Abstract
THE wholesale cultivation of drug-producing plants in Great Britain is being encouraged by the Pharmaceutical Society and the Ministry of Agriculture to meet the deficiency of Continental imports, and a medical correspondent in the Lancet of December 7 points out the dangerous position arising from the prohibitively high prices and the acute shortage of necessary drugs. A survey by the Chemist and Druggist of the present conditions on the nine big commercial drug-plant farms in Great Britain reports a fairly good harvest this past season, but considerable extensions will be required to meet the needs of the manufacturing chemists in 1941. The chief plants required, and suitable for wholesale cultivation as field crops, are deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna), thorn-apple (Datura stramonium), henbane (Hyoscyamus niger), monkshood (Aconitum napellus), foxglove (Digitalis purpurea), hemlock (Conium maculatum), white horehound (Marrubium vulgare), skull-cap (Scutellaria galericulata), male fern (Lastrea Filix-mas), mother-wort (Leonurus cardiaca), chamomile (Anthemis tinctoria), wormwood (Artemisia absinthemum), squirting cucumber (Ecballium elaterium), opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), and valerian (Valeriana officinalis).
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British Drug Plants. Nature 147, 21 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/147021b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/147021b0