What's up with the "cocaine mummies"?

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

Original link is www.straightdope.com/columns/010126.html

A friend asked me about that Egyptian mummies/cocaine link, providing
me with the original paper from Naturwissenschaften 79, 358 (1992) by
S. Balabanova, F. Parsche, and W. Pirsig.

Before I found Cecil’s dope on that topic, I gave a similar reply.
However, I also noted:

Their paper presents no evidence of chemical identification.
They say they used a GCMS device. That’s not evidence. Any real
analytical identification paper would include all the details about
how they established the identify of a molecule. These researchers
failed to do that.

[Aside] Other researchers looking at Chilean mummies reported that
cocaine, as well as the human metabolites benzoylecgonine (BZE)
and ecgonine methylester (EME), were found in the scalp hair.

But getting back to the original report about far away Egyptian mummies…
How can they claim to have identified “hashish”? How could they
distinguish between ingestion of Cannabis leaves, flowers, and
hashish based on identifying one molecule (THC)? Answer, they can’t!

One train of thought might reason, well, cocaine in Egyptian mummies
means a trade route before Columbus, etc, and that since these
researchers found both cocaine and nicotine and since these are both
from “New World” plants in the Americas that somehow the evidence is
greater – like maybe both kinds of plant (coca and tobacco) made
their way to the Egyptian royalty together from South America. But
there is a fallacy there, since nicotine is found in plants all over
the place!!!

Nicotine is found in over 50 species of plants; is found in at
least 19 genera (not including Nicotiana); is found in at least
14 plant families (not including Solanaceae). So nicotine
adds nothing.

However, I pointed out that the plant family Erythroxylaceae,
which contains the genus Erythroxylum and contains the
species Erythroxylum coca, has not been systematically studied
for molecules like cocaine. And there are species from that
family in Africa! So maybe Egyptian royalty sourced those
African plants that we haven’t studied well yet. Also,
nicotine has been reported in the family. So it is
theoretically possible that both a cocaine-like molecule
and nicotine could come from one plant, possibly from Africa,
and this is what they are observing. But of course that part
is speculation.

However, if the German lab goofed and found a cocaine-like
molecule via GCMS, and not actually cocaine, and they didn’t
really-really goof by doing their work on contaminated
samples and contaminated equipment, and they weren’t the
victims of an upstream hoax – then maybe royals were eating
or drinking those African species.

For an old paper on nicotine in Erythroxylum coca (leaf,
root, stem) see JJ Willaman and BG Schubert’s publication
“Alkaloid bearing plants and their contained alkaloids”,
USDA Tech. Bull. 1234 (1961).

But in any case, this kind of report would be rejected from any
chemistry journal, and you don’t need to invoke any argument that
there were no trade routes to reject it…

2

Actually, you don’t need to go nearly so far to question Balabanova’s results. The mummies that tested positive for cocaine were all from the Munich Museum, but they were a highly heterogenous group from quite varied times and places. Balabanova and others have tested hundreds of mummies since and none have tested positive for cocaine. This is highly suspicious and points to either a lab error or someone smoking crack in the Munich Museum mummy room.

Nicotine, on the other hand, has been found in mummies all over the Old World. While you are correct in stating that nicotine can be found in many old world plants, but only at a very low level.

The nicotine levels in the mummies varied a great deal, but the highest were at the lowest level considered proof of smoking in live people (and were found using the same tests). Only tobacco, or some unknown concentrated concoction of one of the other plants would have enough nicotine to cause this.

Beyond this point you get into issues about nicotine levels in hair versus bones and whether nicotine levels in the mummies drop over the centuries. It becomes rather more complicated than I feel like getting into right now.

I wrote an article about this issue for Fortean Times a few years back. The first half or so can be found at:
http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/117_toke.shtml

Bill

3

I read (watched?) somewhere about an important medicinal plant known in ancient times that was subsequently harvested to extintion. Is it not possible that this and possibly other now extinct plants were overharvested because they contained nicotine or cocaine?

4

Re: extinction of medicinal plants.

Maybe. Perhaps you saw something on “Silphium”,
maybe a giant fennel-like plant. It appeared
on Cyrenean coins and supposidly was over-harvested
for its contraceptive properties. Supposidly the
coins end around 250 B.C.

See “Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient
World to the Renaissance” by historian John Riddle.

The Greeks were in what is now Libya.

Sounds like something Cecil would’ve already said something
about it…