Another is Kalmia latifolia, the mountain laurel, the state flower of Pennsylvania. According to records at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History [1], "Benjamin Smith Barton (an American botanist in the late 1700s) wrote that in the autumn and winter of the year 1790, many people died in Pennsylvania from the effects of wild honey, collected from Kalmia plants."
>Eat a teaspoonful, and you might feel pleasantly warm and slightly lightheaded. Eat more than a few tablespoons, and your heart rate can drop to life-threatening levels.
Reminds me of the Futurama episode with the space bee honey. Wonder if the writers got the inspiration from this.
I can imagining that being scary two different ways. I would not want to wake up because whatever this thing is, I love it. I'm having an amazing time, dream or not.
Wait till you're 65. It's more than disbelief, people start to actively moronify you. I'm not that age yet, but I've see it happening to purple my parent's age
For you guys that watch YouTube. The channel is Mass Spec Everything. Here are a couple of interesting videos he did on various honey brands and regions. Pretty interesting stuff.
Discussed in a 2017 National Geographic article[0], archived here[1]. Notice the article text's description of the honey being sold on the black market. Seems that now everyone is shopping there.
Old Vice documentary about it. This is where I had first heard about it. Used to be really hard to find the honey online, like only one or 2 places that sold it
If anyone's interested there's also this recently released documentary in french by Hit the Road, where they show the process of collecting the honey and also the ritual side of it.
They mention the toxin comes from the rhododendron flower. I remember camping in North Carolina once and one of the people I was with warned against burning anything from the rhododendron in the area, as supposedly the smoke would give you the runs.
I mostly thought they were joking, and I have no idea what specific type of rhododendron would be there (if any), but maybe there’s a glimmer of merit to it? Or maybe they were thinking of a different plant?
This was somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains, if I remember correctly.
I was wondering if someone would mention this. I grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of NC and heard this all my life. Once had a camp councilor who would inspect every twig to make sure there was none burned.
I also burned Rhododendron wood in campfires and brush fires more times than I can count without any adverse effects that I know of. My back yard was completely overgrown with the stuff. I’m sure the smoke inhalation of any fire is worse for you than anything specific about rhododendrons.
Fascinating. So it seems to have been used for parasitic and fungal skin treatments, angina, and to induce miscarriage. With no doubt a very narrow band of error.
You remind me of Episode 2 of the Apothecary Diaries: several Chinese troops were poisoned after eating local food. The food was fine, the wood used for fire and eating utensils was the source. I wonder if something like that ever actually happened?
I imagine the native also built up tolerance over generations, not just knowledge as the article contends . Dying from a specific action is quite the evolutionary motivator
As with many psychoactive plants and foods, the adaptation here isn't so much a genetic/physiological tolerance as it is an often in-depth body of knowledge/practices for how to utilize the drug/medicine safely. Look at the notorious Datura for example which can cause you to go into a delirious state for over 2 days. The amount of preparation, processing, and knowledge that goes into administering it safely is lost on modern day kids who simply read an Erowid experience about a powerful psychoactive plant that likely grows locally.
Most kids that are ingesting the devil's trumpet are doing so explicitly because they're chasing after the anticholinergic toxidrome and the badge of honor. "Safe" doses of nightshades like datura and belladonna dilate your pupils and make you sleepy. That's not what they're interested in the plant for.
Datura is fucking dangerous. Deliriants are no joke in general. That one in particular is really dangerous because it grows absolutely anywhere and is very easy to identify.
Source; chemistry was my favorite class in high school and college because it helped me understand how to extract what I wanted from plants like jimsonweed and Mimosa trees.
That's actually a good point that I hadn't considered.
I still maintain that deliriants are for nobody though.
DMT is fine in moderation. But anything that is labeled as a deliriant will not give you any kind of joy or knowledge. It will just fuck you for a lot longer than you think.
It's also extraordinarily easy and discreet to grow cubensis shrooms. The age of buying awesome RCs online are OVER, there's nothing left but horrible, horrible chemicals. Do not go there
Actually it’s entering a new era with GLP1s and peptides. Nothing will replace “our” era which ushered in bitcoin, dark net markets and hell true online community which met its end with the analogue act…
But it’s a new rebirth. Peptides are here and are unscheduled and do not fall under the analog act. Everything that was experienced in that early 10s era is happening all over again now :)
> If you maintain the pairing with the statement about the concentration in the honey varying, it's somewhat harder to argue that it is overblown.
Those are two separate worries connected by an "and". I'm not arguing worry #2 is overblown.
