Flowers, Food + Forage

Like I say, Datura is BBD: beautiful but deadly.

“The Datura plant is one of the most beautiful, exotic, widely spread, toxic entheogens known; ingesting even a small quantity of Datura seeds or any part of the plant can cause strong delirium which can last up to 3-4 days.

“There are several species of Datura and ALL of them will cause strong psychological and physical effects, most likely unpleasant and sometimes fatal: 95% of the Datura reports available describe the Datura experience as terrifying and many of them include chaos often involving the cops, violence, serious physical harm and, alarmingly often, trips to mental clinics and asylums…

“As Datura is spread throughout most of the world, it has a long history of being consumed accidentally (or by people unaware of the dangerous effects of Datura, looking for a cheap high) causing many poisonings, some of them fatal.

“One of the main causes of death due to Datura poisoning* is that tropane alkaloids are processed by the brain really slowly, and it can take several hours until the user feels the effect, so for example, when a teenager eager to get a “cheap high” ingests Datura and feels nothing after an hour, he’ll ingest some more, ignorant to the fact that tropane alkaloids haven’t been processed by the body and, by the time he/she starts feeling the effects, the tropane concentration on his/her body is so high that it will take his/her body maybe a couple of days to process the chemicals, always at risk of an overdose that will cause death.

“The main active chemicals present in datura are the tropane alkaloids scopolamine, atropine, and hyoscamine, all of them highly toxic.

“One of the main differences between the Datura plant and most of the “accepted legal highs” is that it causes delirium (anticholinergic delirium) and the user is completely unable to differentiate reality from fantasy. People lose their memory, smoke imaginary cigarettes, talk to imaginary people, confuse the person they are talking to for someone else, cut themselves, go out to the streets, eat bugs… the list goes on and on.

Scopolamine, atropine, and hyoscamine cause:

- decreased heart contraction rate

- decreased heart contraction force

- vasodilation

- increased exocrine secretion (extreme sweating and salivation)

- reduction of intraocular pressure

- constriction of the pupil (these last 2 cause blurry vision for up to several days after Datura consumption)

* “Why are people, completely outside of appropriate cultural context, ingesting datura seeds for fun or enlightenment? It never provides the former, nor the latter for those without appropriate guidance from within the few Native American cultures that still use datura seeds ceremonially. (If some one offering to let you pay them for a workshop on multi-culti shamanism offers to guide you through a datura seed ‘vision quest’ simply ask them how to say “datura seed” or “huckster” in Tungus as you quickly leave.)”