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Treating nightshade poisoning with daffodils: A bad idea
- Scopolamine is the major deliriant associated (possibly spuriously) with witches, including from henbane, belladonna and mandragora (also the brujas' trumpets: datura and brugmansia). It is quite dangerous.
- Scopolamine is also used medically (for motion sickness, postoperative nausea, inducing dry mouth).
- Medical overdose of scopolamine is treated with cholinesterase inhibitors, also used in Alzheimer's treatment.
- Galantamine is a strong enough CI to be approved by the FDA for ALzheimer
- Rivastigmine, another in the same class, resolved scopolamine overdose very effectively via transdermal patches, according to one case study (10.1016/j.euroneuro.2017.05.006).
- Galantamine is of course named for the galanthus (=snowdrop), but it's also present in narcisus (=daffodil). the Spanish variety (N. hispanicus) had the highest concentration on leaves, but the snowball cultivar performed even better as CI in vitro. (10.1016/j.indcrop.2012.07.034) This might be due to its high concentration of a different CI, sanguinine.
- Sadly snowdrops and daffodils are themselves quite toxic, with a lot of poison in the bulbs, but the whole plant does damage. Apparently this is mostly due to lycorine. Lycorine is usually concentrated in the bulbs, but there's a lot on leaves too, and I couldn't find any sources about whether the leaf-heavy-galantamine plants are also leaf-heavy-licorine.
- Using snowdrop and narcisus as an antidote for nightshade poisoning turns out to be nontrivial.