In 1676, near Jamestown, Virginia a group of British soldiers were traveling to put down Bacon’s rebellion. Hungry and unfamiliar with the local flora these soldiers unwittingly ingested leaves from the plant which became nicknamed Jamestown weed, or jimsonweed for short because of this event. This plant was of the datura genera—a deadly nightshade (plants which contain the deliriant/psychoactive compounds atropine, scopolamine, and hyoscyamine). Included in their salad was not near enough to kill them, but enough that they forgot themselves and had quite the trip! This account, recorded in Robert Beverley’s History and Present State of Virginia describes the soldiers as
turn’d natural fools upon it for several days. One would blow up a feather in the air and another would dart straws at it. . . another, stark naked, was sitting in a corner like a Monkey, grinning and making mows at them; a Fourth would fondly kiss and paw his Companions and snear in their Faces with a Countenance more antick than any Dutch Droll. . . after eleven days, return’d to themselves again, not remembering anything that had pass’d.
This was perhaps the best possible outcome for the British soldiers amongst a plant that is presently known for its horrific days-long nightmarish trips. On any forum where one asks about datura, the majority of the comments are people (with no experience mind you) saying it is the worst possible plant one could take and to never even consider it. Despite the present bias against the plant in subreddits and forums devoted to it, datura has a rich history of use in both ritual and medicine. I’ll be focusing on the latter in this article and will turn to the ritual facet in another piece.
Datura is a beautiful genus of plants—one I’ve grown to love. One of the most wide-reaching plants, it exists across all six inhabited continents of the world. It’s a difficult plant to classify by species because it is such an adaptive plant. Plants of the same species will evolve and adapt quickly to its surroundings. Historically it has been a bit of a taxonomical nightmare with species being confused with each other and sometimes with its sister species Brugmansia (an easy rule of thumb is that datura flowers stand up while brugmansia flowers hang down). However, across the globe it has commonly been called “the thorn apple” due to its spiked fruit.
Some of the earliest possible mentions of the thorn apple come from ancient Greek writers such as Theophrastus in the fourth century BC and Dioscorides writing in the first century AD who reference the plant as causing madness, sleepiness, and visions, while being an additive in aphrodisiacs and medicines. Across the globe this plant has a rich history of ritual and medicinal use in addition to its poisonous virtues. Many toxic and poisonous plants are actually incredibly useful and medicinal at lower doses.
The famed 16th-century alchemist and doctor Theophrastus von Hohenheim, also known as Paracelsus, is credited with the phrase “the dose makes the poison.” He wrote that “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.” This quotation gets shortened to the popular phrase. Most people don’t focus on the dose or the medicinal facets of a plant. Instead they focus on the poisonous aspect of them. Lacking a cultural connection with plants, many fear “poisonous plants” labeling them as bad or dangerous, devoid of any positive benefits (except for perhaps ornamental value in gardens). The “poisonous plant=bad” argument fails too when we realize just how frequently the nightshades were (and still are) used in medicine. It is merely a matter of the dose and context in which it is used.
The thorn apple is most well known for its “madness” inducing properties, which are well documented and the most commonly known attribute of the plant’s qualities today. This facet of its nature is well-documented but, despite this, is referenced throughout history meaning that so long as one is careful in its preparation, its virtues far outweigh its dangers—this is clearly evidenced through datura’s extensive use in ritual and magical contexts and its common mention in early United States medical textbooks.
Beyond ancient Greece, some of the early written references to the plant that we know of in the Western world are found in Arabic texts of the 12-13th centuries. It was known to the Arabic scholars in pain as gauze mathil, “the soporific plant”, e.g. the sleeping plant. It was used as a tranquilizer and narcotic. References to datura pop up throughout the following centuries in Europe where it was used as a part of the “witching herbs”, as a drink additive for wives wishing to escape their husbands (datura can cause disorientation and sleepiness allowing the wives to take a day to themselves), as an aphrodisiac in love philters, and as a general medicine and poison.
The 15th through 17th century records in Europe detail the extensive use of datura by foreign peoples. Explorers such as Konrad von Megenberg, Cristobal Acosta, and John Gerard went to the east Indies and India bringing back confirmation of similar uses of datura as was occurring already in Europe at the time.
In the 16th century, after his exploration of the New World, the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun wrote of his experience encountering datura among the native people in the New World. He described it as “intoxicating and maddening”, writing that those who eat it had extreme visions. De Sahagun also noted that datura had a remarkable ability to cure gout among natives and was a useful application of it.
Datura’s Illustrious History in the United States
Datura was present throughout the eastern United States for much of history. As mentioned earlier Robert Beverley’s History of Virginia published in 1705 records the tale of unwitting British soldiers ingesting datura leaves. Around the same time Reverend John Clayton, the minister of Jamestown, wrote of the Algonquin natives’ use of datura’s flowers as a salve rubbed on the temples to aid fevers and help the sick sleep. He compared their use of datura with his use of laudanum—a comparison that would become even more common in the early 1800s.
Soon after the formation of the United States there are many accounts of datura use amongst the population. The nightshade plants and particularly datura stramonium were incredibly common in both gardens and medicine throughout this period. Multiple doctors and herbalists note that datura could be found on nearly every street corner throughout New England and the East coast. Thomas Green, who published The Universal Herbal in 1820 wrote of datura that “it grows about all the villages and that it and phytolacca [pokeweed] are the worst weeds that infest that continent [America].”
The availability of the plant was a great help to doctors and herbal physicians at the time because it was such a useful medicine. Though it wasn’t necessarily popular in all areas or with all doctors.
