Wicked Plants (3 page)

ARECA CATECHU

The betel nut palm rises gracefully to over thirty feet tall on a slim, dark green trunk, sports glossy dark leaves, and produces lovely white flowers that perfume tropical breezes. This palm is also responsible for the betel nut, an addictive stimulant that turns teeth black and saliva red. Four hundred million people around the world consume it.

The custom of chewing betel nuts dates back thousands of years. Seeds from 5000 to 7000 BC have been found in a cave in Thailand, and a skeleton from 2680 BC was found in the Philippines with teeth stained by the juice of the betel nut.

Like coca, the betel nut is stashed between the cheek and gum and is usually mixed with a little something extra to give it a kick. In India thin slices of the nut are wrapped in a fresh betel leaf with some slaked lime (calcium hydroxide extracted from ashes), a few Indian spices, and sometimes tobacco. The betel leaf used for the outer wrapping is the leaf of
Piper betle
, or “betel” vine, a low-growing perennial whose leaves are also a stimulant. In fact, the betel nut palm gets its name from its association with this unrelated, but synergistic, plant.

This packet of leaf and nut, often called a quid, has a bitter, peppery taste, and it releases alkaloids similar to nicotine. Users get an energy boost, a mild high, and more saliva than they know what to do with.

There’s only one way to handle the constant flow of red saliva from your mouth when you chew betel: spit it out (swallowing causes nausea). In countries where betel nuts are popular, the sidewalks are stained with red saliva. If this sounds unpleasant, consider poet and essayist Stephen Fowler’s description: “There is an almost orgasmic satisfaction to be found in the experience of saliva-ducts open to full throttle. Delicious above all is the aftermath: when the chew is finished, your mouth is left astonishingly fresh and sweet. You feel uniquely cleansed, drained, and purified.”

The betel nut is enjoyed throughout India, Vietnam, Papau New Guinea, China, and in Taiwan, where the government is trying to crack down on “betel nut beauties,” scantily clad women who sit in roadside stands and sell their products to truck drivers.

In addition to its addictive qualities—withdrawal symptoms include headaches and sweats—regular chewing of betel nuts leads to an increased risk of mouth cancer and may also contribute
to asthma and heart disease. The use of betel is largely unregulated around the world, and public health officials worry that it could rival tobacco as a serious health threat.

Meet the Relatives
    The betel nut palm is perhaps the best-known member of the Areca genus, which contains about fifty different species of palms. Its partner in crime,
Piper betle
, is related to
P. nigrum
, the source of black pepper, and
P. methysticum
, source of the mellow herbal supplement kava.

RICINUS COMMUNIS

One autumn morning in 1978, communist defector and BBC journalist Georgi Markov walked across London’s Waterloo Bridge and stood waiting at a bus stop. He felt a painful jab in the back of his thigh and turned around in time to see a man pick up an umbrella, mumble an apology, and run away. Over the next few days, he developed a fever, had trouble speaking, began throwing up blood, and finally went to the hospital, where he died.

The pathologist found hemorrhages in almost every organ in his body. He also found a small puncture mark on Markov’s thigh and a tiny metal pellet in his leg. The pellet contained ricin, the poisonous extract of the castor bean plant. Although KGB agents were suspected of the crime, no one has ever been charged with the infamous “umbrella murder.”

Castor bean is a dramatic annual or tender perennial shrub with deeply lobed leaves, prickly seedpods, and large, speckled seeds. Some of the more popular garden varieties sport red stems and splashes of burgundy on the leaves. The plant can reach over ten feet tall in a single growing season and will grow into a substantial bush if it is not killed by a winter freeze. Only
the seeds are poisonous. Three or four of them can kill a person, although people do survive castor seed poisoning, either because the seeds aren’t well chewed or because they are purged quickly.

Castor oil has been a popular home remedy for centuries. (The ricin is removed during the manufacturing process.) A spoonful of the oil is an effective laxative. Castor oil packs are used externally to soothe sore muscles and inflammation. It’s also used in cosmetics and other products.

