Nature Bulletin No. 599   April 9, 1960
Forest Preserve District of Cook County
Daniel Ryan, President
Roberts Mann, Conservation Department
David H. Thompson, Senior Naturalist

****:MODERN USES OF DRUG PLANTS

Some of us older people who were children on farms or in small towns 
remember when, each spring, we had to drink gallons of fragrant 
sassafras tea. Made by simmering bark from roots of that tree, it was 
considered a tonic "to thin and purify the blood". There were other teas 
and tonics -- some pleasant, some bitter as gall -- brewed from parts of 
various plants.

Our grandmothers had a long list of home remedies obtained from 
plants and used as cough medicines, as laxatives, or for stomach aches, 
fevers, rheumatism, asthma, boils, and other ailments. In pioneer days, 
doctors and apothecaries were as scarce as money. The early settlers, 
learning by experiment or from the Indians, gathered and prepared their 
own medicines -- mostly from native plants. From each plant they used 
a certain part for a desired cure: the leaves or the leaves and stems, the 
flowers, the fruits or seeds, the roots or the bark from roots. and the 
inner bark from trees and shrubs.

Some of those old remedies were beneficial and a few are still used. 
Many were worthless and some were even harmful. Some of those 
plants contain chemicals with medicinal values but not for the purpose 
intended Hundreds of them came to be classified as drug plants and 
were sold in drug stores.

A drug is any helpful substance used in medicines or in making 
medicines. During the 19th century and this one, the science of drugs 
and the science of chemistry developed together. Scientists separated 
vegetable, animal and mineral materials into their component parts and 
identified, in each, the part that acts on the human body -- the "active 
principle". Then they studied the chemical structure or "formula" of the 
active principle. As a result, in many cases, they became able to 
"synthesize" a drug: make an exact copy by putting together the 
chemical elements or compounds needed.

In general, synthetic drugs are cheaper to make. manufactured on a 
mass production basis, with less labor, they do not require plants from 
foreign lands or rare minerals. Atabrine, derived from coal tar as a 
substitute for quinine -- obtained from the bark of the cinchona tree and 
used to cure malaria -- is an example.

The United States Pharmacopoeia, first published in 1820, was 
designated by the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 as the official list 
of drugs legally recognized in this country. An early issue of the U. S. 
P. listed over 600 items of plant and animal origin. The most recent 
issue only lists about 60. Drug Plants of Illinois, published by the 
Illinois Natural History Survey, describes almost 300 plants, growing 
wild or cultivated in this state, that were listed as official drugs or 
sources of drugs in early editions of the U.S.P. Only 24 of them are 
listed in the 1936 edition.

Today, the sale of antibiotic drugs--such as penicillin and streptomycin 
obtained from fungi -- tranquilizing drugs, and drugs for relieving high 
blood pressure, far exceeds in quantity and value the sale of strictly 
botanical drug items.

Nevertheless, certain plant drugs are still extremely important. Digitalis, 
from the foxglove, is best for controlling the muscle action of the heart. 
Curare, from certain tropical plants, is used by surgeons to relax muscle 
during operations. Strychnine, a nerve stimulant, is obtained from an 
Asiatic tree. Morphine, from the opium poppy, is used to relieve intense 
and prolonged pain. Rauwolfia, from the root of a plant in India, has 
been found recently to have great value as a tranquilizing drug and for 
treatment of high blood pressure.

But grandam's "roots and yarbs" are out of date.