Category:Plants

On the floor of a rock shelter at Spirit Cave in the Mae Hong Son hills of northwest Thailand, deposited some eleven thousand years ago, archaeologists working in the 1960s recovered the seeds and pods of plants that the Hoabinhian inhabitants had carried home and eaten or used.^[1] Some of those plants, including peppers, gourds, and a member of the cannabis family, would have been useful as food. Others would have done other things to the people who used them. Whether the Spirit Cave finds count as the earliest direct evidence of plant medicine depends on questions that archaeology cannot finally answer, but the deeper point is older than the evidence: human beings have been using plants to alter the body, ease pain, change mood, and reach altered states for as long as there have been human beings.

The plants category collects medicines whose active material is currently sourced from a plant, a fungus, or, in a small number of cases, another non-mammalian organism (some preparations of toad venom; ergot-derived medicines whose source is a fungus rather than a higher plant). The category tracks the present-tense source. Some of the medicines indexed here have also been brought into pharmaceutical manufacture (the cannabinoids of cannabis are now also produced synthetically as Dronabinol and Nabilone; the alkaloids of opium poppy are the historical root of every opioid in clinical use), and those pages sit simultaneously in Pharmaceutical and in this category. The wiki's framing is that a medicine can belong to both at once.

This page is the plant origin category, one of the wiki's two origin roots, and it is the root of the plant panel. A medicine reaches this category by the wiki's two-gate test: its active molecule is a natural product of a living organism, and it entered use through tradition rather than through scientific discovery.

The boundary of "plant medicine" is genuinely fuzzy, and the wiki does not pretend otherwise. Fungi are not plants in modern biological taxonomy, but the great medicines that come from them (psilocybin mushrooms, ergot, the medicinal reishi and lion's mane) belong in any reasonable account of botanical medicine, and they are indexed here. Animal-source materials with deep ethnobotanical lineage (Bufo alvarius toad venom) are also indexed here as botanically-adjacent. The boundary the wiki holds is not biological taxonomy but pharmacological lineage: medicines whose source has been a living thing growing in a place, found and gathered and used by people who shared its place.

The subcategory taxonomy below is the wiki's own editorial design, not an authority-endorsed classification. It does not carry the weight of regulatory or pharmacopoeial standing on its own. Readers should treat it as a navigation aid, not as a clinical taxonomy.

One axis on this page IS authority-grounded: the three-tier evidence framework used by the World Health Organization in its multi-volume WHO Monographs on Selected Medicinal Plants.^[2] The WHO tagging divides claims into three tiers: clinically supported (modern clinical-trial evidence available for the indication), pharmacopoeially traditional (use documented in classical pharmacopeias but not validated by modern trials), and folk-medicine unsupported (folk use without either of the above). Where a medicine page indexed under this root carries clinical-evidence claims for an indication, those claims are tagged with the appropriate WHO tier; readers should read those tags as authority-grounded in a way the editorial structure below is not.

The primary structure of the plant panel is the Dale Pendell axis: the three volumes of the Pharmako trilogy (Pharmako/Poeia 1995, Pharmako/Dynamis 2002, Pharmako/Gnosis 2005), the wiki's primary literary source for plant medicines.^[3] Pendell organizes his three volumes around what he calls the "ally" character of each plant, and within each volume he names finer classes. The wiki indexes plant pages by both volume tag and class tag, multi-membership.

The three volumes, each a category page in its own right:

• Poeia, the inebriants: inebriants, narcotics, and the plants of altered groundedness. Pendell's first volume.
• Dynamis, the psychostimulants: psychostimulants and empathogens. Pendell's second volume.
• Gnosis, the visionaries: psychedelics and the plants of vision. Pendell's third volume.

The eleven class-level categories, organized by volume:

A plant page in the Pendell-axis system carries one volume tag (Poeia, Dynamis, or Gnosis) and one or more class tags. Volume and class are both used; the granularity is the user's choice. The mapping is verified against the actual Pendell texts; see the wiki's reference page on the Pendell pharmakopoeia for full sourcing.

An earlier editorial design organized the plant root by thirteen botanical-therapeutic subcategories: herbal medicine, psychedelic, entheogenic, cannabis and cannabinoids, psychostimulant (botanical), sedative (botanical), anxiolytic (botanical), adaptogen, medicinal mushroom, ceremonial / ritual, culinary medicinal, toxic plants, and historical plants. With the taxonomy now locked on the Pendell axis as the primary structure of the plant panel, those thirteen subcategories are not the working organization of this category.

They are noted here as a reserved future section. The wiki's psychoactive and CNS-active plant medicines map cleanly onto the Pendell axis, but a later buildout of the non-psychoactive herbal estate, the broad European and Asian herbal traditions, the medicinal mushrooms, the culinary medicinals, will need a structure the Pendell volumes do not provide, since Pendell wrote about the plants that change the mind and not about the wider materia medica. When that herbal buildout is undertaken, the botanical-therapeutic subcategories will be revisited as the frame for it; it is expected to draw on the USP Herbal Medicines Compendium, the WHO monographs, the EMA HMPC reflection papers, and Memorial Sloan Kettering's About Herbs reference. Until then the Pendell axis carries the panel.

This category collects every medicine whose present-tense active source is a plant, a fungus, or a botanically-adjacent organism, and which entered use by tradition. It is one of the wiki's two origin categories, the other being Pharmaceutical; every medicine page carries exactly one origin tag. Origin is single-valued, but class membership is not: a plant medicine that is also a member of a cross-cutting class is indexed in both places, following the wiki's multi-membership convention.

Many of the molecules now sold in pharmaceutical form had their first life in a plant, and the wiki treats those medicines as belonging to both roots. A reader following from opium to morphine to diacetylmorphine is travelling along a continuous lineage that the two-root taxonomy makes navigable. The wiki does not rank one root above the other: plant medicines are not "more natural" or "safer" than pharmaceutical medicines, and pharmaceutical medicines are not "more rigorous" or "more real" than plant medicines. They are two indexes into the same underlying material world of substances people use to change what happens in their bodies.

Each plant medicine indexed under this root has its own page, built on the wiki's standard plant-medicine structure: a history-first account that gives most of its length to where the plant came from and how people came to use it, with prohibition folded into that history, followed by pharmacology, indications, adverse effects, and interactions. Pages in Plant-tagged categories also carry the wiki's plants skin.

This is one of the wiki's MedCategory overview pages. It carries the MedCategory marker tag. The category sits beneath Medicines. It is the root of the plant panel; the three Pendell volume categories sit directly beneath it, and the eleven class categories beneath those.