Greek toxon is the bow; toxikon pharmakon is the drug for the arrow, the smear on the warhead, the Scythians famous for their snake-venom and putrefied adder composite the Greeks called Scythicon. Toxikon yielded Latin toxicum, poison generally, and the medieval verb intoxicare, to poison, literally to put the arrow-poison into. English intoxicated kept the archery until the 17th century, when the tavern annexed it; toxin was coined in the 19th century for poisons of biological origin, diphtheria's the first famous one. The bow never left the word: antitoxin, the antibody, is the shield against the arrow, named for the weapon it blocks.
The semantic annexation is the story: intoxicated was a murder charge's word, poisoned by arrow-drugs, and the drinking culture adopted it precisely because it was dramatic, the dram as a wound, and then the temperance movement re-weaponized it, intoxication as self-poisoning, which is, etymologically, simply the original sense filing a complaint. Every modern detox and toxin cleanse unknowingly invokes the Scythian smear, the wellness industry selling antidotes to arrows that were never loosed, which Mithridates would have recognized as a business model.
The claim: the arrow is the first drug-delivery system and the word knows it, poison arriving by puncture, dose controlled by the smear's thickness, target selected at distance, the syringe, the dart, and the vaccine inheriting the whole architecture, medicine and war sharing a root because they share a mechanism: getting the dose inside without consent of the skin. Verdict: the etymology supports the mechanism reading. The archive's mithridatism file holds the defense, this file holds the offense, and the modern intoxication of everything, food, feed, news, is the Scythian insight generalized: the smear matters more than the shaft. Watch what is on the tip.
If poisoning is archery, who is drawing the bow, and why does the target pay for the drink?