And it sounds like the problem of variance is that it isn't small. If one batch can be 5x as strong as another (made up number), then even a pretty good medicinal response curve leaves you vulnerable to that much variance.
I also wondered why, if it has this effect, it has not been purified to a standard concentration (or synthesized) and used to treat high blood pressure. Possibly because accidental overdose can be fatal?
There could be a case for doing it for people that will refuse anything but natural if it doesn't have other problems, assuming not synthesized, but there's a problem of funding the safety studies and standardization process if a patent is unlikely to result.
> Many to many are born. For the superfluous ones the state was devised... The state, I call it, where all are poison-drinkers, the good and the bad: the state, where all lose themselves, the good and the bad: the state, where the slow suicide of all—is called “life.”
But why would we poison our society by trying to protect these superfluous ones? They may not deserve death, but the more we eliminate the consequences of irresponsible actions, the more irresponsibly people can be and survive, thrive, and even rise to the throne.
This is an unhinged, eugenics-adjacent take that only reflects on your lack of imagination/undeserved faith in your own intellect.
Everyone thinks they are the exception. You are not. You have eaten things you did not vet. You haven’t been poisoned by bathroom products (yet). You are alive because of protections like this.
Most OD’s and such with drugs happens when someone trusts someone. They don’t just pick them up off the ground and go town. It’s basically the whole idea behind food safety. We don’t just expect everyone to know every detail of everything they consume.
This article seems rather reckless. They admit that there is insufficient evidence to secure the safety of consuming ghost pipe, and go on to talk about creating an ethanol extraction (intended for consumption), without really explaining why one would extract with ethanol.
I’m all for wild medicinal remedies but in 2026 we could take a slightly more scientific approach than a paper from 1889.
Funny though, it grows in my back yard, perhaps I could find I way to study the full chemical composition. I do certainly lack the equipment however.
Joe Rogan endorses consuming mad honey according to the copy on this site: https://realmadhoney.com/products/mad-honey-us. So there is an entire supply chain from Nepal to the consumer.
saw a video on youtube the other week, some guys made mead out of this stuff. Claimed the effects were still present. I wonder what the concentration of the psychedelic comounds ends up being vs raw honey.
Just like many of the novel synthetiser drugs, unknown substances are very dangerous. The culprit here seems to be the victim thought he was consuming regular honey.
I suspect if you're buying mad honey that's collected wild on cliff faces and then imported from Nepal, it is likely pretty clear to whoever got it that it is special.
Maybe kid could accidentally get a hold of it, or other adults that didn't buy it. However, from the article (as far as I could get before the ads locked me out) there is a type that tends to have this happen to them (middle aged men IIRC). So it seems to be intentional.
Mushrooms can be a different type than what’s on the label.
Fermented products may contain poisons from dangerous bacteria. If you’ve heard about entire churches full of people dying in South America from bad food, it most likely fermented corn.
Expired food products may be contaminated with bacteria. (Unless they canned, jarred, or too dry Etc.)
Fresh apples may contain enough pesticide to make you sick. Wipe them off with a paper towel before use if you’re not peeling them.
Caffeine is especially interesting, as it is commonly consumed and there are incidents where people are hospitalized because they accidentally ate too much - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8824417/ (referencing the 6000 mg here)
> * Caffeine powder (another game of guess the dosage)
I found a study saying "the caffeine content in tested dietary supplements is 4–35% higher than the declared amount in most cases" which doesn't seem very dangerous.
You can overdose on caffeine in other ways, of course.
99 comments:
This is the original article and has better images IMHO.
https://theconversation.com/mad-honey-that-can-stop-your-hea...
But the risk is actually more broad than the article points out. Any honey where enough of the nectar comes from rhododendrons could be dangerous.
Grayanotoxin containing Rhododendron occur not just in Nepal, but in Turkey, North America, and Europe.
I think there are other plants that the bees concentrate the toxins of.
Another is Kalmia latifolia, the mountain laurel, the state flower of Pennsylvania. According to records at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History [1], "Benjamin Smith Barton (an American botanist in the late 1700s) wrote that in the autumn and winter of the year 1790, many people died in Pennsylvania from the effects of wild honey, collected from Kalmia plants."
[1] https://carnegiemnh.org/collected-day-1959/
I know that West Virginia has entire Rhododendron forests. They are pretty awesome.
And yet we are only hearing of this now, whereas botulism risk for example is a widely known reason to avoid honey for infants.
It must end up being rare for some other reason.
The posted one also removes a link to the original author's Google scholar page.
And can actually be read, the other is so as-ridden that I just gave up (I know I should probably install some blocker in my phone, but I'm lazy).
