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Intoxicating Histories

What’s your poison? At the core of the word ‘intoxicant’ is toxic, which comes directly from the late Latin toxicus, meaning ‘poisoned’. And as the French physiologist Claude Bernard once wisely said: ‘Everything is poisonous, nothing is poisonous, it is all a matter of dose.’ Read our six-part story on intoxicants, the different forms they can take, and the blurry lines between safe and dangerous, legal and illegal.

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Photograph of an abstract colourful pattern with areas out of focus.
Intoxicants, Thomas SG Farnetti. Source: Wellcome Collection. Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).