addiction and abuse. So fundamental is
this pursuit that attempts to prohibit intoxicants have repeatedly failed.
Plants That Make You Loco
During the past 130 million years, flowering plants have colonized practically every habitat on earth, from arid deserts, boggy meadows and windswept alpine summits, to sun-baked grasslands, lush rain forests and wave-battered rocky shores. They have replaced most of the ancient ferns and seed plants that dinosaurs subsisted on, and developed a complex and fascinating relationship with insects and mammals.
During these countless centuries of time, flowering plants have gradually evolved all sorts of ingenious protective devices to discourage hungry herbivorous animals.
Leaves and stems have developed a variety of vicious spines and stinging hairs (trichomes). In some plants, the dense covering of silvery hairs may also provide other ecological advantages such as solar reflection and insulation in arid environments.
But mechanical defenses, such as spines and trichomes, are of limited value and probably would not deter all hungry herbivores, particularly the chewing and sucking insects. Therefore, plants have developed a "chemical warfare," a defense strategy based on a vast arsenal of chemicals which are toxic or distasteful to animals.
But; Just as genetic variability and time allow agricultural pests to tolerate pesticides, so can some herbivores circumvent a plant's natural chemical defenses.
This "predatory pressure" has resulted in the evolution of an endless array of complex plant molecules, from gums and terpenes to alkaloids and phenolic compounds. For example, in nettles (Urtica species) the sophisticated defense chemicals acetylcholine and histamine are employed in an ingenious system of "injection hairs" strategically placed throughout the plant. When we touch these plants, we may be accidental casualties in a chemical warfare between plants and herbivores that has waged through countless millennia.
One of the largest groups of chemical arsenals produced by plants are the alkaloids. Many of these metabolic by-products are derived from amino acids and include an enormous number of bitter, nitrogenous compounds. According to R.F. Raffauf (Plant Alkaloids: A Guide To Their Discovery and Distribution, 1996), more than 10,000 different alkaloids have been discovered in species from over 300 plant families.
Alkaloids often contain one or more rings of carbon atoms, usually with a nitrogen atom in the ring. The position of the nitrogen atom in the carbon ring varies with different alkaloids and with different plant families. In some alkaloids, such as mescaline, the nitrogen atom is not within a carbon ring. In fact, it is the precise position of the nitrogen atom that effects the properties of these alkaloids.
Although they undoubtedly existed long before humans, some alkaloids have remarkable structural similarities with neurotransmitters in the central nervous system of humans, including dopamine, serotonin and acetylcholine.
The amazing effect of these alkaloids on humans has led to the development of powerful pain-killer medications, spiritual drugs, and serious addictions by people who are ignorant of the properties of these powerful chemicals. Plants That Make You Loco
https://www2.palomar.edu/users/warmstrong/ww0703.htm
...Animals even seek out psychoactive substances -- they get drunk on fermented fruit, hallucinate on mushrooms, become euphoric with opium poppies. They also manipulate their own reproduction with plant chemistry, using some plants as aphrodisiacs and others to enhance fertility. There are scores of remarkable examples of the ways animals medicate themselves. - Desert tortoises will travel miles to mine and eat the calcium needed to keep their shells strong. - Monkeys, bears, coatis, and other animals rub citrus oils and pungent resins into their coats as insecticides and antiseptics against insect bites. - Chimpanzees swallow hairy leaves folded in a certain way to purge their digestive tracts of parasites. Birds line their nests with plants that protect their chicks from blood-draining mites and lice.
