Solanaceae
Duboisia myoporoides
Corkwood · Pituri tree
- Part used
- leaf
- Native range
- Eastern Australia and New Caledonia
- Morphology
- A shrub or small tree to fifteen metres with corky bark, soft bright green leaves and small white bell flowers, followed by purple-black berries.
What is in it
Evidence
Scopolamine extracted from Duboisia is a standard medicine for motion sickness and as a premedication, and is on the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines. That is a statement about the isolated drug.
Safety
Severe anticholinergic toxicity — delirium, hyperthermia, tachycardia, seizure. Alkaloid content varies enormously between plants, populations and seasons, which is precisely why pharmaceutical production uses selected cultivated clones rather than wild material.
Interactions: Additive with all anticholinergic drugs
Regulatory: Cultivation for alkaloid extraction is a licensed agricultural industry in Queensland. Scopolamine is a prescription medicine.
Historical use
Aboriginal peoples across eastern and central Australia used Duboisia species — the name pituri is most properly applied to D. hopwoodii — as a chewed stimulant and in trade networks that ran for thousands of kilometres. Commercial cultivation for alkaloid extraction began during the Second World War when European supplies were cut off.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Australia supplies most of the world's scopolamine, and it comes from a plantation crop in Queensland that almost nobody outside the industry has heard of.
The pharmaceutical industry turned to Duboisia during the Second World War, when European belladonna and henbane supplies were cut off, and it stayed because the alkaloid yields are far higher. Selected hybrid clones are grown, harvested mechanically, and extracted — so the travel-sickness patch sold in a European pharmacy is, in all likelihood, a Queensland crop.
The plant sits at the junction of two histories that rarely appear on the same page. Aboriginal trade networks moved Duboisia across the continent for millennia — pituri is one of the best-documented long-distance Aboriginal trade goods — and the modern industry grew on the same genus without that connection being much remarked on.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.