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So how does the poison work exactly? Why would it cause pain? (Genuinely curious and some quick searching doesn't lead to anything)

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It causes paralysis and death by suffocation.

For botulinum, it's the toxin that causes botulism which can be viewed here: https://www.cdc.gov/botulism/symptoms.html

For saxitoxin, it's the toxin that's best known for causing paralytic shellfish poisoning.

TL;DR: it attacks the bodies nerves and leads to muscle paralysis and can result in paralysis of the muscles needed to breath.

cyanide is an enzyme poison - it stops all sorts of enzyme chains reactions from operating. as to why is it painful? well, that comes back to the question of why anything is painful.

> why is it painful? well, that comes back to the question of why anything is painful.

This is such a jordan peterson style non-answer x 'what does it really mean to order a pizza"

Not really. Pain is caused by things going wrong in your body. Poison causes things to go wrong. It’s not surprising most of them are painful.

This is totally meaningless - carbon monoxide poisoning causes things to go wrong, and is painless death. Countless other examples.

No it’s mostly just that oxygen deprivation is an uncommon edge case for a painless death.

We evolved different pain receptors to understand when we're being harmed.

Carbon monoxide poisoning wasn't common enough to warrant one.

It's painful if it's not fast.

All kinds of things can fail in the body without causing pain. What a non-answer.

most kinds of things that fail in the body cause pain, especially if the failure is being caused by an outside agent.

Why? Well one popular just-so story is that pain exists to let us know something is wrong so we will do our best to stop the pain, if the thing that is damaging the body is some sort of external agent then it seems reasonable under this explanation that there should be pain to get you to stop that external agent in some way.

I think the more reasonable question is why did they develop a poison that was really painful?!?

I expect this is less a case of them "developing" the specific poisons as much as looking at the pharmacopeia, and choosing something that was readily available, well understood, and efficacious/unrecoverable.

maybe this is the spycraft version of designed by a developer! hmm, yes we need to make a poison that people will take to keep from being captured and tortured for years before potential release.

Ok, well I reused these components and it is cheap and easy to make! Also unimaginably painful but hey, there's always a tradeoff.

some years later, huh, research shows nobody wants to use our unimaginably painful poison to escape being tortured. Users are stupid and incomprehensible.

We can be more specific here, though.

Cyanide inhibits cellular respiration. It prevents your body's cells from using the oxygen in your blood to produce energy.

My understanding (I am not an expert, please feel free to correct me) is that this produces neurological signals that you're not getting enough air. So you feel like you're choking or drowning; you're gasping for breath, your whole body is screaming at you that you need to breathe, but you are breathing and it doesn't help. That's not a pleasant way to go.

According to my biology teacher, the urge to breathe is from receptors that detect a higher concentration of carbon dioxide (in blood I suppose), not an absence of oxygen. She also said if you placed cyanide in your mouth, it would kill on contact with the tongue, before you managed to swallow it.

Your biology teacher might have been correct, but I had a science teacher confidently tell my class (in an affluent, otherwise science-respecting school) that humans don't land on the dark side of the moon because they would float away due to gravity working the other direction (hence the name).

Cyanide blocks both the mitochondrial ability to take in pyruvate and its ability to generate power, which means the cell can still attempt to use the excess pyruvate to generate energy by fermentation, resulting in lactic acid which stimulates pain receptors.

Carbon monoxide poisoning on the other hand only interferes with oxygen delivery, which shuts down the mitochondrial ability to generate power but critically does NOT stop it from taking in pyruvate. Since there would be no excess pyruvate in the cell outside the mitochondria to undergo fermentation, there would be less lactic acid, and less pain.

That's just my guess.

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