Here's something fun and different for Toxicology Thursday: a self-guided poison plant tour at @ncartmuseum. Admittedly, it's centered around Raleigh-Durham folks, but these plants can be found throughout the southeast and other parts of North America. [link to PDF at the end]
Starting at the main lot, we'll walk down into the open clearing to find POKEWEED. The berries are poisonous and will stain your hands. Mature plants are poisonous too, but small young ones used to be sold in cans.
You'll also find (unless the groundskeepers recently mowed over everything) CAROLINA HORSENETTLE. It's like a tiny, prickly tomato, but it's not edible. All parts contain solanine and are toxic.
There's also occasionally MORNING GLORY climbing its way over everything. It contains lysergic acid amide, a precursor to trippin' LSD. Don't eat the plants or the seeds, please.
Once you enter the woods, you'll find POISON IVY everywhere. Huge vines on trees, as big as your arms. Remember - Leaves of three, let it be.
Take the left up the hill on the dirt trail, and you'll see WILD GINGER. This isn't edible, but it is pretty. Eating it will wreck your kidneys - it's nephrotoxic due to aristocholic acid.
On the damp, shady soils you'll find my favorite: BLOODROOT. It only flowers in the early spring (March around here), and it's so delicate and pretty. The root exudes a red latex with sanguinarine, the DNA killer. It's bad. Don't use 'black salve' as a cancer remedy.
Also in the woods, and elsewhere, you'll find another favorite, SASSAFRAS. It's a spindly, scrawny tree in these parts, but its leaves, when dried, give us file powder for gumbo and its roots used to be used for root beer. Used to, because of safrole and bad science.
Along the paved trails, near the ditches, you can find WATER HEMLOCK, a relative of the poison hemlock that killed Socrates. This is poisonous, too, with violent seizures and death from respiratory paralysis. It's easily confused by amateurs for wild carrots. Don't eat it.
At the outdoor exhibit, near the walls with plaques of famous quotes, you'll find CAROLINA JESSAMINE. It's so pretty and found throughout the Carolinas, but it's poisonous due to gelsemine, a glycine receptor agonist. Arthur Conan Doyle once poisoned himself on purpose!
And that concludes the virtual tour. If you haven't been to the museum and trails, you should. It's a great way to spend your day. I gave this tour to a friend's Girl Scout troop. We all had a great time! The link to the PDF can be found on my site, here: naturespoisons.com/poisons-in-the…
I should add: The walking route in red is about 1.5 miles and mostly paved, but some parts are on compact dirt trails. For reference, the 'blue trail loop' you see on the map is 1.0 miles.
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I haven't done any #PenAndInkPoison in a while - I've been busy - so here you go. Today we'll talk about a toxin with a significant history and mechanism of action, and also dabbles into conspiracy theories. I present to you T-2 MYCOTOXIN: OF FUNGAL TOXINS AND BEE POOP, a 🧵.
T-2 Mycotoxin is produced by species of the fungal genus Fusarium. They're essentially molds that grow in soils and affect plants. If you grow tomatoes that yellow, wither, and die in late summer, you've probably heard of "Fusarium wilt."
Back to T-2 Mycotoxin, it belongs to a class of chemical compounds called trichothecenes. One I've talked about before is VOMITOXIN, which affects wheat and can make you...vomit. T-2 Mycotoxin does the same.
A lesson in *reading the article* 🧵
I'm a simple person so funny titles amuse me:
"Blackout Brownie: A Final Dessert Case Study"
So I read the abstract and this jumped out at me "delta-9-THC present at >5,000 ng/mL in the decedent’s central blood." WHOA! academic.oup.com/jat/advance-ar…
Now, greater than 5,000 ng/mL is huge (for perspective, some states have per se driving limits of 5 ng/mL), so I'm sure this will garner attention from anti-cannabis folks. What will madden them is the case was signed out as a natural cause of death. This was the correct call.
When you read through the history of the case you wonder if she made some super-duper-special brownies, and then you see the results table. What gives? That's a huge disparity between central and peripheral blood. Huge. 5,070 vs 7.6.
Something different for Toxicology Thursday: OF PROHIBITION AND NICOTINE, a longish 🧵.
If you hang out here long enough you'll notice that people that deal with drugs, like forensic and clinical toxicologists, are generally opposed to the prohibition of drugs and substances.
Why is that? If something is deemed bad or unsafe, shouldn't getting rid of it, banning it entirely, solve the problem? In a word, no. Nature abhors a vacuum and will fill it, sometimes with something worse, whether we're talking about a drug, a gangster, or a politician.
The prime example was the prohibition of alcohol from 1920-1933. It was a social engineering attempt that turned into a mass poisoning. Deaths from bootleg alcohol containing methanol and worse flooded the U.S. For more, read @deborahblum's THE POISONERS HANDBOOK, it's excellent!
Ready for some #PenAndInkPoison?
For some reason, I like the poisons in our food. I should clarify: I like the poisons *nature* puts in our food. We all gotta eat, right?
So buckle up for a 🧵, for today I present you with something new: BONGKREKIC ACID
Have you ever had tempeh? It's an Indonesian food made from fermented soybeans. Tempeh is sold as a very firm cake and has a wonderful nutty, earthy flavor. It's common in vegetarian and vegan cooking. I like it a lot. [FoodCraftLab (CC BY-SA-2.0)]
So tempeh is a common, staple food, made from soybeans. On the island of Java, however, is a type of tempeh made from coconut called tempeh bongkrek. And it can be toxic. Toxic tempeh.
Yesterday I mentioned PRACTICAL MAGIC and one of my favorite poisoning tales, and it's been a few years and 5K followers since I last posted it, so I thought I'd re-up it. So settle in for a murder gone wrong and "Justin's Three Rules of Murder." A long 🧵.
I ❤️ Sandra Bullock. And I ❤️PRACTICAL MAGIC. It's a classic tale of "Girl meets boy, boy is an abusive serial killer who kidnaps the girl and her sister, sister poisons bad boy’s tequila with belladonna, bad boy dies. Throw in some magic for good measure." We’ve all been there.
Our tale starts with Heather and Kevin. They got married, bought a house, and had kids. Things were good until Kevin lost his job. To support them, Kevin worked two jobs, so he wasn't around much, and that caused stress and a lot of fighting.
For some #PenAndInkPoison today I want to talk about thebaine, mentioned briefly yesterday when discussing laudanosine and papaverine. Morphine gets all the glory as an opium poppy alkaloid, but I'd argue that thebaine is much, much more important.
Thebaine is not used therapeutically but is used commercially in the synthesis of some of the most important opioids we have on the market today. In anywhere from 2 to 8 steps you can produce all of the opioids shown below - there are more, but these are the important ones.
On the right, we have the opioid agonists oxycodone, oxymorphone, hydrocodone, and hydromorphone. Hydrocodone is the most frequently prescribed opioid analgesic (pain reliever) in the U.S. We all know about oxycodone (Oxycontin). And hydromorphone is used a ton in hospitals.