Common Name: Jimsonweed, Jamestown weed, Thorn apple, Devil’s trumpet, Mad-apple, Stinkwort, Locoweed – The plant was named by the early settlers of the first permanent English colony in North America established in 1607 eponymously named for their sovereign. Jamestown weed became Jimsonweed as an elision.
Scientific Name: Datura stramonium – The generic name is Hindi for a similar plant that grows on the Indian subcontinent that derives from the ancient Sanskrit word dhattura. The species name is a combination of the Greek strychnos and makinos, which translates roughly to “nightshade-mad.” [1] Nightshade is the common name of the plant family more formally called Solanaceae and mad attests to the psychoactive effects that ingesting the plant induces.
Potpourri: Jimsonweed is more American than apple pie. It is named for the first port of entry established by the Virginia company inspired by (the virgin) Queen Elizabeth I and named for her successor King James VI of Scotland who became England’s James I in 1603.The former was the last of the Tudors and the latter was the first of the Stuarts. The striking, stinking flower could hardly be ignored and quickly became one of the cynosures of the colony. Its medicinal properties were of major import in the steaming, swampy caldron of the tidewater coastal area ― it was valued for its “cooling” effect. It was surely one of the first of the New World plants coopted by the Europeans from their Indian neighbors as native herbals. Along with tobacco, which was promoted to “purgeth superfluous fleame (phlegm) and other gross humors [2],” it joined the other members of the Nightshade Family, inclusive of tomatoes and potatoes, in the reverse migration of plants back to Europe. Jimsonweed expanded with the population westward, becoming an agricultural nuisance plant. Its medicinal properties are now better understood, its unrestricted use tempered with caution. It is hallucinogenic in moderate doses and deadly in excess.
The trials and tribulations of Jamestown and the Virginia Colony in its early years are interwoven with its namesake weed. As tobacco growing English settlers moved inland in the early 17th century, displaced Native Americans fought back with justifiable ferocity. Following a series of deadly raids along the Potomac River by the Susquehannocks in 1676, a young planter named Nathanial Bacon led a group of settlers demanding that the royal governor, Sir William Berkeley, take action to prevent further bloodshed. Bacon’s Rebellion, seen by some as a herald of American independence a century later in prescribing universal suffrage, forced the royal governor to flee as his capital city of Jamestown was torched. The rebellion was eventually quashed by British troops sent by King Charles II, who had succeeded his father Charles I a decade after he had been beheaded in the English Civil War during which the Virginia colony remained royalist.[3] In that every army marches on its stomach, the campaigning soldiers were no exception, and jimsonweed was on the menu. According to the historical record, jimsonweed was gathered for a boiled salad “and some of them ate plentifully of it.” The ensuing reverie in which “one would blow up a feather in the air; another would dart straws at it with much fury; and another stark naked was sitting up in a corner” required their confinement “lest they should in their folly destroy themselves.” After eleven days of “a thousand such simple tricks,” they regained their composure “not remembering anything that had passed.” [4] Jimsonweed was a weed to be reckoned with.
Native Americans were masters of herbal medicines as a matter of survival in the eons preceding knowledge of or access to analgesics and antibiotics. The Rappahannock, one of the numerous tribes of Virginia, were well acquainted with jimsonweed, though certainly by another name. Decoctions of leaves were made into salves for the treatment of wounds and their incident inflammation and formed into poultices for fevers and pneumonias. The seeds and leaves were known to be poisonous, a knowledge shared with other major east cost tribal communities like the Iroquois. This was undoubtedly the result of trial and error by more than one individual in the distant past, the learned lore remembered. While local Indians could have warned the English soldiers in advance of their folly, it is more likely that they would have encouraged it as relations were strained at best. The Cherokee, inland toward the Appalachians, smoked dried jimsonweed leaves as a treatment for asthma, which would seem to be at odds with reason. [5] This latter use, however, became one of the most popular treatments in Europe in the 19th century. Smoke from what was called stramonium (from the species name) was recommended by physicians all over the world. The noted French novelist Marcel Proust wrote to his mother that “I had an attack of asthma and incessant running at the nose, which obliged me to walk all doubled up and light anti-asthma cigarettes at every tobacconist’s I passed.” [6] There is every reason to believe this to have been effective, preceding modern inhalers that alleviate asthmatic symptoms.
