Datura

Datura, the thorn-apple or jimsonweed, is a genus of coarse plants of the nightshade family bearing large trumpet flowers and spiny seed-pods. It must be stated plainly at the outset that datura is violently poisonous: every part is rich in the tropane alkaloids atropine, hyoscyamine and scopolamine, and it has caused many deaths and severe poisonings among those who mistook it for something safe. This is fact and warning, not folklore. Its powerful and dangerous chemistry is also the reason it became, in several cultures, a plant of ritual and altered states, a use surrounded everywhere by strict ceremony and danger.

One of datura's alkaloids, scopolamine, has a genuine and continuing place in regulated modern medicine, most familiarly in the small transdermal patches worn behind the ear to prevent motion sickness and post-operative nausea, a tightly dosed pharmaceutical product bearing no resemblance in safety to the raw plant, since the effective medical dose is a tiny, precisely measured fraction of what the whole plant delivers. This gap between a carefully calibrated trace of a compound and the same compound taken from an uncontrolled plant is exactly why datura remains so dangerous outside clinical settings, however legitimate the isolated chemical's medical use has become.

In Hinduism the datura, dhatura, is sacred to Shiva, the great ascetic and lord of destruction and transformation: its trumpet flowers and spiny fruits are among the traditional offerings laid at his shrines, a plant of the wild and the dangerous fitting for the god who haunts the cremation ground. Across the Americas and Asia datura and its relatives appear in the ritual and shamanic practice of many peoples, taken under ceremonial control for visionary and initiatory purposes within living or historical traditions. These practices are described here from the outside and as belonging to their own settings; nothing in them makes the plant safe, and its use outside such controlled and traditional contexts is acutely dangerous. Sacred to Shiva and lethal in the hand, datura is a plant of the threshold between worlds and between life and death.

Datura has a long and separate criminal history distinct from its religious use: from the colonial period onward, Indian court and medical records document its use by robbers to surreptitiously incapacitate travellers before theft, a practice serious enough that nineteenth-century British colonial administrators in India kept statistics on datura-related poisoning cases, and similar incapacitating use of the plant by criminals has continued to be documented in more recent decades, a grim thread of real criminal history running alongside the plant's sacred standing and worth stating plainly as part of an honest account of a genuinely dangerous plant.