PLANTS: POISONS AND DRUGS

(By Michelle Jackson, Aug 96)

A lot of people do not realize just how dependant we are on plants, this talk will briefly explain some of the vital roles they play in our lives. Firstly, lets look at the atmosphere. We rely on plants for the very air we breathe. Their daily photosynthesizing releases oxygen back into the atmosphere where it is available for us and all other oxygen breathing creatures. Second is the water cycle. Through continuous transpiration, water is drawn up from the ground by roots, travels through the plant and finally evaporates from the leaves into the air. Here it collects to form clouds and falls back to the earth as rain. Water evaporates back into the atmosphere anyway but a significant comes from plant activity particularly over forest areas like the Amazon. Thirdly, plants and their thousands of types provide us with practically all of lifes other essentials. Food directly as fruit, vegetables, tea, coffee, sugar, oil and more importantly grapes for our wine, hops for our beer and cocao for our chocolate! But also indirectly by providing food for our livestock, who in turn give us meat, milk, cheese, eggs, etc. They also provide us with other raw materials wood, cotton, fuel the list is endless. And finally after providing all of these services they also have the power to cure our illnesses by giving us medicines.which brings me to the main point of this talk. No doubt on your guided tour you will be shown some medicinal plants and you may well be skeptical when you are told that rubbing a plant root on a wound will help it, or taking the juice from a crushed stem will alleviate a chest infection. Or imagine if on your return home you visit your doctor complaining of heart palpations and are given a prescription for some leaves to chew. You may well query their effectiveness, or at least your doctors sanity! In fact, it may surprise you to know that the most commonly prescribed medication for heart arythmea is cardiac glycosides which come from the Fox glove plant or Digitalis purpurea. You accept it as a medicine because it comes in a form you recognize little white pills.

In actual fact many of the medicines we take contain plant extracts. 1 in 4 prescriptions contain plant derived compounds. Aspirin, the worlds most popular over-the-counter pain killer has the active ingredient salycilin, which originally came from the bark of the White Willow tree, Salix albu. 75% of the worlds population relies largely on local medicinal plant knowledge. Native American Indians used to place the salix bark on the forehead to cure headaches and reduce fever. You may well ask why is it that plants contain compounds capable of being used as drugs? Well basically the answer is.plants cant run. It is not only us humans who tap into plant resources, the whole of the animal kingdom does particularly insects who find leaves irresistible. Another thing you will notice when you walk in the forest is the large amount of chewed leaves around! Plants then, in order to defend themselves against herbivores and pathogen attack have to rely on chemical warfare. For the 400 million years plants have inhabited the planet they have been experimenting with chemicals. Those individuals containing anti-feedant compounds and toxins have survived better that those who do not and over time herbivore and microbial imposed selection pressure has driven plant evolution to create a massive spectrum of biologically active compounds. Biologically active, just means they can effect the biological systems and although we have different biochemistries to animals we also have many similarities, which is why chemicals evolved for defence are potentially useful to us as drugs. Lets look at Digitalis again. The cardiac glycosides they contain are not only capable of affecting insects but also mammals. In large amounts they can kill but in small controlled amounts their activity can be used to cure heart arythmeas by making the heart beat slower and stronger. So what has all this got to do with tropical forests and conservation? Well because of the unique diversity, tropical forests contain a very large amount of different plant species and because of the intense competition and greater selection pressure, plants are not only diverse in form but also in the chemicals they contain.

The local indigenous people who have lived here for 1000s of years are aware of this and have learnt over time that many of the plants are effective treatments, relying to a large extent on this knowledge to cure all manner of illnesses. Sadly our forest is decreasing at a rapid rate daily, estimates are horrific. One figure stated 50 to 60,000.00 hectares a day is disappearing. Thats an area 10 times the size of this reserve, lost for ever, every single day. Obviously this means that the number of plants becoming extinct increases every single day as well. Maybe a possible cure for Aids is out there? Soon it will be too late to investigate, question or analyse, as the answers could be lost forever.