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Xtabentún liqueur and conjectured use of psychoactive honey in balché have parallels in the classical and modern worlds. Pliny noted meli mænomenon of Asia Minor was made into a mead or metheglin, and toxic Ericaceæ honey was traditionally added to alcholic beverages in the Caucasus, to enhance their inebriating properties; while such toxic honey, deli bal, is taken in Turkey as a tonic in milk. Deli bal was an important export from this region in the 18th century, widely used to potentiate liquors in Europe - called miel fou, 'crazy honey' in France (Mayor 1995). "very intoxicating" honey, likely from spp. (mountain laurel) was used in 18th century New Jersey to 'spike' liquor sold under the appropriate trade name 'Metheglin' (Jomes 1947;Kebler 1896)
Toxic honeys are not unusual (I have intentionally ignored the literature on non-psychoactive plant (and industrial) toxins sequestered in honeys), nor are accidental inebriations by psychoactive honeys exceptional. In satisfying the universal human "sweet tooth" during human explorations of any given ecosystems, foragers would encounter psychoactive and other toxic honeys. Having consumed such honeys and experienced psychoactive or other medicinal properties of their contained alkaloids and allied phytochemicals, it would require no special technology nor great imagination to follow the bees to the nectar source, thereby easily finding valuable plants. It has been suggested that ethnomedicinal and culinary plants were discovered by a systematic process of ingesting all species, in the eternal search for food. Some have questioned whether such an extensive bioassay program were feasible in areas of extraordinarily high biodiversity, such as Amazonia, thought to be home to at least 80 000 species of higher plants (Schultes 1988)! Apart from observation of the effects of bioactive plants on domestic wild animals, serendipitous encounters with phytotoxins in honeys could have served as highly specific and efficient pointers to medicinal, especially psychoactive, plants, which would thus stand out in deep relief, even against a backdrop of extreme biodiversity.
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