How to Spot a Psychopath

Do you want to tackle your alcohol addiction with safe and effective herbal medicine?

Look no further than Great Home Remedies' How To Prevent Alcohol And Drug Addiction page!

I particularly liked the part that says:

"Very effective remedy: Take 1 lovage root and 2 laurel leaves, add 250 ml of vodka and leave it in a dark place for 14 days. Let an alcoholic drink a whole glass. Usually even 1 time is enough to stop an alcohol addiction, but you may do it 2-3 times."

I suppose it must be the laurel that does the trick there, since lovage is one of the flavouring ingredients in Bénédictine liqueur. Which has not demonstrated a strong tendency to cure people who drink it of wanting to drink. Although if you polish off a whole bottle, you may not very much desire to drink Bénédictine any more.

(I call this situation a "I haven't drunk X since Y" story. Popular Xs include black Sambuca, ouzo, and any pre-mixed cocktail based on Baileys Irish Cream, especially if it's a generic copy thereof. The Y part of everybody's story is usually very similar.)

250 millilitres of 80-proof vodka will, of course, also give you about the same amount of alcohol as a six-pack of beer. In one belt. But any proper alcoholic should be able to handle that, with a water chaser.

(If you leave the vodka in an open container for the 14 days then a significant amount of the alcohol may have evaporated off, of course. But they don't tell you to do that.)

More seriously, one problem with this and various other herbal remedies is that the amount of active ingredients in a given plant can vary widely even within the one species. Different plants can have different concentrations depending on their strain and how and where they grew, and fresh bits of the plant can be very different from dried bits, too.

And, even more importantly, instructions that tell you to use "2 laurel leaves" do not specify which of the thousands of members of Lauraceae family they're talking about. Some members of Lauraceae are not known as laurels - cinnamon and avocado, for instance - which makes it a little easier. But there are several other "laurels" that aren't members of Lauraceae at all.

When you're playing a computer game, you know that when you pick a "nightshade mushroom", or whatever, you've definitely got the right thing, because there are only a dozen species of pickable plant in the whole game, so anything that looks like ginseng or mandrake root must be. In the real world, though, almost no plants have a common name that's not applied to many other quite different plants.

In this case, the "laurel leaves" they're talking about are probably "bay leaves" from the Bay Laurel. But then there's the entirely unrelated California Bay Laurel, whose leaves are poisonous. But maybe where you live, "laurel" means Camphor Laurel (mildly poisonous, but utterly different from Bay Laurel), or Cherry Laurel (berries edible, everything else poisonous).

You'll face the same problem with most other medicinal, and even simple food, plants. Something that looks like fennel, or like a parsnip, or (of course) like an edible mushroom, can kill you. And it even applies to the other ingredient in the anti-alcoholism six-pack cocktail; buy "lovage root" and you'll very probably get the usual kind of lovage, Levisticum officinale, but then there's the related "Alexanders", a.k.a. "Black Lovage", and Laserpitium latifolium, "Bastard Lovage", and even a poisonous lookalike sometimes called "Water Lovage". And that's not even all of the lovages!

Take-home message: Use herbal medicines if you like. Make herbal medicines if you like. But make sure you pin down the full Latin name of your ingredients before you eat them, and don't trust any source that doesn't give you the exact names.