>Eat a teaspoonful, and you might feel pleasantly warm and slightly lightheaded. Eat more than a few tablespoons, and your heart rate can drop to life-threatening levels.
Reminds me of the Futurama episode with the space bee honey. Wonder if the writers got the inspiration from this.
You’ve got to wake up.
I have a genuine fear that someone will stop me in the street one day, grab me by the shoulders and say
> You have to wake up. Please wake up. We're all here at your bedside waiting for you to wake up. Just wake up. We love you. Please.
And I'm convinced it's because of that episode.
I write this message on thrift store kids doodle tablets regularly.
I can imagining that being scary two different ways. I would not want to wake up because whatever this thing is, I love it. I'm having an amazing time, dream or not.
Off topic, but I totally recommend you check out Total Recall (1990)
"Wake up, Mr. Quaid!"
We have to find you first. The 4D labyrinth you're in is almost impossible to navigate.
My genuine fear is that you’ll just brush me off with a sensible chuckle and keep sleepwalking on down the street.
But seriously, I find that the one recurring theme in nightmares I have is that people simply won’t believe me.
Wait till you're 65. It's more than disbelief, people start to actively moronify you. I'm not that age yet, but I've see it happening to purple my parent's age
Or women of any age in certain contexts, like buying a car, or explaining to a doctor that some abdominal pain is not imaginary or temporary.
No no. Noooooo
I know of rhododendron honey from killing Pompey’s army in around 60bc.
That was you??
Let me get this straight: you feel lightheaded because your heart function is compromised? Sign me up!
For you guys that watch YouTube. The channel is Mass Spec Everything. Here are a couple of interesting videos he did on various honey brands and regions. Pretty interesting stuff.
https://youtu.be/FTaRFX4bKhI
https://youtu.be/FCFtVu6hFdw
Discussed in a 2017 National Geographic article[0], archived here[1]. Notice the article text's description of the honey being sold on the black market. Seems that now everyone is shopping there.
[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/honey-hu...
[1] https://archive.is/Xdd01
That said, clinicians have been writing about this for some time, eg [2] from 2007:
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17540490/
Old Vice documentary about it. This is where I had first heard about it. Used to be really hard to find the honey online, like only one or 2 places that sold it
https://youtu.be/wDOvmhqvIA8
If anyone's interested there's also this recently released documentary in french by Hit the Road, where they show the process of collecting the honey and also the ritual side of it.
https://youtu.be/r-jZyTP4K4g
They mention the toxin comes from the rhododendron flower. I remember camping in North Carolina once and one of the people I was with warned against burning anything from the rhododendron in the area, as supposedly the smoke would give you the runs.
I mostly thought they were joking, and I have no idea what specific type of rhododendron would be there (if any), but maybe there’s a glimmer of merit to it? Or maybe they were thinking of a different plant?
This was somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains, if I remember correctly.
Another one is Oleander, heard stories of people burning this off in incinerators and inhaling the smoke and getting very sick
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11946565/
I was wondering if someone would mention this. I grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of NC and heard this all my life. Once had a camp councilor who would inspect every twig to make sure there was none burned.
I also burned Rhododendron wood in campfires and brush fires more times than I can count without any adverse effects that I know of. My back yard was completely overgrown with the stuff. I’m sure the smoke inhalation of any fire is worse for you than anything specific about rhododendrons.
https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/questions/7100/are-rhodod...
You also don't want to burn poison ivy because the oil (urushiol) is not something you want in your lungs if you are reactive to it.
Florida's manchineel tree (with the tiny apples) is the OG wood you don't burn because it blinds you.
Or oleander [1], which people occasionally poison themselves with by burning its wood.
1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/immunology-and-microbio...
Fascinating. So it seems to have been used for parasitic and fungal skin treatments, angina, and to induce miscarriage. With no doubt a very narrow band of error.
But you also don't touch it, eat it, or stand under it when it rains, so the opportunity to burn it by mistake is limited.
You remind me of Episode 2 of the Apothecary Diaries: several Chinese troops were poisoned after eating local food. The food was fine, the wood used for fire and eating utensils was the source. I wonder if something like that ever actually happened?
i believe ingestion is the primary concern, but the smoke can also lead to symptoms, yes.
That makes sense. We definitely weren’t going to eat random plants, but we could have easily accidentally grabbed some for firewood or kindling.
