Hallucinogenic plants in Chinese herbals

For over two millennia, texts in Chinese herbology and traditional Chinese medicine have recorded medicinal plants that are also hallucinogens and psychedelics. Some are familiar psychoactive plants in Western herbal medicine (e.g., làngdàng 莨菪 "Hyoscyamus niger, black henbane"), but several Chinese plants have not been noted as hallucinogens in modern works (e.g., yúnshí 雲實 "Caesalpinia decapetala, cat's claw" flowers). Chinese herbals are an important resource for the history of botany, for instance, Zhang Hua's c. 290 Bowuzhi is the earliest record of the psilocybin mushroom xiàojùn 笑菌 (lit. "laughing mushroom", "Gymnopilus junonius, laughing gym").

There is a lexical gap between Chinese names and descriptions of hallucinogenic plants and English pharmacological terminology for hallucinogens, which are commonly divided into psychedelics, dissociatives, and deliriants.

The English lexicon has a complex semantic field for psychoactive drugs, and most terms are neologisms (n.b., the following definitions are from Stedman's Medical Dictionary 2008).

Hallucination (from Latin alucinor "to wander in mind") is defined as: "The apparent, often strong subjective perception of an external object or event when no such stimulus or situation is present; may be visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, or tactile." Hallucinogen (coined in 1952 from Latin alucinor and -gen "producing"): "A mind-altering chemical, drug, or agent, specifically a chemical the most prominent pharmacologic action of which is on the central nervous system (mescaline); in normal people, it elicits optic or auditory hallucinations, depersonalization, perceptual disturbances, and disturbances of thought processes."

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