5 Foods Naturally Packed With Drugs
The most reliable way of getting drugs has always been Phil, who hangs out on Third Street. But a bunch of drugs that you might associate with labs and white powders can also be found naturally in food — often the last foods you’d think.
The exact quantities of drugs in these foods ranges between “small” and “extremely small,” but their very presence at all changes what you understand the drugs are.
Tomatoes Have Nicotine
Nicotine appears in some plants, of course. Tobacco is a plant. But tobacco is part of a larger family called Solanaceae, and a whole lot of other plants in the same family contain nicotine, too. These include eggplant, cauliflower and tomato. Solanaceae is also called the nightshade family, which is an objectively cool name, to the point that tobacco companies really dropped the ball by not adopting “nightshade” in their branding.
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While tomatoes predictably contain much less nicotine than tobacco, scientists find it useful to compare the quantity there to the amount of nicotine you get from secondhand smoke. To get the same nicotine hit as spending three hours around passive smoke, you could eat 250 grams of ripe tomato, which is around two medium fruits. If the tomato’s not ripe, you need just 100 grams, and if the tomatoes are pureed, you get that hit from just 23 grams.
Plants make nicotine because it’s a pesticide. It kills bugs that eat it, so bugs learn to avoid that plant. But a fair number of animals have evolved to survive nicotine just fine. Evolution is a constant arms race, and tomatoes need to get comfortable with being eaten.
Potatoes Have Benzodiazepines
Potatoes are in the nightshade family as well (to the point that nearly every part of the plant is extremely poisonous), so they contain nicotine, too. But in the 1980s, scientists found something more surprising buried in potatoes: benzodiazepines. That’s the family of drugs that include depressants like Xanax and Valium.
The scientists who discovered this were majorly surprised. We don’t get benzos from plants, the way we do nicotine or cocaine. We exclusively synthesize them in labs, through chemical pathways. You start out with, say, some 2-amino-5-chlorobenzophenone, then you work in some glycine ethyl ester hydrochloride so it undergoes cyclocondensation. But after decades of that, it turned out the exact target chemical already existed in a food people had been eating for thousands of years.
That’s because — though we didn’t understand it at the time — when we first synthesized benzodiazepines in the 1950s, we were trying to find the chemical that hit a specific receptor site in the brain. We now call that site the BzR, and we can only have evolved it to respond to a substance that already existed.
Nectar Has Caffeine
Caffeine is one of those drugs that you know come from plants, as it’s naturally found in coffee beans, tea leaves and doctor peppers. Much like nicotine, plants appear to have evolved caffeine as a pesticide. Insects that nibble on leaves with caffeine soon end up dead. But caffeine can also be found in the nectar of flowers, maxing out at concentrations nearly as high as in a cup of instant coffee, and here, it serves a different purpose.
Plants want insects to come eat their nectar. The level of caffeine in nectar is too low kill, and it’s too low to taste bitter and repel bees. But the level is still high enough to affect the bees’ minds.
Bees are able to remember tasty flowers where they feed, so they can come back to that type of flower for more. When nectar has caffeine, the bee’s memory heightens. This means caffeine increases a flower’s chance of being pollenated. It also means bees have been using caffeine as a study aid for millions of years longer than we have.
Soy Sauce Has GHB
GHB, or gamma-hydroxybutyric acid, is known as a roofie, a date-rape drug. We all must take care to make sure no one’s spiking our drinks, we were told. In recent years, though, we’ve come to realize that the drug isn’t used in that many rape cases. Predators are quite capable of operating using alcohol alone. The focus on date-rape drugs might even have ended up undermining many victims’ accusations, just because they weren’t drugged with anything but alcohol.
Incidentally, GHB is sometimes found in alcohol even without anyone spiking the drink. It forms during fermentation, which means it pops up naturally in some beers and wines — just, in too low a dose for it to get you high. It’s also in vinegar, which similarly comes from fermentation, and in soy sauce.
You’d have to drink some 100 liters of soy sauce to get a dose of GHB enough to affect you. Of course, drinking that much would kill you, for reasons unconnected with GHB. Chugging even half a liter of soy sauce might kill you, simply due to all the salt.
The Buffalo Sallow Wattle Has DMT
The most famous source for the drug DMT is Ayahuasca. Mash up some leaves of Ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi), and you’ll end up with a beverage that might change your life. There are other sources as well. The human body naturally produces DMT. You could get some by eating brains of humans, or of rats. We don’t recommend this.
You can also find it in some plants besides Ayahuasca. It exists naturally in buffalo sallow wattle, a plant in Australia from the same family as the pea.
If you want to eat DMT this way, you’ll run into some obstacles, both logistical and legal. Buffalo sallow wattle grows only on Mount Buffalo, one single plateau. It only grows on the high-altitude parts of this mountain, making this a truly rare plant, and making harvesting it a high-level quest. The plant’s tiny distribution also means the plant’s critically endangered. Even walking next to the plant is discouraged, for its protection, and eating it is against the law.
Fortunately, if you want to simulate the effects of DMT, you can simply look in a mirror and recite the words “buffalo sallow wattle” until all thought loses meaning.
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