Henbane was used for all sorts, including brewing.

As for the trip… we have it growing wild at our place, and I’ve been schooling myself as a herbalist/botanist, mostly for practical purposes. I’ve smoked it and had it in tea. It’s not a “oh wow I want to do that again!” but it’s also not “oh sweet Jesus no”. Floaty, tranquil, visuals not unlike DMT, and a terrible stomach upset.

Some locals still use it, as an alternative to hemlock, to stun fish.

To build in the brewing part, before it was replaced by hops, it was the plant that gave its name "Bilsenkraut" to the city of Pilsen. So not just occasionally used, but significant enough that places where named for it

Very interesting, thanks. I think there's often a cultural "plant blindness" we have nowadays, but it's hard to overstate how influential many plants have been on all human cultures.

One fun thing I found out today: Linnaea is a genus of honeysuckle named after botanist Carl Linnaeus whose name derives from the Swedish lind or linden tree. So it's a plant named after a person named after a plant!

I bet I could find a lot more examples like this if I kept digging. I only recently realized how common it is for names to derive from plants and I've had a lot of fun digging into it

> Some locals still use it, as an alternative to hemlock, to stun fish.

Why is anyone using Hemlock to stun fish? Given there are dozens of plants that stun fish, it seems odd that folks would use one that's also absurdly toxic to humans.

Hemlock grows in poorly drained soils (e.g. next to streams) so it's likely very often the nearest plant you can find to use for this purpose

Makes sense. I wonder if pawpaw would work. It seems like it might if rotenone works, since they both have the same mechanism of action, but I’ve never seen it listed as a fish poison.

> Why is anyone using Hemlock to stun fish?

Because they are criminals. This is strictly forbidden in most countries.

And because they are stupid and like to play with their own health

Interesting. I've read it was used in cigarettes in part for its narcotic effects (and to treat asthma) and was wondering if that meant it's hallucinogenic or not

From what I understand it can be poisonous if consumed directly. You'd probably get poisoned from directly consuming tobacco leaves too so I wonder if this is a similar situation where smoking is safer than direct consumption

Would you describe the experience as a "trip" like other psychedelic plants and fungi?

You can get poisoned just by handling tobacco leaves - Green Tobacco Sickness. I had it as a kid after playing in a wet tobacco field - I honestly thought I was going to die.

And yes, it was a trip - but mild in the grand scheme of things.

Is that the ones that they call the zombie drug on the TV shows?

It's used in parts of Latin America by thieves to rob people. They become delirious and detached from reality and will do whatever the thieves want.

Circe also used it in the Odyssey to turn Odysseus's men into pigs. Odysseus prevented succumbing to Circe's poison by taking galantamine from the flowers of Galanthus nivalis, which is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor. Galantamine counteracts the effects of anticholinergics by inhibiting the enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine.

> Circe also used it in the Odyssey to turn Odysseus's men into pigs.

What's that based on? I can't seem to find any mention (in this translation at least) of what Circe used. Beyond just "evil drugs", "baneful drugs" etc.

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...

For some reason, in the humanities, especially with "pop" stuff like this, you can find a lot of extremely strong claims with basically zero backing.

At any rate it's not a translation issue. You can see in your link, which also has the original Greek, that the phrase used is "pharmaka lugros", which means precisely what the translation said. Maybe there is some other tradition besides Homer that handed it down, but it's healthy to have a lot of skepticism with claims like this.

Read post #2

https://bluelight.org/xf/threads/scopolamine.765088/

Fair point. It's not really analogous to "dropping acid" as I put it, but we do have clear evidence of its use specifically for its hallucinogenic properties:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4224707/

> In the Norwegian tradition, women put an ointment contain mixture of some plants such as BH on parts of the body with thin skin and became hallucinated

> It Soothsayers applied BH as a component of their hallucinatory mixture

"anti-cholinergics"

Based on what little I know, that sound scary.