DESERT TOBACCO, dwelling on the plants...
...dwelling on the plants...I guess I am focused and obsessed with the world around me, this summer 2022 our native desert tobacco was blooming everywhere in the lower desert after abundant moisture from summer monsoon rains.
NICOTIANA OBTUSIFOLIA (NICOTIANA TRIGONOPHYLLA)
Nightshade Family, Solanaceae
Desert tobacco is a multifaceted native plant that covers perennial/biennial/annual herb presentations. Nicotiana obtusifolia is a native plant growing in most western US states, in variable forms within its range.
Currently observed blooming north quadrant, upper sonoran desert ecosystem, blooming late August in wide profusion. Desert tobacco inhabits and surrounds the washes, arroyos, dry river pathways of the desert.It is abundant in the somewhat occasional, ephemeral desert waterways. …especially abundant now, in a moist, wet monsoon summer. This summer 2022 the dry possible waterways became wet actual waterways flowing down from the centerpiece Santa Catalina escarpment ruling the lower valley and foothills.
Tobacco is a much maligned plant in the social context of it being money marketed by global interests to large amounts of people worldwide and the ensuing degradation of their health in a strong addiction for profit model. Like many banned and demonized people, places, plants, and activities, tobacco and the alkaloid nicotine is still out there. In a similar way, native wild tobacco and nicotine as an allelochemical is still out there. Allelochemical means influencing and modifying plant, animal, bird and insect behaviour. An allelochemical is a sort of trickster quasi-neurotransmitter within the plant environment. And just so you know, we still live within a plant environment. Nicotine is such a substance and is in many solanaceae vegetables such as potatoes, pepper, and eggplant. While in general practical science allelochemicals maybe thought of as plant generated herbicides and pesticides, they do more than maximize one particular plant's chance of survival by controlling germination and growth rates in the immediate vicinity of that particular plant, or influence plant resistance to insects and animals. Plants work with many of the same chemical types we do. Plants have neurotransmitter chemicals, same here. We are dependent on plants to live, sorry carnivore fans, in some way everything about us is plants. It's said we started out in a garden somewhere east of Eden. If you want vitality, sooner or later you have to knock on the plant door. Likewise for illness, plants have answers. Working with plants to help one another out with health challenges is a legitimate activity. Today's fascination with health experts who have a phobia engaging with the natural world is a situation that increases suffering for the most vulnerable among us. Health doesn't come in a bottle of pills any more than water comes in a plasric bottle. Engaging with plants is important work, it is the real work.
In a wet monsoon year desert tobacco, tree tobacco and datura, a network of solanaceae blooming flowers are blooming together in the southwest. Tobacco unbeknownst to most people is not only in neat rows of porcelain white, shiny boxed stacked tubes of 20 pieces, in neat rows at the front desk 7/11 convenience store. Tobacco is a native plant, and this year at least, is everywhere in the old pueblo. Every breath you take is laced not only with ozone, automobile exhaust emissions but also a chemical air soup of pollens. Does the circulating mix of proven allelochemicals in the desert ecosystem influence the 4legged humans zooming about? That is a question that answers yes. We are influenced by the growing green around us. We can choose the hypnotism route of using all our energy to avoid the real or we can stop, slow down and go deep into the littleness of blades of grass, grains of sand.
Rooted, stationary plants were here millions of years before the mobile mammals, scurrying about. The rootedness of plants means that plants secured their existence by becoming chemical factories influencing their world to advantage for their own continued existence. Rather than go the big brain monkey route of zipping around they dug deep, and found a hidden way to influence outcomes. Rather than move their bodies around in the environment, plants remain rooted but circulate a vast array of chemical, color and environmental responses, while simultaneously remaining hunkered down. In that sense, plants evolved to accomplish things vital to survival by remaining rooted in place while their striking chemical and visual adaptations move about in the environment. Plants in that way have accumulated a complex chemistry. Often times these complex chemicals are made in the roots, so that in terms of herbalism, the roots (often but not always) have stronger concentrations of these substances we call plant medicine. Doctoring people with plants is using their ancestral hidden plant mojo, different yet similar to our own, to do good stuff in the body.
