Botanicals Are Complicated, and That's a Good Thing

Botany is one of the oldest sciences, stemming from humanity’s pressing need to tell the helpers from the killers among the pullulating flora. Back when I was in short pants, the height of folk wisdom about poison ivy was that you needed to avoid any plant with three leaves in a bunch. Today, you can find a wonderful chapter on Botanical Dermatology in the Electronic Textbook of Dermatology where besides testing your woodlands savvy with visual quizzes you can learn that the allergen urushiol “avidly binds to skin” and that “exuberant bathing may increase the area of exposure.”

Those emotion-markers “avidity” and “exuberance” capture something of the mystery of allergy, and of our relationship with botanicals. Opium, for 5,000 years or more cultivated by humans as the last recourse against the evil of physical pain, is today in its many derivatives an angel and devil, providing succor to those who need it, slavery to those who don’t.

We always think that isolating the active principle will make things -- our relationship with the plant -- more predictable. A few years ago, it was all about utilizing high-tech molecules to selectively squelch the inflammation-related COX-2 enzyme while sparing the gastric lining-maintaining COX-1 enzyme. Now articles about alternative pain-treatments with dubious, uncertain mechanisms of action are appearing in surgical journals, and good old aspirin, even old-as-the-hills willow bark, are getting new respect, while opioids are in increasing disrepute.

In case you didn’t get the memo: Plants are insanely creative biochemical laboratories, and our relationships with them are just as complex. You think the active ingredient in willow bark extract is just salicin? I remember bonding with Jordan Peterson during my first month studying psychology at McGill by scoffing in unison over the first sentence in Kandel’s otherwise-masterful Principles of Neural Science (Third Edition): “…all behavior is a reflection of brain function.” What about the mind, man? Does mind = brain? Is that all there is? as Peggy Lee sang. Something in our pilgrim souls rebelled at the drear reductionism of it all. Does opium = morphine? Does coffee, tea, cola, or guayusa = their equivalents in anhydrous caffeine? Does any “active ingredient” in any botanical boil down to, reduce to, its equivalent as an isolated molecule? Not often.

Really, the delightful and maddening problem with all botanicals is that “it all depends” - on the conditions of growth, harvesting, processing, varietal, and consumption method. Back in the late 1990s I used to pop by my local Montreal magick shop for my favorite botanical relaxant. The last time the clerk covertly sold me some he warned darkly of Canada Customs busts and hinted I’d better buy some while he still had a stash.

I’d mix it with whole-fat milk, strain it, and drink it down in one swoop to achieve a barely-there buzz, like one-quarter of a beer. I’ve never since been able to find quite that same kind of mild kava kava. The “extracts” I’ve tried since don’t “do” anything, and the raw stuff I’ve bought over the Internet from Fiji and Vunuatu is potent enough to lay a Cyclops by the heels--not my idea of a mild tipple. After all the kava liver toxicity brouhaha, there’s been a recent call for a return to basic quality control standards.

This unquenchable quest for scientific understanding has led to some overshooting of the mark, with Kava Kava reduced to kavalactones, St-John’s Wort to hyperforin or hypericin, Ginkgo to ginkgolides and bilobalide, and grape skin to resveratrol alone. Botanicals pose a problem for a world geared toward discrete, patented molecules that do one thing very well. But if even high-tech molecules like fluoxetine don’t just do the one thing they’re designed to do — fluoxetine it turns out doesn’t really work only as a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor — how realistic is it to ascribe all the benefits of botanicals to one thing?

Our industry faces many challenges with quality control and identification of raw botanical ingredients. Once we’ve got that under control, then we could start exploring interesting quirks. I’m looking forward to that noble-cultivar-sourced, barely-there kava kava.