Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, October 22, 1993 TAG: 9310220263
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Kids grow up snarling and pouting at the dinner table. They won't eat brussels sprouts. They'll gag over lima beans, push away broccoli and tomatoes and hyperventilate when faced with a slice of onion.
So they come of age, surviving their dietary deficiencies to reach teen-agerhood and what do they do?
They go out into an open field, and they pluck one of the nastiest seedpods - it looks like a green egg spiked with rose thorns - crack it open and eat the seeds.
Kids who paled at the sight of a piece of cauliflower nibble at the flesh of a plant they know nothing about.
They're munching on the tiny piece of jimson weed because it offers a trip into the unknown, a naturalists' high, a hallucinogenic commune with forces not visible to the undrugged eye.
Maybe that's no irony at all. People will drink Sterno and sniff model glue or gasoline, inhale the fumes of a felt-tip marker or sip after-shave in search of that jolt of creative thinking and a few giggles.
What's a few seeds plucked from the edge of a vacant lot?
Jimson weed is easy to find - here, and in Asia and Africa and in Haiti, where the locals call it the zombie's cucumber.
Criminals and shamans, poisoners and magicians have for centuries called on zombie's cucumber to cast their victims into a hopeless stupor - or death.
The Yaqui Indians of Mexico crush the leaves and rub it onto their arms and legs. It makes them feel as if they're flying. Thieves in India drugged their victims with it. Indians in Colombia administered it to the wives and slaves of dead kings - then buried the stupefied victims alive, with their masters. In West Africa, disgruntled women raise beetles fed on nothing but zombie's cucumber, then feed the beetle droppings to their no-good husbands to kill them. East Africans drop the spiny seedpods on the ground in hope of drugging their barefoot enemies.
American Indians have used the drug in manhood rituals. Chew a few of these seeds, my boy, and you'll forget what it's like to be a kid and be ready to become a man.
The difference between these primitives and the Salem youngsters is that the Salem kids had no idea what they were doing.
As proof: Their recent poisonings as a result of eating the jimson weed expose them as rank amateurs. No self-respecting Haitian would be caught just munching the damn seeds. And besides, this isn't even jimson season. The seeds are still white and immature inside the forbidding-looking pod. Later, they'll mature, and harden, and intensify in their potency.
That's when the real pros step in.
Not kids who wouldn't know Belgian endive if it bit 'em in the hindquarters.
by CNB