The strong correlation of nicotinic pathway receptors in the human body and also nicotinic pathway connections within the desert ecosystem, indicates that like the Dine and Hopi sippapu story of human emergence in Arizona, and the tobacco stolen by coyote at the four corners, tobacco certainly was certainly, effectively, widely spread around the four corners. From Dok’od’slid to Santa Catalina it’s on.
Tobacco is a plant with unique properties. Nicotine as a signal mechanism is present in many plants including one of the oldest plants still around doing it’s thing, Equisitum, the silica rich, horse tail scouring rush. What exactly that means, I really don't know except to say, plants were our healing allies in ancestral time and still are today at this present moment. A lot has changed and nothing has changed, our relationship with plants is an ongoing love affair of plant, person and place. To the degree we can maximize that connection, to that degree we can be.
Our native Nicotianna obtusifolia, is a medium small plant growing to 3 feet high and bushy in a wet year. With dark green, heavy nitrogen alternate leaves, triangular towards the leafbase. Leaves are spade shaped, rounded spoon blunt pointed leaves. The lower stem leaves at the base of the stem are larger, with a graceful blunted point on a short petiole. Leaves on the upper stem are sessile, clasping the stem, with ear like lobes on both sides of the stem. The leaves growing more narrow, elongated, rising up the stem. The whole plant has glandular, sticky hairs, on the leaves, stems, and flowers. So that dust, insect wings, bits of other plants, pollen from other plants, humming bird feathers, bits of animal fur will stick to these lower first leaves. Although desert tobacco can grow everywhere, it likes best the neural lines of water created friction energy we call, the watercourse, canyon, and stream. Water seeks the lowest place. Often in the desert subsurface water as invisible moisture continues to flow underground in a dry desert arroyo. The Holy Ghost wind also descends and ascends like buzzard and golden eagle on the in out diurnal breath that is the life force of God, flowing up and down the canyons. In addition to subsurface moisture, vital energy flows in the visible tangible form of animal trails and pathways along the wet, now dry, now wet watercourse as visible riparian. So nicotine grows best, and wild tobacco is also called nicotine, along the earth energy pathway networks of veins and arteries of the place, the ecosystem predestined and ordained by Creator God the father. Tobacco, like many other plants, is a watercourse plant. In terms of herbalists the common consensus for me is that frequently invoking Jesus Christ as the Holy Ghost wind within prayer, contained in the energy pathways of underground streams, placed there by God the father, at the time of creation to later appear as Mary the mother of God birthing redemptive healing, allows healing to more easily occur. This greater fulness in Christ Jesus obviously includes healing plants and herbalist mediated plant materials such as dried herbs, tinctures, salves and poultices. For me it is important to reconcile the numinous plant stories of Christendom. Fortunate or unfortunate I never have been able, nor do I want to shed my Jesus, my saints or my blessed Virgin Mary and the native plant remedios all in culturally incorrect mish mash of relationship. It is who the plants are for me. I am too old to disavow the plants I learn, prayer, fasting, the 1500 year old Catholic Latin mass that for me is stability.
The flowers of our native desert tobacco, Nicotiana obtusifolia are creamy white tube trumpet shaped, as a beautiful example of an extended corolla one piece. So we could speak of a nightshade shaped flower. The one piece extending beyond the green bracts with five pointed green teeth at the base. The entire plant is sticky, covered with glandular hairs. All parts of the plant have the pyridine-type alkaloid nicotine, created in the underground chemical factory of roots. The roots transmit nicotine to the stem, leaf, flower and pollen. The pollen is released which then circulates throughout the air.
Nicotine, a signature alkaloid of Nicotiana species responsible for the addictive properties of tobacco smoking, functions at times for the tobacco plant, as a defensive neurotoxin against insects and bacteria attacking the sovereignty of the wild tobacco plant. Nicotine affects the bacterial, fungal, viral and intricate web of life surrounding tobacco plants. In that sense it functions as an allelochemical, quasi-neuro transmitter within the desert wash. Communicating not only like the thorns of rose, boundaries, but also intricate messages to pollinators as diverse as the hawk moth to the hummingbird.
