Datura stramonium

• 1. Introduction

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  Datura stramonium turned up in the Australian food supply in December 2022, and around 200 people reported becoming ill afterward. Its young leaves had been picked along with spinach leaves, and the products were sold mostly through Costco. Heavy rainfall had helped the weed spread, and the grower, Riviera Farms of Victoria's Gippsland region, moved quickly to wipe it out.

  A poisonous weed in a bag of salad raises questions. Where did this plant come from, and how did it travel so far? What does it do to the human body? Why does one plant carry so many names? And why have healers, ascetics and gardeners all felt so strongly about it?

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• 2. A Plant of Many Names

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  The word datura comes from dhatūra, a Hindi name that traces back to the Sanskrit dhattūra, meaning white thorn-apple. The second half of the Latin name is more of a puzzle. The origin of stramonium is unknown, although the name Stramonia was applied to various Datura species in the 17th century. Some evidence suggests it comes from two Greek words, στρύχνον, meaning nightshade, and μανικόν, meaning which makes mad.

  Telugu speakers call the plant ummetta, and Tamil speakers call it umathai. Both words are believed to come from the Sanskrit unmatta, meaning mad or insane. South Africans use the Afrikaans name malpitte, or mad seeds.

  English speakers have called it thornapple, moon flower, hell's bells, devil's trumpet and devil's weed. Other regional names include tolguacha, stinkweed, locoweed, pricklyburr, false castor oil plant and devil's cucumber.

  The name jimsonweed comes from Jamestown, Virginia, where soldiers sent to suppress Bacon's Rebellion reportedly ate the plant. Some Americans say Jamestown weed instead. An early written account says the soldiers picked the young plant for a boiled salad. The account calls the result "a very pleasant comedy" and says they "turned natural fools upon it for several days." One man puffed a feather upward while another jabbed straws at it in a rage. A third sat naked in a corner, pulling faces like a monkey. A fourth tenderly kissed and pawed at his companions. The men were confined so they could not hurt themselves, and the account stresses that their antics were innocent and good-natured. After eleven days they came back to themselves with no memory of what had happened.

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• 3. The Night Bloom

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  Two to five feet is the height of a mature plant, an erect annual herb that branches freely into a bush. It rises from a long, thick, fibrous white root. The stout stem is smooth and leafy, colored anywhere from pale yellow-green to reddish purple. It forks repeatedly, and each fork produces a leaf and a single upright flower.

  The leaves measure roughly 3 to 8 inches long, with soft, toothed, irregularly wavy edges. The upper surface is a darker green than the pale underside. Their taste is bitter and nauseating, and it lingers in extracts and in leaves long after drying.

  Throughout the summer, fragrant trumpet-shaped flowers appear on short stems, sprouting from leaf axils or from the forks of branches. They range from white to creamy or violet. The calyx is long and tubular, swollen at the base and sharply angled, topped with five sharp teeth. Inside, the funnel-shaped white corolla stays folded and only partly open, with prominent ribs. The blossoms open at night, releasing a pleasant scent that draws nocturnal moths to feed.

  The egg-shaped seed capsule measures 1 to 3 inches across and may be covered in spines or spineless. At maturity it splits into four chambers, each holding dozens of small black seeds. Those seeds can lie dormant underground for years, germinating once the soil is disturbed.

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• 4. A Weed on the Move

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  Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, described and named the plant in 1753, though botanists such as Nicholas Culpeper had described it a century earlier. Its likely origin lies in Central America, but it reached the Old World early and became naturalized there.

  Roadsides and dung-rich livestock enclosures are typical homes, and the plant now grows wild in all the world's warm and temperate regions. In Europe it turns up as a weed in garbage dumps and wastelands, and animals that eat it are poisoned. It is an aggressive invader in both temperate and tropical climates.

  Birds are thought, from observation, to carry the seeds in their droppings.

  Cultivated plants do best in rich, calcareous soil, with several feet left between seedlings. Frost damages them, so they need shelter in cold weather. Harvest comes when the fruits are ripe but still green. The whole plant is cut down, the leaves are stripped off, and everything is left to dry. Once the fruits begin to burst, the seeds are collected. Intensive plantations can produce 1100 to 1700 kg of leaves per hectare, plus 780 kg of seed per hectare. Nitrogen fertilizer added to the soil raises the concentration of alkaloids in the plant.

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• 5. Chemistry of Poison

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  Atropine, hyoscyamine and scopolamine, three tropane alkaloids classed as deliriants or anticholinergics, occur at dangerous levels in every part of the plant. Lower amounts of other alkaloids turn up as well, including methylecgonine in the roots, apoatropine in stems and leaves and tropine in the flowers. The risk of fatal overdose is high among uninformed users. Many hospitalizations involve recreational users who swallow the plant for its mental effects. Smoking jimsonweed or related species has also caused poisonings, both deliberate and accidental.

  A 20 to 1 gap in toxin levels can separate one plant from another. Age, growing site and local weather all shift the numbers, and even within one plant the concentration differs by part and from leaf to leaf. Plants growing outside the native range may hold 20 to 40 times less atropine and scopolamine. Researchers suspect an evolutionary response to fewer predators. In young plants the ratio of scopolamine to atropine is about 3 to 1. After flowering the ratio reverses, and scopolamine keeps declining as the plant ages.

  Each seed contains about 0.1 mg of atropine. The approximate fatal dose for an adult human is above 10 mg of atropine or above 2-4 mg of scopolamine. Traditional cultures relied on deep experience with the plant to limit harm.

