>Eat a teaspoonful, and you might feel pleasantly warm and slightly lightheaded. Eat more than a few tablespoons, and your heart rate can drop to life-threatening levels.
Reminds me of the Futurama episode with the space bee honey. Wonder if the writers got the inspiration from this.
Old Vice documentary about it. This is where I had first heard about it. Used to be really hard to find the honey online, like only one or 2 places that sold it
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If anyone's interested there's also this recently released documentary in french by Hit the Road, where they show the process of collecting the honey and also the ritual side of it.
I imagine the native also built up tolerance over generations, not just knowledge as the article contends . Dying from a specific action is quite the evolutionary motivator
As with many psychoactive plants and foods, the adaptation here isn't so much a genetic/physiological tolerance as it is an often in-depth body of knowledge/practices for how to utilize the drug/medicine safely. Look at the notorious Datura for example which can cause you to go into a delirious state for over 2 days. The amount of preparation, processing, and knowledge that goes into administering it safely is lost on modern day kids who simply read an Erowid experience about a powerful psychoactive plant that likely grows locally.
Most kids that are ingesting the devil's trumpet are doing so explicitly because they're chasing after the anticholinergic toxidrome and the badge of honor. "Safe" doses of nightshade dilate your pupils and make you sleepy. That's not what they're interested in the plant for.
Datura is fucking dangerous. Deliriants are no joke in general. That one in particular is really dangerous because it grows absolutely anywhere and is very easy to identify.
Source; chemistry was my favorite class in high school and college because it helped me understand how to extract what I wanted from plants like jimsonweed and Mimosa trees.
I also wondered why, if it has this effect, it has not been purified to a standard concentration (or synthesized) and used to treat high blood pressure. Possibly because accidental overdose can be fatal?
They mention the toxin comes from the rhododendron flower. I remember camping in North Carolina once and one of the people I was with warned against burning anything from the rhododendron in the area, as supposedly the smoke would give you the runs.
I mostly thought they were joking, and I have no idea what specific type of rhododendron would be there (if any), but maybe there’s a glimmer of merit to it? Or maybe they were thinking of a different plant?
This was somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains, if I remember correctly.
Most OD’s and such with drugs happens when someone trusts someone. They don’t just pick them up off the ground and go town. It’s basically the whole idea behind food safety. We don’t just expect everyone to know every detail of everything they consume.
Joe Rogan endorses consuming mad honey according to the copy on this site: https://realmadhoney.com/products/mad-honey-us. So there is an entire supply chain from Nepal to the consumer.
I suspect if you're buying mad honey that's collected wild on cliff faces and then imported from Nepal, it is likely pretty clear to whoever got it that it is special.
Maybe kid could accidentally get a hold of it, or other adults that didn't buy it. However, from the article (as far as I could get before the ads locked me out) there is a type that tends to have this happen to them (middle aged men IIRC). So it seems to be intentional.
> * Caffeine powder (another game of guess the dosage)
I found a study saying "the caffeine content in tested dietary supplements is 4–35% higher than the declared amount in most cases" which doesn't seem very dangerous.
You can overdose on caffeine in other ways, of course.
Caffeine is especially interesting, as it is commonly consumed and there are incidents where people are hospitalized because they accidentally ate too much - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8824417/ (referencing the 6000 mg here)
Reminds me of the Futurama episode with the space bee honey. Wonder if the writers got the inspiration from this.