Hello, I'm jim mcdonald.
I'm an herbalist.
I live in Michigan, but I'm not in Michigan right now.
I'm in Oregon.
And that can be challenging
because when we first got to where I'm at right now,
I was looking around and I was thinking,
well, I don't know that,
I don't know that,
and that doesn't grow by me...
But you know, if you think about a lot of our common weeds,
they grow where there's disturbed soil.
And it seems like wherever people live,
we disturb the soil.
So I looked and I saw this plant growing here,
and I thought, "Whoa, that seems to be wild lettuce."
And then I wondered, is it the same species of wild lettuce
that grows by me, Lactuca serriola?
And yes, I think it is.
And there's different wild lettuces where I live.
I can speak to that.
There's two really tall wild lettuces.
Lactuca canadensis and Lactuca biennis.
Canadensis has yellow flowers,
biennis has kind of pale blue flowers.
And then there's prickly lettuce, prickly wild lettuce:
Lactuca serriola.
And the way that you can tell
that this is prickly wild lettuce
is that it's got prickles on it.
It's well-named.
Also like, it's kind of got this gray-green color, right?
So there's, you know, a lot of-
Most plants are green,
but they have different shades of green.
Some are more blue-green and some are more yellow-green.
And this one I think is kind of gray-green.
And then there's this interesting things where the leaves,
they don't grow out flat like this, like a lot of plants.
They kind of are turned sideways.
And so that's something that I look for, you know?
I'm not guaranteeing that any plant
that's gray-green and has sideways leaves
and some prickles on it is this plant.
You'll need to figure that out.
Make sure yourself, that's important.
But I'm confident that this is prickly wild lettuce.
And it's a cool plant,
but I need to dispel something about it.
You may have seen on the internet,
you may have had someone post on social media
that wild lettuce was once called lettuce opium,
which it was.
And that it's as strong as opium
or stronger than opium or stronger than morphine.
And it's totally not.
Like, it's not.
If you were to get surgery
and someone gave you wild lettuce instead of morphine,
you would be so bummed out, right?
What wild lettuce is, is it is a relaxant.
It is a mild antispasmodic and a calming herb,
but it's not-
And in those regards,
it's maybe "like" opium or "like" morphine
but it's not anywhere near the the potency or forcefulness
or scale of how strong opium or morphine is.
But you can make preparations with it.
And one of these preparations was called lettuce opium.
And if we break a leaf and-
We'll notice that it exudes a milky latex,
just like opium poppy would.
And they used to make this stuff called lactucarium
where they would chop up the stems and it would exude latex,
and they would scrape off the latex.
And then they would chop more stems,
and they would scrape off more latex,
and they would get just a pile of latex.
And they would dry it and they would extract that.
That concentrated, it's relaxant
and somewhat sedative effects.
And you can make that, it's really tedious.
It'll take you a long time.
Different people make tinctures in different ways.
Some people might make a tincture and then strain it out,
put more herb in it and then make the tincture again
using the same tincture that they made to make a new batch.
And do that a few times to sort of concentrate it.
Some people use dry herbs.
Different people do things different ways.
But I've made a tincture with this plant,
and I can use it for like mild stressed-outed-ness, right?
So like you're kind of stressed out, you
need something that's going to calm you down a little bit.
It can be a calming herb.
But I think it's a great antispasmodic
for upper respiratory tension and spasmodic coughing.
And I'll just use this straight tincture
of the fresh plant for that.
I don't always double or triple or quadruple macerate it.
I can just use it as it is and mix it with other herbs.
And I like it quite a bit.
Sometimes if you can't sleep, that tincture can be helpful.
The more you concentrate it,
the more macerations you do, the more-I don't
want to say it's going to be stronger, but the... you know,
the less you need to take to get the same effect from it.
It's a really weedy plant
and so therefore it's very sustainable to gather.
It's something that you can kind of gather with wild abandon
and not have to worry about screwing up your environment.
And it's a good plant to know because of that.
The more that we can focus on weedy stuff,
the more pressure we take off of sensitive stuff
that's not weedy.
It has a lot of ecological
and sustainability considerations.
So wild lettuce, whether one of the tall ones
or this small prickly one,
it's a great herb to know and really simple and safe.
It's not like morphine, it's not like opium,
but it's better because it's not like that.