Jimsonweed that was once a weed from Jamestown became in time one of global apothecary’s standard prescriptions as stramonium. The 16th century English herbalist John Gerard wrote of the thornapple, a name that refers to the large, spiny fruits of jimsonweed, noting that its blossom was “offending to the head when it is smelled unto.” Juice from thornapples “boiled with hogs grease to the form of an unguent or salve, cures all inflammations whatsoever” and “doth most speedily cure new and fresh wounds.” [7] That this is similar in form and function to its uses among Amerindians lends credence to at least its vulnerary qualities. By the early 20th century, stramonium was included in most national Pharmacopoeias … the process to extract the medicinal compounds from jimsonweed leaves was specified in the United States Pharmacopeia. A yield 0.35 percent of its alkaloids, noted for their “unpleasant narcotic odor and a bitter, nauseous taste,” was expected with a collector able to capitalize its leaves for 2 to 5 cents a pound. In addition to dilation of the eye, a feature common to many Nightshade Family plants (especially belladonna, or beautiful woman, as eyes thus darkened were considered alluring), narcotic, diuretic, and anodyne uses were prescribed. As a validation of the common practice “in asthma, they are frequently employed in the form of cigarettes which are smoked or the fumes are inhaled.” [8]
What to make of this unusual plant that cooled Jamestown’s summer heat, evoked outbursts of exuberance from staid British soldiers, and healed the bloody wounds of war? Datura stramonium almost surely evolved in the tropics of the Americas and made its way north and south into more temperate regions. [9] It achieved this feat with an egg-shaped seed capsule that is covered with prickles―a botanical oddity. [10] Since plants are sessile, they must employ external agents to disperse seed. One of the more successful ways of doing this is to grow a fruit that is both colorful and sweet to attract animals like apples. Consumption of the fruit results of the deposition of the seeds, hardened against gastric acids, in a mound of excrement, an ideal fertilizer, at some distance from the parent. Spines or thorns have the opposite purpose. The sharp points that stick into sensitive mouth tissues are there to prevent animal ingestion. This is why they are normally found along stems in plants like roses and barberries. Jimsonweed evolved a novel solution. The seed pods burst open (technically called dehiscence) with enough force to eject the seeds up to 10 feet from the parent plant. If a stream happens to be within range, the seeds are buoyant and can stay afloat for over a week. Each plant can contain as many as 50 seed pods, ejecting over 30,000 seeds that are both consistent and persistent. In one field trial over 90 percent of the seeds germinated almost 40 years after pod ejection. Once established, it can wreak havoc on crops, notably reducing crop yields of soybeans and tomatoes by up to 50 percent. [11] The plant from Jamestown is a serious weed.
