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Wild lettuce is a legal ethnobotanical in the United States, and has enjoyed a surge of popularity as a recreational herb on the internet. It is related to common garden lettuce Lactuca sativa, but the leaves are very bitter. Wild lettuce leave contain a potent milky latex, sometimes called "lettuce opium", that is sedative, helps to induce sleep, and calm restlessness and anxiety. Mabey, Richard ,48
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| Toxic in large amounts |
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Preparation Methods :When a stem or leaf from a wild Lettuce plant is broken or cut, it will bleed a thick milky sap. This sap can be made into an alchhol tincure, (Lactucarium)or the fresh leaves and flowering tops can be tinctured, or dried and made taken as teas,smoked or less often in capsule form.
 Remedies using : Wild lettuce
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Related Species
Lactuca Canadennis,Lactuca Serriola |
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- Flowers: Numerous, small, about 1\4 in. across, involucre, cylindric, rays pale yellow; followed by abundant, soft, bright white pappus; the heads growing in loose, branching, terminal clusters.
- Stem:Smooth, 3 to 10 ft. high, leafy up to the flower panicle; juice milky.
- Leaves: Upper ones lance-shaped; lower ones often 1 ft. long, wavy-lobed, often pinnatifid, taper pointed, narrowed into flat petioles.
- Preferred Habitat:Moist, open ground; roadsides.
- Flowering Season:June - November
- Distribution:Georgia, westward to Arkansas, north to the British Possessions.
Few gardeners allow the table lettuce (saliva) to go to seed; but as it is next of kin to this common wayside weed, it bears a strong likeness to it in the loose, narrow panicles of cream-colored flowers, followed by more charming, bright, white little pompons. When the milky juice has been thickened (lactucarium), it is sometimes used as a substitute for opium by regular practitioners - a fluid employed by the plants themselves, it is thought, to discourage creatures from feasting at their expense. Certain caterpillars, however, eat the leaves readily; but offer lettuce or poppy foliage to grazing cattle, and they will go without food rather than touch it.
Netje Blanchan Wild Flowers worth Knowing(1917)
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 Where the garden varieties originated, or what they were, nobody knows. Herodotus says lettuce was eaten as a salad in 550 B.C.; in Pliny's time it was cultivated, and even blanched, so as to be had at all seasons of the year by the Romans. Among the privy-purse expenses of Henry VIII is a reward to a certain gardener for bringing "lettuze" and cherries to Hampton Court.
Netje Blanchan Wild Flowers worth Knowing(1917) |
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 It is under the government of Mars. The smell and taste is much like opium. A syrup made from a strong infusion of it, is an excellent anodyne(pain relief) it eases the most violent pains of the colic, and other disorders, and gently disposes the patient to sleep, for it has none of the violent effects of other opiates. The best way of giving it is, to dry the juice which runs from the roots by incision ; this dissolves freely in mountain wine, if one ounce be put into a gallon of wine there is produced an excellent quieting medicine, a teaspoonful of which in a dose in a glass of water. This takes off spasms, convulsions, stays fluxes of all kinds proceeding from irritation. Nicholas Culpeper |
 Pagans use wild lettuce as an incense aid for divination, especially when working with darker deities. | |
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Wild lettuce Medicinal Uses & Benefits
