Lactucarium.

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.herbs
Subject: Re: Does lettuce contain caffeine?
From: aj982.FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Kerry Eady)
Date: Wed, 5 Jul 1995 23:56:53 GMT

Dale Woika (dww5.psu.edu) writes:
> Denise Brady writes:
>>Does lettuce contain caffeine?
>>Yeah, yeah, it sounds nuts. But my wife claims she heard it somewhere, and since none of our friends could say anything authoritative other than, "Bah! Couldn't be" we thought we'd post here to see if anyone can authoritatively confirm or deny. Any takers?
> Actually, several lettuce species do actually have very minute amounts of morphine, one of the opiates. However, we are talking micrograms. I imagine a physiological dose might be 10 or 15 heads of iceberg lettuce....

Lactucarium doses require juicing the hearts and root ends of about 8 heads of lettuce (wild lettuce is more potent and you can use the whole plant, but I've never tried it) You need a pint of juice for one dose.

I tried it when I worked at an organic restaurant. I rescued the hearts when I made the tossed salad. It took *forever* to evaporate the liquid.

It was a mild dreamy spaced out high. A legal version of hash. Apparently you can buy the wild plant extract in some places but I've never tried finding it.

From: iss.ripco.com (R.M.K.)

>aj982.FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Kerry Eady) replied:
>Lactucarium doses require juicing the hearts and root ends of about 8 heads of lettuce (wild lettuce is more potent and you can use the whole plant, but I've never tried it) You need a pint of juice for one dose.

Several species of 'wild' lettuce... Lactuca biennis; L.virosa were cultivated by American Indians and refined the milk-juice called lactuarium into a substance that was smoked for a opium-like high. The stuff was actually sold as 'domestic opium' until the higher quality product was made more available by far-eastern trade routes.