X. Ethnomedicine

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Throughout history, an array of plants have been documented for treating various ailments. Among which, species of the genus Datura stand out for their infamous use in both medicinal and cultural contexts, as analgesics, hallucinogens, and poisons. Alkaloids, a prominent class of specialized metabolites, are celebrated for their medicinal properties, and Datura species produce a diverse range of tropane alkaloids, making them a significant resource for natural products discovery. Despite their medicinal potential, tropane alkaloids present contamination risks in numerous food sources, including teas, spices, grains, honey, and herbal supplements. Consequently, the development of new analytical techniques for identifying novel tropane alkaloids and detecting known ones has great importance. Employing analytical approaches using LC-MS/MS, we have found previously unidentified alkaloids in Datura. These findings not only broaden our comprehension of Datura’s metabolic diversity, but also offer insights into its traditional uses and evolutionary adaptations.

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Across contemporary psychedelic counterculture, ‘plant medicine’ is celebrated as healing and spiritual in association with indigenous ritual use, yet also imagined to be optimized in Silicon Valley—by splicing ayahuasca and psilocybin, for example.  In the 1990s Ketamine was a ‘horse tranquilizer’ or ‘designer drug’, yet is now also celebrated as a ‘psychedelic’—and semantically continuous with indigenous healing as a consequence.  My ethnography explores New Age youth culture at massive psytrance parties across Europe, where I am positioned as a popular educator and interact with psychonauts, “chaos magicians” and other techno-utopian “digital nomads” who smoke synthetic DMT sprayed on plants and tell of “machine elves”.  I explore primitive accumulation in relation to the legalization and medicalization of mind-altering plants, and how participants in the neoliberal “psychedelic renaissance” shift between celebrating nature and its improvement, wherein indigenous knowledge is referenced and displaced in the marketing of psychedelics for workplace use.