Nicotine is a complex contradictory substance on many levels. It is said that the nicotine content of a single tobacco leaf, if ingested simultaneously and completely, in the human body, would instantly kill several human beings. Yet over one billion people consume nicotine products as cigars, chewing tobacco, cigarettes, vaping, and are somehow able to process it. Nicotine is used as a potent insecticide. Yet Nicotiana is fertilized by the hawk moth. Likewise tobacco flowers containing nicotine are deadly to avian species, yet although deadly to avian species they are pollinated by hummingbirds. Hummingbirds as a general rule pollinate only red and orange flowers, yet tobacco has a creamy white flower.
Athabascan people in the four corners, in the past viewed tobacco as one of the first plants. Tobacco’s use is tied to coyote who stole tobacco from his cousin, the Sun. “According to the White Mountain Apache legend, Coyote Steals Sun’s Tobacco, Slim Coyote, a trickster, visits his cousin Sun on a day when Sun was not home. Coyote tells Sun’s wife he came to talk to his cousin and will wait for him to return.
While waiting Coyote asks if he can have some of Sun’s tobacco to smoke, since he came to talk and smoke, saying his cousin would not mind. Sun’s wife says he can. Coyote fills his own little buckskin bag from Sun’s bag, quickly hiding his own bag. He then rolls a cigarette and says he has decided not to wait.
When Sun returns home he immediately asks who’s been there when seeing his depleted tobacco bag. His wife tells him what occurred. Sun get very angry and is determined to get that fellow. He saddles his horse Black Wild Horse and takes off after Coyote.
Now the horse could fly, making a sound of lightening when it did. A falling light rain covered Coyote’s tracks, but Sun still could follow him by the ashes from the thief’s cigarette.
As it continued raining the tobacco that Coyote had with him began to sprout and grow putting out leaves, and then flowers. When it dried, the wind scattered its seeds everywhere. When Sun saw this, he stopped chasing Coyote and went back home.
But Coyote’s troubles, due to his behavior, were not over yet. When getting back to the Apache camp where he was living Coyote would not share his tobacco.
The people kept asking him for tobacco to smoke and Coyote kept refusing to give them any. Finally an Apache council was held and it was decided to pretend to give Coyote a wife in order to get his tobacco.
When they told Coyote they were going to give him a wife, at first he thought they were joking, but they convinced him of their sincerity by building him a new hogan and promising slim coyote a wedding ceremony at sunrise the next day. This caused Coyote to feel so good that he gave them all of his tobacco.
So come time, a young man dressed as a woman entered the hogan and sat down beside Coyote; he had been told not to let Coyote see him till dawn. They both stayed on opposite sides of the hogan. Slim Coyote became very excited; he could not stand up but just crawled around on the ground, barking. As time passed he became more and more impatient.
Then just before dawn, as it was getting brighter Coyote could see he had been tricked. : “You’re not a woman. You are a man.” He ran out screaming to the people, “You lied to me, you didn’t give me a wife at all. Give me my tobacco back!” But no matter how loud he ranted and yelled the people would not give the tobacco back. This is how people first got tobacco.” A.G.H.
Plants have stories and we are their tellers. The squash gourd pumpkin instantly communicates halloween, fall, autumn, the coming of winter. Crocus, lily, rose say the coming of spring, valentine’s day, new life, romance. A spruce or pine says winter, Christmas tree, solstice. These plants have stories because we have stories within the place where plants grow.
Nicotine is very similar chemically to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which functions in the human peripheral nervous system. “Components of the cholinergic system—acetylcholine, acetylcholinesterase, and acetylcholine receptors—are the principal components of the nerve transmission in animals. Plants, though nerveless, have long been known to possess most of the components of the cholinergic system. Plants also have a repertoire of chemicals that inhibit various components of the acetylcholine system. A hitherto overlooked fact is that many of these anticholinergic chemicals present in some plants act as allelochemicals and help the plants to dominate their habitat by affecting the growth of other plants in their vicinity. Since the target sites of most of the allelochemicals in victim plants are unknown, the possibility of cholinergic chemicals as allelochemicals opens new areas of research in plant biology. We have shown earlier that the extract of Cyperus rotundus inhibits acetylcholinesterase activity in electric eel, wheat, and tomato and that it also inhibits germination and growth of root and shoot in tomato and wheat. Now, we present evidence that the methanolic extracts of 45 weeds, including invasive weeds like Lantana camara, Ageratum conyzoides, Argemonemexicana, Ranunculus sceleratus, and Prosopis juliflora contain very high levels of anticholinesterases. Anticholinesterases block the enzyme acetylcholinesterase, resulting in an increase in the levels of acetylcholine in the system. We propose that cholinergic chemicals act as allelochemicals in plants.”