I imagine the native also built up tolerance over generations, not just knowledge as the article contends . Dying from a specific action is quite the evolutionary motivator
As with many psychoactive plants and foods, the adaptation here isn't so much a genetic/physiological tolerance as it is an often in-depth body of knowledge/practices for how to utilize the drug/medicine safely. Look at the notorious Datura for example which can cause you to go into a delirious state for over 2 days. The amount of preparation, processing, and knowledge that goes into administering it safely is lost on modern day kids who simply read an Erowid experience about a powerful psychoactive plant that likely grows locally.
Most kids that are ingesting the devil's trumpet are doing so explicitly because they're chasing after the anticholinergic toxidrome and the badge of honor. "Safe" doses of nightshades like datura and belladonna dilate your pupils and make you sleepy. That's not what they're interested in the plant for.
Tbf for me, erowid introduced the idea and taught me how to safely consume it.
Then said friends I introduced it to decided to freewheel it once and did end up in a state for 2 days.
So I guess information is power or something.
Datura is fucking dangerous. Deliriants are no joke in general. That one in particular is really dangerous because it grows absolutely anywhere and is very easy to identify.
Source; chemistry was my favorite class in high school and college because it helped me understand how to extract what I wanted from plants like jimsonweed and Mimosa trees.
Also no one should do that.
As someone who as extracted dmt from mimosa hostilis, more people should do it than buy god knows what RCs on the darkweb.
That's actually a good point that I hadn't considered.
I still maintain that deliriants are for nobody though.
DMT is fine in moderation. But anything that is labeled as a deliriant will not give you any kind of joy or knowledge. It will just fuck you for a lot longer than you think.
It's also extraordinarily easy and discreet to grow cubensis shrooms. The age of buying awesome RCs online are OVER, there's nothing left but horrible, horrible chemicals. Do not go there
Actually it’s entering a new era with GLP1s and peptides. Nothing will replace “our” era which ushered in bitcoin, dark net markets and hell true online community which met its end with the analogue act…
But it’s a new rebirth. Peptides are here and are unscheduled and do not fall under the analog act. Everything that was experienced in that early 10s era is happening all over again now :)
What's RC? Recreational Chemical?
Research chemicals. Typically analogues, and stuff like that.
> Dying from a specific action is quite the evolutionary motivator
Only if it is before you breed, or you kill your own kids.
> The problem is that the gap between a medicinal dose and a toxic dose is very small
What's this claim based on? I don't think it's the rat study linked nearby. I looked through it and they didn't really compare doses.
If it's a linear effect on dropping blood pressure, that seems like an overblown way to talk about it. If it's something else, I'd love to hear more.
If you maintain the pairing with the statement about the concentration in the honey varying, it's somewhat harder to argue that it is overblown.
The concentration varies considerably due to bees harvesting pollen from different flowers and from some batches of honey being mixed and some not.
> If you maintain the pairing with the statement about the concentration in the honey varying, it's somewhat harder to argue that it is overblown.
Those are two separate worries connected by an "and". I'm not arguing worry #2 is overblown.
And it sounds like the problem of variance is that it isn't small. If one batch can be 5x as strong as another (made up number), then even a pretty good medicinal response curve leaves you vulnerable to that much variance.
I also wondered why, if it has this effect, it has not been purified to a standard concentration (or synthesized) and used to treat high blood pressure. Possibly because accidental overdose can be fatal?
Grayanotoxin is a neurotoxin with a lot of unpleasant side effects. It would make a terrible drug for high blood pressure.
because we already have actual medication that does that in a controllable and well-characterized way
There could be a case for doing it for people that will refuse anything but natural if it doesn't have other problems, assuming not synthesized, but there's a problem of funding the safety studies and standardization process if a patent is unlikely to result.
'Natural' is either the bees knee’s, or a death trap. Take your pick.
edit:typo
If you buy psychoactive honey/drugs online, it is on you to find out what it is and what kind of dosage you should take.
It's on you to figure out the dosage you can take, and it should be on the producer to label the dosage they're selling.
Good luck with that, doesn’t really seem like the kind of seller you can take to the FDA
Maybe they'll get onboard with UNTP https://untp.unece.org/
Yes but also we need to deal with the reality of the world, which is 1) not everyone is going to and 2) they don’t deserve to die because of it.
> Many to many are born. For the superfluous ones the state was devised... The state, I call it, where all are poison-drinkers, the good and the bad: the state, where all lose themselves, the good and the bad: the state, where the slow suicide of all—is called “life.”
But why would we poison our society by trying to protect these superfluous ones? They may not deserve death, but the more we eliminate the consequences of irresponsible actions, the more irresponsibly people can be and survive, thrive, and even rise to the throne.
