Column: Strange brews and deadly blooms

Welcome, everyone. As we continue our month of “Oddtober” columns, we’re coming to you from the desolate and spectral garden crypt. It seems that after quaffing many mugs of my home-brewed, barrel-aged, triple-strength compost tea, my altered dark side suddenly reared up — "Compost Walking." 

Blame him for today’s column content, which is purely for history's sake. This publication does not promote the use of any of the following:

• In honor of this bewitching time, here is the original secret recipe for “Witches Flying Potion.” Gather henbane, belladonna and mandrake root, and make a salve. Next, slather liberally on your skin. It’s toxic but will make you feel as if you’re flying. These beauties are in the large family of nightshade plants, which also include datura, tomatoes, eggplant, potatoes and tobacco — some deadly, some delicious. Yin and yang. Toxicity comes from all parts of the plants — roots, berries and leaves — which contain potent tropane alkaloids.

• Bilsenkraut, or beer lettuce — it seems German brewers in the Bavarian Alps once wanted to add more “kick” to their beer, so they used toxic and hallucinogenic henbane to increase the high. To counter this, Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria in 1517 created Germany’s Purity Law, stating that beer could contain only water, barley and hops.

• Thomas Edison, in the late 19th century, drank a concoction called “Vin Mariani,” a French wine laced with cocaine. This helped him with “energy” to invent the light bulb — the original Red Bull?

• A real candy treat in the 1860s went by the unusual name “Arabian Gunje of Enchantment.” That’s right — candy laced with marijuana. A great Halloween treat; some things never change. Think gummies.

• A toxic parasitic fungus called ergot (Claviceps purpurea), a toxic alkaloid, may have been responsible for the witch hysteria in Salem, Massachusetts, during the winter of 1691. The fungus thrives in damp conditions and attaches to flowering cereal grasses like rye and wheat. Unknowingly, it was processed and eaten in contaminated bread. Symptoms included constricted blood vessels, burning skin sensations, seizures, nausea, gangrene and eventually death. It was believed to cause “St. Anthony’s Fire,” also known as dancing mania. In 1938, Albert Hofmann extracted lysergic acid from ergot, and in 1943 he discovered its hallucinogenic properties — thus giving the world LSD.

• In the 1800s, Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky experienced an epidemic known as “milk sickness.” The disease was unpredictable, untreatable and often fatal. Nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died in 1818 at age 34 from this illness. The cause was cattle eating a plant called white snakeroot (family Asteraceae). The cows’ milk became contaminated with the toxic chemical tremetol, which poisoned both humans and livestock. The plant is found in summer pastures, meadows and woodlands and is related to Joe-Pye weed.

• The No. 1 plant of mass destruction is Nicotiana tabacum, otherwise known as tobacco. Native to South America and dating to 5000 B.C., it was smoked by Native Americans 2,000 years ago. Today, it is the most widely grown nonfood crop, covering more than 7.7 million acres. Consumed by 1.3 billion people worldwide, it kills 5 million people annually. Global tobacco products are worth an estimated $800 billion. Tobacco is as addictive as they come, its leaves being used as legal tender in Virginia in 1612. By 1700 Virginia farms were exporting 38 million pounds of tobacco annually to England — helping to jump-start the use of enslaved labor to grow and harvest the profitable crop.

“Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.” — Mark Twain

Until next time — keep on truckin’.