But even this natural vegetable oil is not entirely benign: in the 1920s Mussolini’s thugs used to round up dissidents and pour castor oil down their throats, inflicting a nasty case of diarrhea on them. Sherwood Anderson described the castor oil torture this way: “It was amusing to see Fascisti, wearing black shirts and looking very earnest, bottles sticking out of their hip pockets, chasing wildly down the street after a shrieking Communist. Then the capture, the terrible assault, hurling the luckless Red to the sidewalk, injecting the bottle into his mouth to the muffled accompaniment of blasphemy of all the gods and devils in the universe.”

Meet the Relatives
   The garden spurge called euphorbia, known for its irritating sap; the poinsettia, also mildly irritating but, contrary to rumor, not dangerous; and the rubber tree,
Hevea brasiliensis
, source of natural rubber, are all related to the castor bean.

Among nineteenth-century European explorers a story circulated about the existence of a West African bean that could determine a person’s guilt or innocence. According to local custom, the accused would swallow the bean, and what happened next would determine the outcome of the trial. If he vomited the bean, he was innocent, and if he died, he was guilty and got what he deserved. A third alternative existed: he could purge the nut, or evacuate it through his bowels, in which case he was also determined guilty and sold into slavery as punishment. (A thriving slave trade dating back to the early 1500s facilitated this quirk in the West African criminal justice system.)

This practice was known as trial by ordeal, and plants used for the trials were called ordeal beans. Several plants were used; judges could choose a less toxic plant when they wanted to influence the outcome in favor of the accused.

The ordeal poison of choice, the Calabar bean flourishes in warm, tropical climates; reaches up to fifty feet in height; and produces lovely red blossoms like those of the scarlet runner bean, followed by long, fat seed-pods and hefty dark brown beans.

The alkaloid physostigmine is responsible for the bean’s toxic effects. It works like nerve gas, disrupting the lines of communication between nerves and muscles. The result is copious saliva, seizures, and loss of control over bladder and bowels; eventually, as it becomes impossible to control the respiratory system, death by asphyxiation will occur.

Its chemical composition, along with a little armchair psychology, may explain why the plant had such different effects on the poor souls facing a trial by ordeal. A person who knew they were innocent might chew the bean quickly and swallow it with pride, ingesting a quick dose that would cause them to vomit before the bean could do more damage. A guilty party, dreading death, might take tiny, slow bites. Ironically, this attempt to prolong their own life would only hasten their death by delivering a gradual, well-digested dose of poison.

By the 1860s Calabar beans were the talk of London. Dr. James Livingstone returned from Africa with an account of a poison he called
muave
and noted that tribal chiefs would volunteer to drink the
muave
to prove their innocence, their strength of character, or to demonstrate that they had not been the victim of witchcraft. Mary Kingsley, a pioneering explorer who broke many taboos by traveling alone to previously unexplored parts of Africa, wrote in 1897 about an oath some tribal members would make before taking an ordeal poison they called Mbiam: “If I have been guilty of this crime . . . Then, Mbiam! THOU deal with me!”

These frightening chants did not stop intrepid British scientists from testing the beans on themselves. In an 1866 London
Times
story titled “Scientific Martyrdom,” Sir Robert Christison is described as having
come “very near killing himself in testing the effect of the recently introduced Calabar bean upon his own organism . . . and was as nearly face to face with death as a man well can be and yet escape its jaws.”

Employed in Madagascar, this relative to the suicide tree
Cerbera odol-lam
is poisonous in all parts; even smoke from the burning wood can be toxic. However, the nuts deliver the poison in the most convenient form for trial by ordeal.

Observed in use along the banks of the Congo, the curvy, reddish-brown bark of this tree is toxic enough to stop the heart. Ranchers know to keep their cattle away from it, because it could even kill a steer. Other names for the tree include “ordeal bark” and “doom bark.”

The seed of the strychnine tree is a potent enough poison to make it useful as an ordeal bean. Any prisoner offered
nux vomica
seeds to prove their innocence would be well advised to do some fast talking and suggest another ordeal poison, because the strychnine is far more likely to cause convulsions and death by asphyxiation than vomiting.