Category:Plant

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 plant 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.

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. The categories of "adaptogen", "medicinal mushroom", "anxiolytic (botanical)", and others reflect how the wiki organises its content for navigability; they do not carry the weight of regulatory or pharmacopoeial standing on their own. Readers should treat them 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 subcategories below are not.

The plant root will parent the following thirteen subcategories. Some already exist on the wiki and are indexed below; others are reserved for the Phase-3 buildout once the taxonomy is locked.

• Herbal medicine (the broad European and Asian herbal traditions, the Western pharmacopeia's plant entries from 1820 to 1942, modern phytotherapy). To be built; will draw on USP Herbal Medicines Compendium, WHO monographs, EMA HMPC reflection papers, and Memorial Sloan Kettering's About Herbs reference.
• Psychedelic (psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, San Pedro cactus, salvia, iboga, ayahuasca admixtures, DMT-containing plants). Multi-membership with Phantastica on the Pendell axis.
• Entheogenic (plants whose primary historical and contemporary use is for spiritual or ritual purpose, frequently overlapping psychedelic but distinguished by intent and context: peyote in the Native American Church, ayahuasca in the Santo Daime and União do Vegetal lineages, iboga in Bwiti initiation).
• Cannabis and cannabinoids, multi-membership with Cannabinoids in the pharmaceutical root for the synthetic and isolated members. The Cannabis page is the canonical plant-medicine exemplar.
• Psychostimulant (botanical), coffee, tea, cacao, guarana, yerba mate, coca, khat, ephedra. Multi-membership with Psychostimulants in the pharmaceutical root.
• Sedative (botanical) (valerian, kava, hops). Distinguished from the broader sedative-hypnotic pharmacology of Pharmaceutical-side pharmacology.
• Anxiolytic (botanical) (passionflower, lemon balm, lavender, ashwagandha when used for anxiolysis). Overlaps Sedative (botanical) where the same plant is used for both indications; pages may sit in both.
• Adaptogen, a category whose biomedical standing remains contested, but whose ethnobotanical lineage is real: ashwagandha, rhodiola, eleuthero, schisandra, holy basil. The European Medicines Agency's Herbal Medicinal Products Committee issued a reflection paper in 2008 that examined the adaptogenic concept and declined to recognise it as a valid pharmacological category, while acknowledging the consistency of the traditional-use claims underlying it.^[3]
• Medicinal mushroom (reishi, lion's mane, cordyceps, chaga, turkey tail, maitake). Naming convention follows ethnomycology rather than the marketing-folksonomy term "functional mushroom".
• Ceremonial / Ritual (plants whose primary historical role has been religious or ritual rather than therapeutic in any modern sense: ayahuasca admixtures, ololiuhqui, peyote in Native American Church use, kava in Pacific ceremony).
• Culinary medicinal (plants whose role straddles food and medicine: garlic, ginger, turmeric, cinnamon, cardamom, the broader Mediterranean and Asian kitchen pharmacopeias).
• Toxic plants (plants whose principal medical interest is toxicological: belladonna, henbane, datura, mandrake, monkshood, hellebore, foxglove in its non-medicinal forms). Many of these are also Historical plants, but the distinguishing axis here is current relevance to clinical toxicology and emergency medicine.
• Historical plants (plants whose principal medical interest is now historical: many of the medieval European herbals' entries, the bulk of the witching herbs of European and Mediterranean tradition where the use is no longer current). Overlap with Toxic plants is large; multi-membership applies.

A second organising frame sits alongside the therapeutic subcategories above: the Dale Pendell Pharmako trilogy (Pharmako/Poeia 1995, Pharmako/Dynamis 2002, Pharmako/Gnosis 2005), the wiki's primary literary source for plant medicines. Pendell organises 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:

• Inebriant (Poeia): inebriants, narcotics, and the plants of altered groundedness. Pendell's first volume.
• Stimulant (Dynamis): stimulants and empathogens. Pendell's second volume.
• Visionary (Gnosis): psychedelics and the plants of vision. Pendell's third volume.

The eleven class-level categories, organised by volume:

A plant page in the Pendell-axis system carries one volume tag (Inebriant / Stimulant / Visionary) and one or more class tags. Volume + 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.

Many of the molecules now sold in pharmaceutical form had their first life in a plant. The wiki treats those medicines as belonging to both roots: the cannabis page indexes the plant, the THC and cannabidiol pages index the molecules (which are now produced both botanically and synthetically), the Dronabinol page indexes the pure pharmaceutical product. 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; 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. The taxonomy reflects what is true now about how each material reaches a user. The history, the chemistry, the pharmacology, and the lived experience all sit on top of that, indexed by whatever route gets the reader closest to the medicine they want to know about.