So while it would be confusing to say that plants have neurotransmitters, because they do not have nerve cells, neurons, and lack a nervous system, they are alive. They do utilize allelochemicals such as acetylcholine, which is a neurotransmitter in humans, mammals, and birds. Allelochemicals are synomones, chemicals emitted by one organism, that influence the physiology and behavior of another species. Allelochemicals affect other organisms, either in their physiology, growth, and behavior or life history. Effects range from stimulation to regulation and inhibition. So what does it mean to say plants produce neurotransmitters? What does it mean to say plants lack any currently identifiable nervous system? Then in the same breath state, plants make and use the substance acetylcholine, and many similar substances our body uses? Acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter. In other words, by logic, plants do have the equivalent of a kind of nervous system that makes possible their life via neurotransmitters within their brainless, neuron-less, nerve-less consciousness environment. Because they make and use not just one, but dozens of known substances that a scientist would identify as chemicals called neurotransmitters. The nervous system of plants maintains a plant’s life just as our brain maintains our life in a body, and that body in the environment.
So we need to re-think neuro-transmitter in our own human biology. Our thinking is head/brain value heavy. Especially now with the growth of invasive, quasi-magical AI modifications to our behavior, and hence value system-nuevo. Lack of verbal, tactile, visual eye contact becomes the new compassionate response to every person, every time. As the AI trojan horse menace invades every nuance of experience, our integrity as persons to respond meaningfully becomes baffled. Remembering Edward Abbey and the monkey wrench, every social interaction becomes a lack of faith with grains of sand, jamming the gears of american big pharma police surveillance state hegemony of the big tech, thought police app world. It is this ultimate lack of faith that must be pursued on every front. When we think, consider a neurotransmitter, we imagine ourselves as the apex of the AI foodchain pyramid. We are the master autistic big brain lunatic at our massive computer desk. We have accomplished the final solution mastery of events. We applaud the personless, family free, raceless, nationless economic zone. When in truth we are mastered by an AI cult of death and masturbation. We imagine neurotransmitters doing something heroic between the ears, within our brain, in our head, which is true but becomes false if we don’t include our lungs, legs, fingers, intestines, and so on. NT’s have functions within every body system. The key component word in NT’s neurotransmitters is not brain. If the key component word in NT’s was brain, it would preclude NT’s in brainless plants. Let’s be clear, ‘brainless plants’ is not a derogatory put down. It is simply an affirmation that plants have a brainless intelligence. Plants, like us, have intelligence that is operative, manipulating and managing survival strategies in an ever changing world for kind after kind. Our wisdom to survive as genetically intact must include a resistance to the transitioning of AI.
In short, you’re smart if you can take care of your own shit. You are stupid if you can not manage your own shit. You are intelligent if you can set and achieve goals. The primary goal of human existence is never far from, order, cleanliness and literally, hygiene, because shit born illnesses, drinking water contaminated with fecal matter, was the single greatest limiter and scourge, plague to be overcome. When people talk of the greatest health gain it is not, and never was, vaccines, pills or much of modern pharma. That is pharma born police state fictional narrative. The greatest health gains have been clean drinking water, the elimination of disease carrying vermin, rat infested living spaces, the draining of swamps, the clearing of forest and within all that, solid nutrition. To these we must return again, clean water, nourishing food, family, love. All these improve the vitality of people and indirectly their ability to maintain health. Health is rooted in the body, and the body politic of governance as the family, the strength and resilience of body vitality. Knowing that our body is relationship. Health can not be rooted in pills and potions and that includes herbal potions.
