Overview
“Accidental poisoning” generally refers to the unintentional ingestion of a substance or amount of a substance that produces unwanted, and generally negative, outcomes.
This is meant to encompass more than just accidentally consuming drugs like eating a spiked brownie thinking it was a standard brownie. It also includes chemicals, foods, plants, and venoms that can be harmful after unintentional exposure. Further, even when there’s an intention to use a substance, “accidental poisoning” still applies if the amount taken was not intentionally determined; someone might have decided to only take one dose but forgotten if they did or not, leading to a second dose. As a technical term it has specific desginations within the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and codes of the Center of Disease Control.
Often, if someone presents with an overdose and there is no evidence or reason to believe that someone wanted to harm themselves, it will be classified as an “accidental poisoning.”
History and Etymology
Before “overdose,” it was much more common in addiction literature to see the term “poisoning,” particularly from the 1960s to the 1990s. As with all things related to addiction, the sociopolitical circumstances played a huge role in determining which context each term was used in.
Pharmaceutical drugs were seen as distinct from illicit drugs in both social use and physiological mechanisms, so “dependence” or “addiction” to pharmaceutical drugs was difficult to comprehend as something that could happen in white middle-class neighborhoods. The stigma of “addiction” was tied heavily to marginalized communities after centuries of propaganda associating illicit drug use with black and brown communities, as well as working-class white communities. Pharmaceutical companies didn’t want their products associated with that class of illicit drugs or marginalized people either, and historically the industry has been quite keen on deregulation that allows them to sell products without the efficacy.
Yet, there were clearly habit-forming substances that were causing social and health issues within white upper and middle class communities, and a term had to be used to discuss them. Thus, many doctors at the time attempted to discuss substance use by describing the effects as “accidental poisonings” resulting from inadequate guidelines in medical contexts and poor regulation in the drug manufacturing marketplace. “Addiction” could be classified as a moral failing that plagued minority communities while “accidental poisonings” were attributed to systemic issues for middle-class white communities.