Ethnobotany arecoline playlist

Chapter ten of the textbook opens with legends and stories of plants and then moves into psychoactive plants. The connection is that psychoactive plants are also often sacred plants in traditional cultures and almost always have origin legends or stories attached to them. Plant legends lift a plant up to a higher plane. Here on Pohnpei Piper methysticum is nonphysically elevated to where no one can step over the plant when the plant is laying on the ground.

The class opened by asking each student if they did drugs. Then, with the textbook open on the smartboard, the five types of psychoactive compounds were covered:

1. Euphorica: Drugs that cause a pleasant sensation of warmth and comfort. Often highly addictive. Withdrawal from any drug often brings the opposite effect, in this instance depression and melancholy (sadness, emptiness, loneliness). Opium, morphine, heroin, codeine. Physical and psychic pain killers.
2. Phantastica: Drugs that cause hallucinations, illusions, visions, peyote, ebena, LSD, cannabis, mescaline. Word means "amazing" as in "amazing visions."
3. Inebriantia: Drugs that bring first excitation followed by depression. Alcohol, inebriated "drunk"; as in alcohol drunk. Chloroform, ether.
4. Hypnotica: Drugs that cause sleepiness. Sakau, barbituates, veronal.
5. Excitantia: Stimulants. Drugs that cause wakefulness usually addictive or highly addictive. Coffee, tea, tobacco, betel nut, cola nuts, kat, amphetamines, cocaine.

Inebrantia was noted to be the leading cause of death for youth in an 18 to 25 age range bracket here: automobile accidents due to driving under the influence of alcohol. This was intended to tie into Lorn's Acid Rain video that ends on a twist. 

Excitantia was the one that caught some of the students by surprise. With that category, everyone in the class was confirmed to be a consumer of drugs, we are all on drugs.

This introduction to psychoactive plants helps make clear the link between the chapter topic and the songs that now lead into the video. The start of class had been a slow roll to let students come in and get settled. Role wasn't called until around 15:35 or slightly later. The prefatory material above took the class through to around 16:55 or thereabouts. 

The Tove Lo video did not play well and will be removed. That video would need some local framing that would be inauthentic to the singer. Some of the students laughed at Weezer, and that video played well for the student audience. Lorn's Acid Rain makes a nice transition from the humor of Weezer to the darker side coming up. The darkness of Acid Rain tumbles well into the betel nut video which starts off light hearted and end on a depressing set of notes. In this new sequence the UOG video is now redundant and should probably also be pulled.

The videos wrapped up just before 16:30. Then the Ted talk began, covering:

Psychoactive plants should only be used and consumed in the manner in which the originating indigenous culture used and consumed them.

Mixing psychoactive plants is often problematic, they were not traditionally mixed, for example, betel nut and tobacco.

Cigarettes contain compounds that keep the cigarette lit, they were not designed with the idea of putting the unlit cigarette in one's mouth next to the inner cheek and leaving it there. Those aromatic flammable compounds then enter the bloodstream. This is the strong driver of the oral cancer rates. Oral cancer is now the number one form of cancer in the FSM.

Psychoactive plants that have harmful health impacts are a sieve that selects for survivors who may experience reduced risk of harmful health impacts. Put another way: only do the drugs of your own traditions. 

If one chooses to chew betel nut with tobacco, avoid having children. Too many funerals for parents with children way too young to understand why their mother or father is gone. If one has or is planning to have children, then no chewing betel nut with tobacco. 

The closing talk took the class to 16:44.