Currently many people are actively pessimistic and withdrawing from each other and the actual world of place in doing. Their science advises a world of caution, fear and introspection. They advertise a new monasticism of transitioning to an AI (artificial intelligence) erasure mentality. They are pursuing a bodiless electro spiritual existence within supposed intro-nets. There is enforced regime forgetfulness, a benzodiazepine fog of electricity in every continuous economic transaction. What actually is happening in our own bodies is lost in the pharma forgetfulness of the actuality of the world around us as erasure. People live isolated from natural process in climate controlled pods connected to various bizarre virtual, online realities. We, as people, working directly with plants, are one of a large minority of people that understand that transitioning to an AI virtual reality is a Jim Jones Guyana death cult on a global scale. AI virtual transitioning is head heavy imposed slavery. Leading the way globally, to this dystopian fear zone by a death cult occupied America. Working with plants as herbalism is a meaningful conduit to active resistance to AI transitioning. Herbalism presupposes intimate contact with plants and their wild, eco systems. I would go as far as to say, that if a new fear cult illness arises, the cure is already available in the traditional plant, folk medicines. So begin the work of making medicine as salvation story. When you mix up a topical liniment with desert tobacco, and other local growing abundant, commonplace plants, and share it freely person to person, face to face you are doing the real work.
So plants use NT’s in the environment to get stuff done. Plants can’t run around, trees and tobacco plants have roots in the earth. Plants can not call 911, but they can control their sovereignty and secure the existence of their plant people and a future for plant children, as sprouts, rhizomes, roots, seeds, branches, pollen and leaves via NT’s functioning as allelochemicals within the greater ecosystem. We as herbalists come to the plant to cooperate with their work because their work is our work. While it is somehow true plants are chemical factories, and we use their chemical constituents in our formulas, it is also true plants exist as we do, in the mind of God. as spirit. These two versions of plants are opposed only in the mind of the enemy who would lie, destroy and have us masked, shut in our pod, cowering in fear. Fear on that level, systemic fear that divides and separates is a form of arrogance because it denies the power of God to overcome. Our heroic ancestral spirit is ongoing.
On the tongue, in the back of the throat, in the nose, nicotine has an acrid, sharp biting bitter taste. This sensation is present in vaping, tobacco smoke, chewing tobacco and in the immediate environment of smokers. It is present on the clothes, skin, saliva, hair, fingers of smokers. This biting stinging sensation is also perceptible in the upper, north sonoran desert air, with every breath during a banner monsoon year. During a banner monsoon summer there can be billions of Nicotiana obtusifolia flowers blooming, releasing their pollen. Thus releasing their neuro chemical analogs. And of course not only tobacco pollen but a plethora of species doing the same thing, modifying the environment in an air-born soup.
Tobacco leaves alive, encountered in the wild, have a pungent smell like other members of the nightshade family. Commercial tobacco has many flavorings, spices, sugar and additives to mask the taste and aroma of tobacco smoke and change the pH for absorption of nicotine at mucous membranes in the mouth, air ways and lung tissue.
Nicotine, although a deadly poison, somehow mimics various neuro receptors and signal communication pathways within the brain and various body systems of two legged humans. Significantly this same information response adaptation, neuro receptors in the immediate environment of nicotine laced tobacco plants is a feed back loop strongly present, in the biosystem environment of the upper sonoran desert ecosystem. “nocturnal moth-pollinated flowers are characterized as having corollas that are white or pale in color and as emitting a strong, sweet scent when open, which is usually in the evening or at night”, (1961; Percival, 1965; Faegri and van der Pijl, 1966).) “Hummingbirds are the predominant pollinators of species with short-tubed flowers of various other colors, ranging from red to pink to greenish-yellow”,
Etymology: Nicotiana is named for Jean Nicot (1530-1600), the French ambassador to Portugal responsible for introducing tobacco to France in 1560; obtusifolia means obtuse or blunt leaved.
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Leeming, David, Jake Page. The Mythology of Native North America. Norman. University of Oklahoma Press. 1998. p. 65
https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/how-the-tobacco-plant-outwitted-the-hawkmoth
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185683
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Role of Acetylcholine System in Allelopathy of Plants
ByRashmi Sharma, Rajendra Gupta, 1sr edition 2018
