Romeo drinks poison when Juliet appears dead because he believes he cannot live without her. Romeo has already been established as an impetuous teenage boy who makes rash decisions, so this is a continuation of such characterization. His suicide contains dramatic irony in spades: he kills himself because he thinks Juliet has died, though the audience knows she is not truly dead but merely pretending so Romeo can come and take her away to Mantua with him.
However, the fact that Romeo uses poison to kill himself is interesting thematically. On one hand, it parallels Juliet's fake death, which she triggers through use of a sleeping potion that puts her in a death-like coma.
Romeo also bought the poison through illegal means from a seller whose desperate poverty was the only thing that made him "consent" to the transaction. That Romeo gets the poison in such a manner highlights his outsider status in Verona: he is an outlaw with nowhere else to go now that he thinks he's lost his love. This element also suggests the social forces within Verona itself which force Romeo and Juliet to have to hide their relationship from their families.
Finally, the poison is itself the culmination of poison as symbolism throughout the play. Earlier, Friar Lawrence discusses how certain plants can be used to heal or hurt depending upon how they are processed. In other words, even something good can be turned to poison under the wrong circumstances and vice versa.
In this case, Romeo and Juliet's passion has become a kind of poison, not just because Romeo is impulsive but because of the social forces that made their love impossible to begin with. Fate, the feud, and oppressive social codes (such as the hyper-masculine youth culture which accuses Romeo of being unmanly if he does not continue the fight and Juliet's limited status in a patriarchal society) all turn what could have at worst been teenage infatuation and at best true love into something that kills both Romeo and Juliet.
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