'Mad honey' that can stop your heart is being sold online
phys.org92 points by samizdis 4 days ago
92 points by samizdis 4 days ago
>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.
This is the original article and has better images IMHO.
https://theconversation.com/mad-honey-that-can-stop-your-hea...
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
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What makes you say it's LLM?
> Every article you read here is written by university scholars and researchers with deep expertise in their subjects, sharing their knowledge in their own words. We don’t oversimplify complicated issues, but we do explain and clarify. We believe bringing the voices of experts into the public discourse is good for democracy.
> What makes you say it's LLM?
Probably the usual "big words hard" mindset of people who aren't used to reading well-written prose.
Dunno about AI, but I was turned away by the sheer amount of ad spam on the site
Such assurances mean almost nothing these days. But to be frank this specific article doesn't seem particularly AI to me.
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.
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 reminds me to buy some, anyone tried it already?
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.
> 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
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Not only they don't deserve to die - they deserve to not die from this, no matter their level of risk taking.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The dose makes the poison, or something like that.
- Sand (inhaled)
- Air (intravenous)
- Blood thinners or rat poison
Metta Beshay, my new favorite drug explainer, has a neat video on the subject: https://youtu.be/5X3dCBQYdek
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