Study: Weeds Make the Best Medicine

June 24, 2004 -- Researchers who are scouring the tropical forests for exotic plants that can heal the sick may be overlooking the obvious.

Look not in the forest, advises anthropologist John Richard Stepp of the University of Florida. Look, instead, at your feet and savor the medicinal values of ordinary weeds.

That's right. Weeds.

Those miserable plants that always turn up where they are least welcome account for more than a third of the plants used in pharmaceuticals, according to Stepp's research. That's despite the fact that only about 3 percent of the world's plant species are classified as weeds.

"There has been this sort of promotion of tropical forests as the place to find drugs, and I started to wonder if that jived with what had already been discovered," Stepp says. After combing through the technical literature Stepp concluded that weeds have been a veritable gold mine for pharmaceutical companies in the past, and in many cases far more beneficial than more exotic plants found deep in the forest.

Stepp published his findings in the current issue of the Journal of Ethno-Pharmacology.

Local Remedies Tap Weeds

He figures the poppy, used to produce morphine, is the best known medicinal weed, but there are many others. Weed extracts are used for the motion sickness drug scopolamine, as well as the cancer medicines vinblastine, for Hodgkin's disease, and vincristin, for childhood leukemia, he says.

Some gardeners may not view the poppy as a weed, but it fits the classic definition.

"Basically, weeds are plants that are aggressive, fast growing, and thrive in disturbed areas," Stepp says.

My dictionary calls a weed "any undesired, uncultivated plant that grows in profusion so as to crowd out a desired crop."

That's a stuffy phrasing of the old gardener's definition of a weed. It's anything that grows where you don't want it to grow. By any definition, weeds are all around us, and they arrive in great numbers soon after the spade is plunged into the soil.