Up in the mountains around these parts, the perennial Yerba Santa starts to become a significant part of the chaparral at around 1,500 feet in elevation. You can see it growing in clumpy thickets along the highway, often next to the intensely aromatic White Sage (Salvia apiana.)
While Yerba Santa (Eriodictyon californium) bears some olfactory similarity with sage, the fragrance is sweeter and earthier. The best I can come up with is a cross between Black Sage (S. mellifera), Wriggly’s Juicy Fruit gum, and lemongrass. I’ve made teas with Yerba Santa and Black Sage many times and while it’s pleasant enough, it has no caffeine kick. Now, I’m not necessarily craving a kick for my herbal teas (I have coffee for that) but I wouldn’t turn it down either.
For some reason, the term “Mormon Tea” has been popping into my head lately. This tea is made from the plant Ephedra viridis. As you might have guessed by the name, the chemicals ephedrine and pseudoephedrine are named after ephedra. Ephedrine is the active ingredient found in the energizing Chinese herbal medicine Ma Huang. Back in the day, Ma Huang teas and weight loss supplements could be bought just about anywhere. But in 2004 it was banned by the FDA for causing serious cardiovascular side effects, seizures, and even several deaths. Ephedrine’s gentler cousin, pseudoephedrine, is found in the decongestant Sudafed. But it was banned for OTC sale because it was being used as a precursor for methamphetamine. Meth cooks would hire teams of “Smurfs” to fan out across the city, clear the shelves, and actually cause local shortages.
Well-played ephedra, you have my attention.
Some varieties of ephedra can be legally purchased online for your garden, plucked in the wild, and apparently consumed however the heck you want. This seems odd give the paragraph above because surely the crushed stalks could serve as a precursor to meth production – right? If some herbal Heisenberg out there was willing to harvest a mountain of it, and use a reagent to extract the ephedrine, the Smurfs would be out of a job.
But doing a little more research into the published alkaloid assays, only the Old World varieties of ephedra are rich in ephedrine. Our New World species are considered chemically inert and remain unregulated. Mormon tea therefore contains neither ephedrine or pseudoephedrine if you believe the Feds. But doing a little more digging, the California variety, Ephedra californica, is reported to contain low levels of pseudoephedrine amounting to some .01% of wet mass. It also contains significant levels of several indolealkylamines and tryptamines distantly related to the hallucinogen DMT. Cool as this all might sound, I’ve never heard of anyone tripping balls on ephedra. Well, except maybe Joseph Smith but he was already tripping. Gold tablets written in Reformed Egyptian? GTFO.
Anyway, because the Mormon homeland is located in Utah, my brain had somehow concluded that ephedra only grows in the high desert southwest somewhere. I don’t recall anyone ever pointing ephedra out on my many hikes in California. Looking at the pictures online, it’s maybe clear why – ephedra is an unremarkable shrub, oddly skeletal, and can appear almost dead. It also doesn’t produce large colorful flowers in spring so you’re never going to hear anyone say “Darling, you simply must come to California when the ephedra are in bloom…”
As a member of the gymnosperm family, ephedra is related to conifers and produces tiny woody “cones” when it’s time for reproductive action. Indeed one of its many monikers is Joint Fir. This isn’t because people smoke it but because the stalks have bamboo-like sections connected by knobby joints. Other slang terms include Whorehouse tea, Popotillo, and Tepopote, the connection between these terms being its historical use in treating venereal diseases. So once again, ephedra is associated with the edgier side of human behavior. This plant gets around.
I don’t know about you, but I’m as curious as a nun with a gun to brew some of this shit up and see what happens. I’m located in Ojai these days and if the website CalScape is to be trusted, there is a nice patch of ephedra located about 20 miles north of me:
I know this location well. It’s exactly where the biome shifts from classic upland chaparral to a more Great Basin-like pinyon-juniper woodland. Big Sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) and Rabbitbrush (Ericameria nauseosa) dominate the understory resulting in a vegetation mix that is very close to that found at lower elevations all over Utah.
So, let’s say I actually managed to make some of this Heisenberg Tea. Would it taste like ass or be pleasant? More importantly, is the purported pseudoephedrine present in sufficient concentration to get a nice decongesting buzz – or not?
We’re gonna find out.