This is an unhinged, eugenics-adjacent take that only reflects on your lack of imagination/undeserved faith in your own intellect.
Everyone thinks they are the exception. You are not. You have eaten things you did not vet. You haven’t been poisoned by bathroom products (yet). You are alive because of protections like this.
I think to unabashedly declare that you know what someone does or does not deserve requires just as much if not more faith.
I agree they don’t “deserve” to die, but someone comfortable with that level of risk management is quite hard to fully protect from themselves.
Most OD’s and such with drugs happens when someone trusts someone. They don’t just pick them up off the ground and go town. It’s basically the whole idea behind food safety. We don’t just expect everyone to know every detail of everything they consume.
Not only they don't deserve to die - they deserve to not die from this, no matter their level of risk taking.
Some people survive by sheer luck.
Just use ghost pipes for your grayanotoxin.
Had to look that up and stumbled across this:
> The information about ghost pipe containing grayanotoxin is based on a single source from 1889. (Yes 1889, not 1989!)
https://unrulygardening.com/ghost-pipe-faqs/
They are also listed as endangered in several states. I see them with some regularity in Wisconsin, even had one in my yard a few years back.
This article seems rather reckless. They admit that there is insufficient evidence to secure the safety of consuming ghost pipe, and go on to talk about creating an ethanol extraction (intended for consumption), without really explaining why one would extract with ethanol. I’m all for wild medicinal remedies but in 2026 we could take a slightly more scientific approach than a paper from 1889. Funny though, it grows in my back yard, perhaps I could find I way to study the full chemical composition. I do certainly lack the equipment however.
I’m surprised it’s even legit. I’ve heard of aphrodisiac honey that’s just been laced with viagra.
Joe Rogan endorses consuming mad honey according to the copy on this site: https://realmadhoney.com/products/mad-honey-us. So there is an entire supply chain from Nepal to the consumer.
saw a video on youtube the other week, some guys made mead out of this stuff. Claimed the effects were still present. I wonder what the concentration of the psychedelic comounds ends up being vs raw honey.
Just like many of the novel synthetiser drugs, unknown substances are very dangerous. The culprit here seems to be the victim thought he was consuming regular honey.
In a linked article it said something like 77% of cases were deliberate consumption of mad honey for thereputic qualities.
Metta Beshay, my new favorite drug explainer, has a neat video on the subject: https://youtu.be/5X3dCBQYdek
that reminds me to buy some, anyone tried it already?
“You don’t want to sell me death sticks”
A lot of things sold online can stop your heart.
A reasonable person wouldn't expect honey to stop their heart though.
I suspect if you're buying mad honey that's collected wild on cliff faces and then imported from Nepal, it is likely pretty clear to whoever got it that it is special.
Maybe kid could accidentally get a hold of it, or other adults that didn't buy it. However, from the article (as far as I could get before the ads locked me out) there is a type that tends to have this happen to them (middle aged men IIRC). So it seems to be intentional.
There are no longer any reasonable people with the shift in demographics.
What do you mean?
Then again, many reasonable people would avoid, rather than specifically seek to buy raw honey from India (or the vicinity).
Name a few. I want to be an informed person.
Tobacco can make you really sick if ingested.
Anything distilled may contain methanol.
Mushrooms can be a different type than what’s on the label.
Fermented products may contain poisons from dangerous bacteria. If you’ve heard about entire churches full of people dying in South America from bad food, it most likely fermented corn.
Expired food products may be contaminated with bacteria. (Unless they canned, jarred, or too dry Etc.)
Fresh apples may contain enough pesticide to make you sick. Wipe them off with a paper towel before use if you’re not peeling them.
Yohimbine is popular for weightloss but its dangerous if not dosed correctly
* Sibutramine (weight loss medication)
* Suldenafil or tadalafil (ED medication)
* SARMS (steroids in general)
* Caffeine powder (another game of guess the dosage)
Caffeine is especially interesting, as it is commonly consumed and there are incidents where people are hospitalized because they accidentally ate too much - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8824417/ (referencing the 6000 mg here)
> * Caffeine powder (another game of guess the dosage)
I found a study saying "the caffeine content in tested dietary supplements is 4–35% higher than the declared amount in most cases" which doesn't seem very dangerous.
You can overdose on caffeine in other ways, of course.
Escorts, ideally.
The dose makes the poison, or something like that.
- Sand (inhaled)
- Air (intravenous)
- Blood thinners or rat poison
Pre-workout supplements
Water (in the right dosage)
Token prices without cache.
Knife.
Taurine
Exactly, thank you.