alt Hacker News'Mad honey' that can stop your heart is being sold online
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>Eat a teaspoonful, and you might feel pleasantly warm and slightly lightheaded. Eat more than a few tablespoons, and your heart rate can drop to life-threatening levels.
Reminds me of the Futurama episode with the space bee honey. Wonder if the writers got the inspiration from this.
For you guys that watch YouTube. The channel is Mass Spec Everything. Here are a couple of interesting videos he did on various honey brands and regions. Pretty interesting stuff.
Discussed in a 2017 National Geographic article[0], archived here[1]. Notice the article text's description of the honey being sold on the black market. Seems that now everyone is shopping there.
[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/honey-hu...
That said, clinicians have been writing about this for some time, eg [2] from 2007:
Old Vice documentary about it. This is where I had first heard about it. Used to be really hard to find the honey online, like only one or 2 places that sold it
If anyone's interested there's also this recently released documentary in french by Hit the Road, where they show the process of collecting the honey and also the ritual side of it.
They mention the toxin comes from the rhododendron flower. I remember camping in North Carolina once and one of the people I was with warned against burning anything from the rhododendron in the area, as supposedly the smoke would give you the runs.
I mostly thought they were joking, and I have no idea what specific type of rhododendron would be there (if any), but maybe there’s a glimmer of merit to it? Or maybe they were thinking of a different plant?
This was somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains, if I remember correctly.
I imagine the native also built up tolerance over generations, not just knowledge as the article contends . Dying from a specific action is quite the evolutionary motivator
> The problem is that the gap between a medicinal dose and a toxic dose is very small
What's this claim based on? I don't think it's the rat study linked nearby. I looked through it and they didn't really compare doses.
If it's a linear effect on dropping blood pressure, that seems like an overblown way to talk about it. If it's something else, I'd love to hear more.
'Natural' is either the bees knee’s, or a death trap. Take your pick.
edit:typo
If you buy psychoactive honey/drugs online, it is on you to find out what it is and what kind of dosage you should take.
Some people survive by sheer luck.
I’m surprised it’s even legit. I’ve heard of aphrodisiac honey that’s just been laced with viagra.
Joe Rogan endorses consuming mad honey according to the copy on this site: https://realmadhoney.com/products/mad-honey-us. So there is an entire supply chain from Nepal to the consumer.
saw a video on youtube the other week, some guys made mead out of this stuff. Claimed the effects were still present. I wonder what the concentration of the psychedelic comounds ends up being vs raw honey.
Just like many of the novel synthetiser drugs, unknown substances are very dangerous. The culprit here seems to be the victim thought he was consuming regular honey.
Metta Beshay, my new favorite drug explainer, has a neat video on the subject: https://youtu.be/5X3dCBQYdek
that reminds me to buy some, anyone tried it already?
“You don’t want to sell me death sticks”
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This is the original article and has better images IMHO.
https://theconversation.com/mad-honey-that-can-stop-your-hea...