Aspiring Human

Some highlights about nutmeg (might not be perfectly up to date but we’re accurate as of the early 2010s):

There are only 2 known fatalities attributed to “overdoses” on nutmeg. One of them was an 8 year old boy in the 1800s who ate several grams….. To treat him, the doctors injected a combination of brandy (yes, the liquor), a smidge of cocaine, and some other highly questionable substances I don’t remember the exact details of. (May edit this post later to add them). After the “treatment,” he died. Was it the nutmeg that killed him or the (literal) cocktail straight to the blood that could perhaps kill a grown man? The world may never know.

Update: it was 14 grams, and in 1908.

The dose of nutmeg needed to get high is approximately 5 grams. The toxic (NOT lethal, toxic just means ‘starts to make you feel some degree of very sick’) is also 5 grams. This means that in basically every instance in which a person successfully uses nutmeg to get high, they also feel very ill. Most people report nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain, at the very least.

The nutmeg community is WILD. Part of my project required that I quote actual users from testimony somewhere online. The stories I read were so absurd that they still live in my head rent-free almost a decade later. Every single story (except ONE, see below) were indeed tales of utter misery.

One was a guy who ate 10g of nutmeg before his sister’s wedding. He reported that the wedding was “not very enjoyable” as “the cake tasted like dirt” and dancing felt like “being a puppet pulled poorly and roughly around by a bad marionette.”

Another reported doing nutmeg and becoming convinced he had destroyed his brain. He said he stared out the window of his second floor apartment and “looked down at the other people, the normal people, the ones who weren’t going to be 30 IQ points stupider for the rest of their lives. I envied them for what they had. They didn’t even know. I would never be like them again.” He reported that he was fine a day later after the high wore off, and swore he’d never do it again. I still remember his username. RIP thelittletripperthatcouldnt.

The final guy, though. His story was the strangest. He LOVED nutmeg. He nut(meg)ed every day. For 12 hours each day he would watch porn and do nutmeg. He had done this for months. He was happy. He recommended nutmeg to everyone. I did not include his take in my presentation.

Q: What kind of drug is nutmeg?

A: A deliriant. (The most popular example of a drug with a similar effect in this class is Benadryl). It has some hallucinogenic/psychedelic properties, but also a lot “anti-cholinergic” properties. I’ll explain that more below.

Q: You can get high off of nutmeg?!

A: Yep. Supposedly it sucks though. The active ingredient is thought to be myristicin. You’d have to eat a lot of powdered nutmeg to get an effect, though. And nutmeg has that same powdery, makes-you-wanna-choke, dry consistency that cinnamon has, so straight up swallowing a bunch of nutmeg is very difficult. (Anybody else old enough to remember the cinnamon challenge?? It’s like that. Oof.)

Q: How does it work?

A: Seems like myristicin asks on the serotonergic and cholinergic systems in the brain. Serotonergic systems involve, as you might guess, serotonin. Serotonin does a bunchy bunch of things, and you’ve probably heard of it before! A lack of serotonin is involved in depression, hence the common use of SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, for depression treatment. There are multiple serotonin receptors and each have somewhat similar but definitely not identical effects. The serotonin 5HT3 receptor is thought to be the major player in LSD highs, for instance. Myristicin probably acts there too, causing some mild euphoria and hallucinations.

Cholinergic systems involve the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. It has 2 main receptors subtypes, which then divide more into other subtypes of their own. There are the nicotinic receptors, named for nicotine, which exerts its effects primarily by its action on them. Then there are the muscarinic receptors, named for muscarine (another drug you may not have heard of) by the same logic. Acetylcholine is the most common neurotransmitter in the body and it does a fuck ton of stuff that would take me a long long time to write out. For our purposes, just know that anti-cholinergics block those muscarinic acetylcholine receptors, and cause some nasty side effects. These include dry mouth, urinary retention, dehydration, constipation & abdominal pain. All of which you get with nutmeg!

bonus/proof:

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