years ago and arsenic was found in them. The mystery persisted for a few years. Was he being slowly poisoned by someone? No that wasn't the case, the problem was that in his time, arsenic was used in the production of wall paper to keep the colors bright. It seems he got arsenic poisoning from his wall paper. Some people still claim that the British Government slowly poisoned him when he was in captivity.

A family in the midwest of the United States was getting very sick and no one could figure out why. Slowly they began to die until no one was left. It was a tragedy that seemed to be unsolvable. Then investigators hid upon the cause. It seems that they kept orange juice in a pottery pitcher in the fridge and every morning the family would drink their juice from it. The problem was that the acid from the juice was leeching lead from areas of the pottery that had not been glazed properly and the family died from lead poisoning.

Poor Socrates. He was found guilty of corrupting the youth of his time and was forced to drink hemlock, a deadly poison. There are many rumors that throughout history many different people were poisoned but most of these can never be proven. Some of these people are Louis XIV, this may have been due to the popularity of poisoning at the time. Alexander VI, Warren Harding, John Paul I and Zachary Taylor to mention a few.

But no discussion of poisoning would ever be complete with mentioning the most famous poisoner of them all, Lucretia Borgia. Lucretia Borgia started life on the wrong foot as the illegitimate daughter of Pope Alexander VI. It is said that the pope poisoned many people and died by mistakenly drinking poisoned wine that was meant for one of his enemies. As for Lucretia some say she was one of the most evil women in history and poisoned many people while others say that she poisoned no one and they are trying to get her history rewritten. They contend that she was just the victim of an evil family.

In 1953 Stalin was convinced that a group of doctors was out to poison the Soviet leadership. This later became known as 'The Doctors Plot'.

Gregory Rasputin was a monk who became famous as a Russian Mystic. It is said that he would consume a little poison every day to build up an immunity to poisoning. Well it must have worked because a group of Russian aristocrats who wanted to kill him, fed him poisoned food and cakes but were dismayed when it had no effect on him. They then shot him, but he didn't die and when they went back to look at what they thought would be a body Rasputin, he attacked them. They shot him again, beat him with a club and stabbed him. After that they picked him up and threw him in the river to drown

Today the biggest poisoners are the armies of the world's countries. In World War I hundreds of thousands of soldiers were gassed. In World War II the Germans poisoned millions of people in gas chambers. Iraq is said to have poisoned and killed over 10,000 people in modern times.

So it seems that now poison has moved from the realm of the private person to the tool of the military.