Thursday, June 21, 2012

I'll pass.



There's a plant that grows around here, and you can't miss it if you see one in bloom. I never gave them much thought before yesterday. But in the early morning as we Jeeped through the wash on the way to Gitmo, I saw one growing all alone in the sand where no plant more exotic than a tumbleweed had any business being, apparently just as happy as mint in a midwesterner's herb garden. Big splashy white flowers. It was kinda weird.

And I mentioned it later to the guy for whom I'm doing all this raking (Five trailer-loads so far and maybe a little more than half done. I'm too old for this.) He asked me if I hadn't heard of Jimson weed before. Yeah, I'd heard of it but never claimed to be a botanist. He said I was looking at it, also called "Sacred Datura," and then he went off at considerable length about its history among the Indians and its uses as a hallucinogen.

I remembered to look it up this morning, and decided that Indians are crazy.
Ingestion of plant material can induce auditory and visual hallucinations similar to those of Datura stramonium, with the active compounds being concentrated in the seedpods and roots; concentrations vary widely between samples, and onset is slow. This makes dosage estimation a difficult and adds further risk to the administration of material that already has potentially lethal side effects. Scopolamine is the primary active molecule; it is related to atropine, with a similar, largely anticholinergic activity. Effects may include dry mouth, hyperthermia, profuse sweating, drowsiness, lethargy and anteriograde amnesia - along with the before-mentioned hallucinations and sensory distortions. These compounds also induce a profound dilatation of the pupils and suppress eye saccades, resulting in considerable degradation of visual acuity, often to the point of functional blindness. This may persist, to a reduced degree, for days. The combined effect may result a panic state in the user, a particularly dangerous situation in someone temporarily deprived of useful vision; users are prone to serious accidental injury. Scopolamine induces respiratory depression at hallucinogenic doses. The combination of anesthesia (in the hospital) and Datura is usually fatal due to combined respiratory depression.[1] Seizures and fevers as high as 43 C (110°F) have been reported.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ditto for most illegal drugs, cigarettes and alcohol. I am literally begging my adult children to stop smoking but they are unable or unwilling to do so. The only good thing is they will die of lung cancer after I am no longer here to cry for them. Thank you big tobacco and government that prefers the tax revenue to doing something serious about tobacco.

BobG said...

I see them a lot in southern Utah, where they grow wild around the river canyons. Pretty plant.

Anonymous said...

Weird plant - and pretty. When you crush a Datura leaf, it smells like peanut butter (at least to me it does).

Huge blossoms - around four inches across and four inches long.

MamaLiberty said...

Anonymous... just what is it you'd like government to "do" about tobacco?

I've never smoked, and despise the stuff myself, but what other people decide to do with their lives is none of my business. And it's none of yours either.

Anonymous said...

How many things do you know of then when used as intended will kill you? About 3 million people a year die from lung cancer caused by smoking. Why not tell tobacco growers it will no longer be legal to grow and tell cigarette makers they have 90 days to convert their business model (or reinvest) to something different. Would some smokers still find tobacco somewhere? sure! Would some people start selling it on the black market? Sure! Would the number of people dying from lung cancer every year plummet? Sure! So what should the government do? Stop making money from tobacco and do everything possible to make it unavailable. I am not aware of even one person ever dying from a big gulp but government seems to think they can legislate that. More people die from smoking every year thewn all the Americans in all the wars we ever fought. Shouldn't that matter???

WolfSong said...

I don't know, Anonymous, seems to me if people want to kill themselves with smoking, that's up to them. Even as someone who is rabidly anti-smoking, I can't say that it's the gov's job to stop people from smoking. They will or they won't. So long as they don't do it around me, or my kid, I really don't care what smokers inhale.

Besides, we let biggov tell smoker's they can't smoke, then they might turn their snouts towards the coffee drinkers. Any politician tries to tell me I can't have coffee, well, then, we're gonna see some deaths...

Anonymous said...

I don't disagree with either the slippery slope arguement or the areguement that under the constitution they have no right whatsoever to tell us what we can consume. If tommorow the federal government would stop interefering in our lives in the thousands of ways they do today equally unconstitutional then I will suspend any effort to have a prohibition on tobacco. In fact I would welcome that event. They have no constitutional right to even tax tobacco or alcohol but they do. I could literally list a thousand things the federal government cannot do but they do it never the less. Almost all of those "extra constittutional" laws and regulations are either designed to funnel money into the public coffers or to reward some constituency. It is rare indeed that any law or regulation is implemented to actually benefit the citizens.

You will also notice I didn't actually ask for a prohibition or to make tobacco illegal to use. I merely want them to stop the commercial growing and selling of the product. If someone was so hooked on cigarettes that they grow their own or drive to Canada to buy it I am not suggesting we have a war on tobacco to stop them. But a couple million high school kids who today start smoking simply because cigarettes are so easy to get probably would not start smoking if they had to grow their own.