But that is only half of the story. Jimsonweed produces powerful chemicals that deter almost all herbivores from eating it, killing many that try … but most don’t since the alkaloids that act as deterrents are distinctly bitter in taste. Bitter is one of the five nominal tastes sensed by most animals that indicates poison, just as sweet is nutrition, salty is minerals, sour is unripe and savory is protein. The most common form of animal jimsonweed poisoning is contaminated hay as silage for cows and horses and contaminated grain fed to chickens. This occurs when harvesters fail to carefully inspect fields for infestation prior to threshing. [12] The most serious jimsonweed poisoning problem is humans, particularly juveniles for which the lure of intoxication is unconstrained by the wisdom of years. The main culprit is atropine, mnemonically described by clinicians as having symptoms of being “blind as a bat, mad as a hatter, red as a beet, hot as a hare, dry as a bone, the bowel and bladder lose their tone, and the heart runs alone.” Since over 80 percent of all cases also involve hallucinations, the “tune in … turn on” experience is considered by some to be worth the risk; there were over 300 emergency room visits in 1993 alone. [13] A popular medicinal plant field guide provides the following dire warning concerning jimsonweed: “Violently toxic. Causes severe hallucinations. Many fatalities recorded.” The bold typeface is in the original. [14]
The effects of jimsonweed are a matter of neuroscience. The circuitry that sends signals to trigger heartbeats and climb stairs relies on neurons that convey action impulse to muscle momentum. Neurons operate in sequences with the dendrite at one end signaling to the axon in the next in line across a gap called a synapse. The signal is carried across the synapse with molecules called neurotransmitters. There are about twenty, including the well known serotonin which is linked to the management of anger and dopamine which signals pleasure. Acetylcholine (ACh) is not so well known, but it is perhaps the most important. It is defined as “the neurotransmitter at many synapses in the peripheral and central nervous systems, including the neuromuscular junction.” Atropine, the alkaloid produced by jimsonweed disrupts the proper operation of acetylcholine. In the lexicon of psychiatry, it is an agonist. ACh is the primary neurotransmitter of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) which carries out most if not all of unconscious signals that operate the organs like pulsing hearts and breathing lungs. This includes the sympathetic nervous system, which is essentially crisis control central with its functions known suggestively as the four F’s (fight, flight, fright and sex). ACh also operates to trigger the conscious operation of muscles, the essence of all bodily movement from walking to chewing. [15] Any disruption to the proper operation of acetylcholine is bound to have consequence, which jimsonweed does. Mad-apple is an apt common name.
References:
1. Center for Agriculture and Bioscience Compendium https://www.cabidigitallibrary.org/doi/10.1079/cabicompendium.18006
2. Boorstin, D. The Americans, The Colonial Experience, The Easton Press, Norwalk, Connecticut, 1958. pp 209-210.
3. Mapp, A. Virginia Experiment, The Old Dominion’s Role in the Making of America 1607-1781, Lanham, Maryland, 1985, pp 119-172.
4. Beverly, R. The History of Virginia, in Four Parts, London, Printed for F. Fayram, J. Clarke, 1722 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/32721/pg32721-images.html#Page_109
5. The Native American Ethnobotanical Database http://naeb.brit.org/uses/search/?string=datura
6. Jackson, M. “”Divine Stramonium”: The Rise and Fall of Smoking for Asthma”. Medical History. April 2010 pp 171–194. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2844275/
7. Gerard, J. Generall Historie of Plantes, London, 1597, pp 191-193 https://archive.org/details/herballorgeneral00gera/page/n5/mode/2up
8. Henkel, A. “Jimson weed”. American Medicinal Leaves and Herbs. U.S. Government Printing Office. 1911. p. 30.
9. “Datura stramonium”. Germplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN). Agricultural Research Service (ARS), USDA https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/taxon/taxonomydetail?id=13323
10. Niering, W. and Olmstead, N. National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1998, pp 802-803.
11. Michigan State University Department of Plant, Soil, and Microbial Sciences https://www.canr.msu.edu/weeds/extension/jimsonweed
12. Cornell University Weed Identification for New York State https://blogs.cornell.edu/weedid/jimsonweed/
13. Arnett A. “Jimson Weed (Datura stramonium) poisoning”. Clinical Toxicology Review. December 1995. Volume 18 Number 3. https://www.erowid.org/plants/datura/datura_info5.shtml
14. Duke, J. and Foster, S. A Field Guide to Medicinal Plants and Herbs, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 2000, p 205.
15. Bear, M, Connors, B., and Paradiso, M. Neuroscience, Exploring the Brain, 4th edition, Wolters Kluwer, Philadelphia, 2016,
Hiker's Notebook 