WILD LETTUCE
Name: Wild lettuce
Scientific name: Lactuca Virosa
Other names : Opium lettuce, bitter lettuce
Summary: A sweet sleeping drug.
Description: Plant with hollow stalk with varnished leaves
and with clusters of compound light yellow flowers . The whole plant contains
a white latex.
Environment and culture: Common in all Europe, it grows on uncultivated
grounds, at the edge of roads and in hedges. The harvest is made in the bloom,
at the end of summer.
Used parts : leaves, latex.
Constituents: Lactucin, lactucopicrin, flavonoïdes, coumarins.
History: Dioscoride compared its action to poppy, (but wild lettuce is not toxic).
Information:. It was an opium substitute, (notably during hippy period at the 70's) thanks to her similar properties but not toxin, not entrainant neither dependence nor overdose.
Manners: Favors night-sleep and calms down overstrain. It calms down also cough and pain.
Effects: Painkiller, stimulates dreamlike activity.
Warnings: In strong dose, the vireuse lettuce can provoke slumbers.
Preparation: It is possible to take it in infusion. It is alsopossible to get back lettuce's latex by soaking it quite one harms and by boiling the obtained liquid. There will be then a consumable brown residue.
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