  Symptoms begin about 30 to 60 minutes after the herb is eaten. They include delirium, hallucination, high body temperature, a racing heart, bizarre behavior, difficulty urinating and widely dilated pupils. The dilated pupils bring painful sensitivity to light that can last several days. Pronounced amnesia is also commonly reported. Episodes usually last 24 to 48 hours, though some have lasted as long as two weeks. In severe cases, doctors can give intravenous physostigmine as an antidote, as with other anticholinergic poisonings.

  A recent rodent study used a methanolic extract made from the whole plant. The extract caused memory deficits, along with anxiety-like and depressive-like behaviors. Brain tissue showed raised lipid peroxidation and a marked loss of antioxidant enzymes. Examination revealed disrupted neuron structure. That damage in the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex points to neurotoxic potential.

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• 6. Built to Defend

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  Being an annual means the plant cannot regrow from meristems after damage, so even minor attacks injure its leaves. To compensate, the leaves start out large, which gives the plant some redundancy. They also live longer and keep metabolizing even when damaged. Instead of choosing between resistance and growth, the plant pursues both at once. In experiments the two show no negative correlation, though limited resources may force a tradeoff.

  The threats range from herbivores, pathogens, viruses, fungi and oomycetes to drought, light, temperature and nutrient deprivation. Terpenoids play a central role in the response. A sulfakinin domain linked to terpene activity dulls the taste receptors of certain insects that touch the plant. Terpenoids also attract carnivorous creatures that prey on those herbivores. They may carry signals between plants as well, which could support a community-wide threat response. Leaf trichomes add a physical barrier against herbivory. Protein kinase regulatory subunits, which are over-represented, expanded and positively selected, drive much of the response to abiotic stress.

  Datura stramonium split from the rest of its genus around 30 million years ago. Its branch carries the most rapidly evolving gene families seen in the nightshade family. Genome research on the genus is limited, which makes tracing how its traits evolved difficult. Its genome holds unusually many repetitive DNA elements, even compared with other nightshades, along with a recent and independent surge of retrotransposon expansion.

  No other member of the nightshade family produces as much tropane alkaloid. Scopolamine, atropine and anisodamine are the main compounds, and all of them interfere with neurotransmitters. The pmt gene family behind alkaloid production expanded within the genus. The last common ancestor carried a single copy, while modern variants carry more, which raises mutation rates in alkaloid-related traits. Tropane alkaloids arose several times in nightshade lineages, in some cases independently, and enzymes from entirely different protein groups carry out similar reactions.

  In ecological reserves, herbivores can raise or lower plant growth, fitness and resistance, a result credited to genetic variation among the tested variants. Regional variants have genomes of similar size. Even so, tropane alkaloid concentrations in different regions of Mexico differ 59-fold. Researchers suspect the rapid spread of the plant through human activity helped drive such variation.

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• 7. Healers and Folk Remedies

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  In his Herball of 1597, John Gerard claimed that thornapple juice boiled with hog's grease cured every inflammation. He listed burns and scalds from fire, water, boiling lead, gunpowder and even lightning. Gerard said he had proved it in daily practice, "to my great credit and profit."

  William Lewis reported in the late 18th century that the juice could be made into a remedy. He called it "very powerful" for "convulsive and spasmodic disorders, epilepsy and mania." He added that it eased external inflammations and haemorrhoids.

  Around the same time, James Anderson, the English Physician General of the East India Company, learned of the practice and popularized it in Europe. The leaves were generally smoked in a cigarette or a pipe, and atropine is among the main active agents. In China, the plant served as a form of anesthesia during surgery.

  Henry Hyde Salter discussed the plant as an asthma treatment in his 19th-century work On Asthma: its Pathology and Treatment. Smoking herbs, including this one, was thought to relieve asthma from antiquity into the early 20th century. That use later waned, once asthma came to be understood as an allergic inflammatory reaction and pharmacology offered more effective treatments.

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• 8. Visions and Rituals

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  Across the Americas, the Algonquian, Aztecs, Navajo, Cherokee, Luiseño and the indigenous peoples of Marie-Galante used this plant or other Datura species. They did so in sacred ceremonies, for its hallucinogenic properties.

  In Ethiopia, some students and debtrawoch, who are lay priests, use the plant to "open the mind." They hope to become more receptive to learning and to think more creatively and imaginatively.

  In India, Datura metel, a sister species, is considered sacred and is believed to be a favorite of Shiva in Shaivism. Some sadhus and charnel ground ascetics, such as the Aghori, have reportedly used both species as an entheogen and as a ritual poison. They sometimes mixed it with cannabis and with highly poisonous plants such as Aconitum ferox to produce dysphoric experiences deliberately. The goal was spiritual liberation, called moksha, sought amid extreme horror and discomfort.

  In his book The Serpent and the Rainbow, Wade Davis named the plant as a central ingredient in a zombie-making concoction. Haitians call it "zombi cucumber." Others note that bokors, rather than vodou priests of the loa, carry out zombification.

  European witchcraft lore counted the plant among the usual ingredients of witches' flying ointment, alongside other poisonous nightshades. It was often behind the hallucinogenic effects of magical or lycanthropic salves and potions.

  In England and parts of the colonial Northeastern United States, the witch-phobia craze of Early Modern times made the plant unwelcome in gardens. It was considered unlucky or inappropriate to grow, as an aid to incantations.

  The Royal Horticultural Society now advises worried gardeners to dig the plant up or have it removed, wearing gloves to handle it.

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