A powerfully
psychoactive genus of plants, including jimson weed, also known as loco weed. Active ingredients include
scopolamine,
atropine,
hyoscyamine and other
tropanes. It can theoretically be smoked, eaten, boiled into a tea, or crushed and made into a salve and smeared on bare skin, though it is probably easiest to simply consume it as a tea. However, dosage is very tricky, for a couple reasons. First, as it is a naturally occuring plant, the potency can vary greatly from plant to plant and species to species, as much as five or ten times from one plant to another. Secondly, as has been stated before, it is not a safe substance; little more than double the active dose could be enough to cause heart attacks, heat stroke or seizures, all of which could be fatal. With such a variation in potency, the only truly safe way to approach Datura is to not take it at all. If you're set on taking it, make a tea of two leaves or about 3/4 teaspoon of seeds, and drink it slowly, over the space of an hour. Onset is usually fifteen to thirty minutes, so you can decide to stop drinking it (or have someone take it away from you) if it turns out to be a powerful sample. Again, SAFE DOSAGE IS VERY DIFFICULT.
Warning: Do NOT take this without a sober sitter. "Yeah, yeah," you think, "That's what everyone says about everything from mushrooms to nitrous, and I've been fine." This is not safe to do alone. You could overdose, or you could kill yourself for no reason. The sober sitter should be aware of what you are taking and have the number to the local poison control at the ready.
The high is anywhere from a six hour buzz with mild auditory hallucinations to a full three or four days of total delerium. During this time, you may experience total hallucinations that are nothing like those experienced on acid or mushrooms. You will have no idea you are hallucinating. Even when the UFO flies overhead and starts zapping people on the street, it will seem fully real. This sounds fun, but this also means you can hurt yourself easily. Erowid (www.erowid.org, where I did some of this research) has trip reports where people have blacked out or hallucinated things so terrible that when they woke up, they discovered that they had smashed windows, tore off their clothes in public, tried to kill themselves with everything from knives to shards of broken glass or put themselves into comas by repeatedly hitting their heads against walls, thinking they were soft.