Toxicology: Look Out for Those Plants & Spices

Danger lurks in the most innocent-looking household plants and spices, according to the latest warnings by doctors. Items:

∙ The 40-year-old housewife who appeared at the emergency room of University Hospitals in Cleveland could not swallow and could scarcely talk. Her tongue was swollen and intensely painful. Through these impediments she managed to tell the doctor that while tending her house plants that afternoon, she had bitten a piece of stalk from a handsome specimen with striped leaves, called Dieffenbachia. Her pain was so severe that the doctors had to give her a morphine-type drug. After a while she was able to take, though painfully, a little aluminum-magnesium hydroxide as an antidote to whatever poison she might have swallowed. Her face and blistered mouth remained painful for more than a week, and she had to be content with a liquid diet and baby foods. What makes this case important, say Drs. George Drach and Walter H. Maloney in the A.M.A. Journal, is that Dieffenbachia—it is also called dumb cane and mother-in-law plant—is such a common house plant that anybody could easily be accidentally poisoned by it. A child who chewed it would become seriously ill, and the effects might be fatal if he swallowed it. For dumbcane stalks contain calcium oxalate, which causes burns similar to those of caustic soda.

∙ Dr. Robert B. Payne reports, in the New England Journal of Medicine, a sick story about nutmeg. Two students at the University of North Carolina heard from a beatnik friend that it would give them a jag like a combination of the effects of alcohol and LSD or mescaline. The two lads each took two tablespoonfuls, the powder equivalent of two grated nutmegs, in a glass of milk. Within five hours they had a leaden feeling in their feet and legs, and an airy, dreamlike sensation in their heads. Their hearts were beating in double time. They were as red as beets. Both were agitated and apprehensive. Dr. Payne gave the boys a laxative to get the undigested nutmeg out of their systems, but their feelings of unreality persisted for 48 to 60 hours. There is little danger that anybody who has taken nutmeg for kicks will become addicted, says Dr. Payne: these boys found the experience as frightening as it was unpleasant.

∙ Teen-agers and young-adult beatniks have started an out-of-season run on seed stores, buying up morning-glory seeds. Far from representing an interest in gardening, this trend is part of a feverish search for kicks. The word has got around, said the Food and Drug Administration, that the seeds of some varieties of the morning glory contain drugs, chemically related to LSD-25, that will induce other-worldly hallucinations. The two favorite varieties are called, of all things, “Heavenly Blue” and “Pearly Gates.”