💾 Archived View for transmom.love › herbalism › scopolamine-galantamine.gmi captured on 2023-07-22 at 16:25:47. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

More Information

⬅️ Previous capture (2022-04-28)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

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.