In The American Medical Recorder published in 1822 William Zollickoffer, a physician in Baltimore, wrote of datura:
This plant I conceive ought to be more highly prized by American physicians, than any other indigenous vegetable with which we are at present acquainted; for as a remedy belonging to the class of narcotic medicines, it is by no means inferior in point of activity to opium, cicuta [hemlock] and many others, and when properly exhibited will be found a medicine in the hands of the practising physician, which will enable him to control some of the most distressing maladies to which mankind are subject.
These distressing maladies included: asthma, whooping cough, chronic rheumatism, epilepsy, menstrual pains, neuralgia, epilepsy, open wounds, milk sickness, hemorrhoids, and a whole host of other problems.
In the early United States datura was used as a cure for asthma. It was rolled up and smoked to help those with lung issues (ironic, right? But it worked!). Colonial doctors reported that this use was found in both Native Americans and in doctors bringing word back from as far away as India.
Chronic rheumatism or arthritis was a common problem at this time and one of the more frequent remedies appears to have been a combination of datura tinctures and salves. To make a tincture the seeds of the plant (the part containing the highest concentration of psychoactive alkaloids) were soaked in alcohol and mixed with other healing plants—frequently camphor and cinnamon (and occasionally mixed with henbane or belladonna).
Tinctures were then taken with a dosage of a certain number of drops, anywhere from 5 to 100 (although that measurement doesn’t mean much since the alkaloids vary from plant to plant and the concentrations might be different), every half hour until the patient starts feeling some vertigo. The vertigo, by the way, signals they are entering the phase where the famed hallucinations can start occurring. Sometimes the seeds themselves were also prescribed. For milk sickness, some doctors prescribed twenty to thirty seeds every few hours (a single dose of this is enough to evoke hallucinations in some people depending on the plant).
In an 1809 history of South Carolina the medicinal vegetables section begrudgingly notes that “The common and despised datura stramonium, or Jamestown weed, is a most powerful medicine in epilepsy and some of the most obstinate complaints to which human nature is liable.” The claim that datura was a cure for epilepsy and seizures seems to have begun in the mid 1700s but by the 1830s was a common claim among all physicians. It was touted as a “radical cure for epilepsy” by The American Medical Intelligencer. They published an account by doctors at Yale in 1839 where it was reported that all epileptic cases were suspended while patients were under the influence of datura. The epilepsy would not return until after datura treatment was suspended. The crazy thing is they report that patients would be kept under the influence of datura for months at a time. Extended treatment with datura was not uncommon. The wild thing about this is that the active tropane alkaloids in datura (atropine, scopolamine, and hyoscyamine) are quite effective at blocking acetylcholine which can disrupt normal neurotransmission for extended times, these alkaloids are metabolized very slowly by the liver, and they are lipid-soluble meaning they can cross the blood-brain barrier efficiently and they accumulate in fatty tissues. These are some of the reasons the experience can last an entire day at low doses and three days or more at higher doses. For people to take even low doses of datura on a consistent basis means that it would build up in their system eventually reaching a point where it was as if they had taken a higher dose.
Given the prevalence of the use of all of the nightshades in medicine during the period of The Second Great Awakening in the US, it leads me to wonder if one of the reasons for the pervasive visionary and ecstatic periods in early US history was the prevalence of these substances in everyday medicine. At the very least, being under the influence of even a low dose of datura or any of the other nightshades likely would’ve made individuals more suggestible to the ecstatic fervor.
Other Uses of Datura
Datura has been widely used by indigenous populations across the globe as well. In the Americas it was used by the Aztecs and Mayans to treat broken bones, abscesses, swollen knees, and rheumatism. It was one of the most common sedatives and aphrodisiacs in Mexican folk medicine, known there as Toloache. Topical applications were used to treat skin diseases, muscle pain, and joint problems. The Seri people of Sonora, Mexico would drink a tea made from the seeds to treat a swollen throat. The Apaches would use the flowers to create a poultice that would disinfect wounds. The Zuni used datura as an anesthetic before performing surgeries. The Tubatulabal would use it to treat inflammation, bruising, and swelling.
In Ayurvedic medicine, datura has been used to treat various illnesses and problems including headaches, convulsions, epilepsy, insanity, asthma, bronchitis, mumps, chicken box, open wounds, all sorts of pains, arthritis, nervous disorders, and as a replacement for opium as a pain reliever and sedative.
Validating many of the traditional uses of datura, a recent study looking at the phytochemical, biological, and toxicological profiles of Datura metel showed that it exhibits antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects. Extracts of the leaf, stem bark, and roots showed strong antifungal, antiviral, and antibacterial activity. A datura ointment exhibited significant wound healing capacity. They found that it actually had contraceptive effects and lowered the likelihood of pregnancy (which is interesting given its past association as an aphrodisiac and love philter ingredient). Other studies here, here, and here similarly validate this research.
While the use of datura still exists among many herbalists and indigenous populations, its knowledge and use as a whole plant in Western medicine has largely been forgotten in the same way so many others have. The active compounds in datura, the tropane alkaloids however, are still isolated and used in all sorts of modern medicines. Scopolamine is the main ingredient in anti-nausea patches. The tropane alkaloids are the active ingredients in anti colic and spasmolytic drugs, in eye drops used to dilate pupils, and in some IBS medications.
The medicinal qualities of this plant ought not to fall out of general knowledge, particularly when paired with its use as a visionary aid (I’ve used it successfully for both healing and visionary pursuits now). This plant, along with so many others, are an integral part of our history and likely was used to treat (or poison) an ancestor of any one of us at some time. To me it’s fascinating to see how plants have been used in the past and the story of how they came to be universally known and used. Imagine if datura had remained a consistent replacement for opium as was cited so frequently in early United States medical praxis. How many people might not have become addicted to opium and succumbed to that addiction? These, to me, are interesting questions! More on the ritual and magical use of datura in the next essay.