Herbal "knockout pills"

[elmenora]

Google and the library have failed me, so here goes.  I need a non-lethal drug, preferably plant based, that will knock some folks out when put in their food.

The scene:
Group A has invited group B to a feast, with the intention of drugging them and killing them (group A are noted warriors, so B wants to minimize the risk).  Main character figures

Comments

[sushidog]

Is laudanum no good? That would be my first thought.

[elmenora]

Considered it, but I'm not sure about the other effects. Apparently pre-modern laudanum tended to cause vomiting, cramps, and sweating - stuff the victims might notice easily. But if I can't find anything else laudanum would probably do the trick.

[the_physicist]

the side effects are from the opium and affect people who's stomach lining don't like the opium. from personal experience i can say that if you only use a little opium the side effects shouldn't occur within the short time period you're thinking of. after repeated exposure to small doses of the opium over a 12 hour period they're eventually likely to get the side effects. but even if they got it earlier, because your character uses a lot of opium, it's not like: OMG, someone put laudanum in my food! because the vomiting just feels like you might have eaten something bad, so if one or two characters are throwing up when they wake up, it could be put down to bad food.

[charlycrash]

I've never taken opium, but when I've been injected with morphine I haven't had any side-effects at all other than a brief but nasty "rushing" sensation presumably due to the method of delivery. That said, I didn't feel sleepy at all, nor did I feel high.

[charlycrash]

To be honest, I suspect you're going to have difficulty finding anything that fits the bill. At least anything that's just going to make someone go *thunk* without also putting them beside a warm fire/having a boring story read to them/etc.

It could be simplest just to get your character pissed, really :/

[elmenora]

Well, I don't need them to go "thunk" exactly. Just fall asleep more suddenly than normal and stay that way through moderate disturbances.

[subluxate]

Melatonin might work for your purposes. It can be derived from plants, and if conditions are otherwise conducive to sleep, a high dose should be sedating enough.

It does work differently on different people--my father, for instance, who weighs considerably more than I, can take 1mg and sleep all night, whereas back when it was effective, I'd take 10mg in order to sleep. That's because any sedative will also depend on any other physical conditions. Exhaustion will help; pain will make it less likely to work.

[cuneiforms]

How about mandrake or henbane? I don't know if curare does anything if you eat it - but that's one that came to mind.

[lilacsigil]

Can you get them drunk? A stronger liquor than they expect (spiking ale with vodka) is a pretty common method of date rape.

[elmenora]

For various plot reasons, it has to be in the food. Otherwise, alcohol would be top of the list :)

[marycatelli]

Alcohol-based sauces?

[lolmac]

I'm afraid that charlycrash is correct -- you're not going to find anything that fits your needs, unless your world allows for some handwaving. You might try starting with rohypnol and look for a biopharmaceutical that parallels its chemistry. But honestly? If the drug you want existed, I think it would have been used historically, frequently enough to be well-known. Date rape would be an established practice instead of a recent development. Instead, every example I can think of in history or story involves the target simply being plied with liquor.

In Regency Buck, Georgette Heyer -- a nonpareil at historical research -- has one character drug another to quick unconsciousness. She uses port wine, which is very strongly flavoured, and the recipient is a young man (low body weight). She never identifies the substance; in fact, the passage is written with a fine sleight of hand, pulling attention away from the fact that she handwaved it

[archangelbeth]

Date rape is an established practice -- as is using mind-altering substances to aid and abet it. The second subset started with "getting them too drunk to know what they're doing," back when someone invented a still. The first started when two people went walking and one of them decided that there was going to be sex whether the other person wanted it or not.

(Yeah, I think I know what you mean, but... be more careful saying whatcha mean, 'kay?)

[lolmac]

My apologies. By 'date rape' I was referring to the practice of drugging an individual to insensibility for the purposed of forced sexual assault, using something other than alcohol by itself: a type of event that has only been recognised and acknowledged as a serious problem relatively recently, in some countries. As I indicated, I can think of numerous examples of similar incidents, in history, mythology, traditional storytelling, ballads, etc., in which the assault occurs, but no substance other than alcohol is used (setting aside magic, which I'm assuming is not available to the OP). In most cases, brute force is applied without mind-altering substances. This suggests, to me, that there was no substance generally known and available that would function in the same manner as, for example, rohypnol.

[archangelbeth]

Thanks. I'm just very much against defining "date rape" as "using drugs to facilitate rape" -- it clouds the already murky issue of "two people had a social meeting and one decided that there would be sex, whether they had to nag, drug, or force the other." (Since persistent "nagging" for sex, or "not quite threatening" or "getting someone tipsy" are all things that can make it unclear to the person feeling violated whether it was "real rape.") You probably know all that, but, well, for anyone who might read this who doesn't, y'know?

I do agree: what with all the various "love potions" (lust potions...) that have been attempted over the centuries, if there were a generally known-and-available substance (besides alcohol) that facilitated sex-without-consent of the drugged person... It'd be documented.

OP: does it have to not be alcohol? (And on the other front, you can justify "non-fatal" by saying that some of the poisoning-group are going to have to eat some of the drugged food, to "prove" it's "harmless." They may need to have