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Today'S episode once again discusses the deaths of individuals. If this sort of thing upsets you, may I suggest you read a book. Maybe something like Cannery Row. Welcome to Mayhem in the Morgue with your host Dr. Kendall crowns. Today's episode Foraging Misadventures When I was driving to work the other day, I heard a story on the radio. It was about individuals in Arizona that were reportedly licking toads. Evidently, recent unseasonal monsoonal rains in Arizona had caused an increase in the appearance of this particular toad. The toads had come out of their ground habitats to breed in the puddling water. People believed that if they catched these toads and licked them, they would get high. When I heard this, it reminded me of a couple of my high school friends from years ago. They were really into drugs and they were really into hallucinogenic drugs and often talked about finding new ones. And somehow they had heard a story about toads that if you licked them you could have a crazy hallucinogenic experience where they found this information out about these magical toads. I still don't know to this day, but I know they went on a hunt to find one of them in the wilds of Kansas and they were definitely armed with bad information because they caught a couple of the toads and attempted to lick them and ended up throwing up for about 24 hours. They showed my other friends and I the toads that they had caught. They were large, light yellow toads with dark green spots that were outlined by a lighter color. They had a large lump between their eyes and numerous warts on their body. Comparing them to pictures in a book, it appears they had caught a Great Plains toad, which is very common in Kansas and not known to secrete hallucinogens. It is instead known for secreting a toxic substance known as bufotoxin. And they were lucky that all they did was get nausea and vomiting because if this toxin is in high enough levels, it can actually make you go into heart failure. I had forgotten about this until I heard this radio show all these years later, and I thought, are these indeed the magical toads my friends were looking for? After a little research, I found out they just might be. The mythical toad from my high school friend's quest is known as the Sonera desert toad or Colorado river toad. It is a large, olive green to brownish gray toad with relatively smooth skin and prominent parotid glands behind each eye and some large warts on its hind legs. It can be found in Colorado, California, New Mexico, and Arizona, but definitely not Kansas. So my friends had been doomed to failure from the start. This toad is special because it secretes a toxin from its parotid gland known as 5 methoxydimethyltryptamine, which is a neurotoxin, and actually, in humans, a powerful hallucinogenic which can cause audio and visual distortions, alter your perception of time, as well as amplifying emotional states and feeling of awareness. It can even make you feel like you've been reborn. The effects can last for an hour and leave the user with an altered mood and perception. And so, really, can you go on a magic carpet ride by catching one of these toes and having a good lick? I had to find out the answer to this question, and the answer is possibly, but not by directly licking them. In fact, what most people do is extract the 5 methoxydimethyltryptamine and make it into a paste and smoke it or do other things with it, but not lick the toad. The problem with licking the toad is the substances they are releasing are when they are captured by a predator, picked up in a dog's mouth or something like that. And they release these substances as a fear response, and they don't regulate how much they release. And so you never know how much you're going to get when you attempt to lick one. And if you get too much of the toxin, it can actually cause you to have a seizure, go into a coma, and even die suddenly. Plus, they secrete other toxins as well, which are cardiac glycosides, which can cause gastrointestinal issues like nausea and vomiting and diarrhea. And they can also be cardiotoxic, which means it results in poisoning of your heart. And these toxins can cause your heart to slow down, cause irregular heart rates or dysrhythmias, which can result in sudden death. From an article I read, it stated toad poisoning comes with a high mortality rate. So if you're into licking toads, it's a risky endeavor that can result in death and I wouldn't recommend it. Often when people experience nature, they take in the beauty. They see the sights, they smell the smells, they take scenic pictures. They don't seek out peril or things that can result in disastrous consequences. But some people, often males, actively seek these things out. And more often than not, their actions result in a free trip to the morgue. And also we will be playing a double header of everybody's favorite true crime game show. Is it alcohol, meth or women? So get your Scantron answer sheets out, sharpen your number two pencils and have your answers ready at the end of each case. So let's get started. The first case we'll be discussing is a 20 year old male. He loved to go hiking in the forest and experiencing nature firsthand. And on his latest hike, he saw what he thought were magic mushrooms. He went to the library, looked them up, studied pictures and flipped through many books on mushrooms. And it was certain he he was right. He told his friends he had discovered magic mushrooms and he was certain of it because he had seen pictures in the library and he said he was going to go back out there and harvest them and asked if they wanted to come along, to which they all said no. And he said, well, okay. He would bring them back to share with them and they would all have a great party. The problem is, though, a lot of mushrooms can look alike. Mushrooms are the member of the kingdom fungi, which is one of the largest, most diverse groups of organisms, second only to insects. It has been estimated that there are more than 10,000 species of mushrooms found in the United States and the area he was living in. In the state of Illinois, there are at least 2,000 species that can occur, and some of them are edible and some of them are deadly. And those deadly ones are fairly similar in appearance to the safe ones. A mistake can have horrible consequences. When he went out, he ended up finding his quarry. They were growing in abundance in the wet Illinois woodlands, popping up on the rotting wood of fallen trees. He picked dozens of mushrooms and brought them home. He then dried them out over the next few weeks, excited about the possibilities of what was going to happen. And he told his friends he was going to make a killer psychedelic tea. And all his friends could come over and drink his tea and have a crazy wild party. When he felt the mushrooms were sufficiently dry, he ground them up, put them in boiling water and made them into a tea. He called his friends and invited them over to partake in his concoction. But no one wanted to. And he responded to them with, well, I guess that's more for me. And he drank his magic elixir. And he was disappointed because nothing happened. Everything was just normal. He didn't hallucinate or anything. After several hours, though, something did occur. He began vomiting and then he began having explosive diarrhea. This was not the experience he was hoping for. And this continued for about a day or so. And after it ended, he called one of his friends and told them how sick he had been. And they told him, do you think it was the mushrooms? And he said it's a possibility that maybe he had gotten the wrong type of mushrooms and he wasn't going to try them again. His friend told him maybe he should go to the hospital and get checked out. And he said, no, he was doing better now and he was okay, so he didn't need to go to the doctors. A day or two later, he didn't show up to his job and one of his friends went to check on him. They had a key to his apartment, and when they entered, they found him on his bed. He. He was still alive but unresponsive, and his skin was bright yellow. The friend called emergency medical services. They responded and took him to the hospital where he was found to be in liver and renal failure. He was admitted to an icu, put on a ventilator, and slowly progressed to multiorgan failure and eventually died. After several days at autopsy, he had marked jaundice and scleral icterus, which means his skin was highlighter yellow as well as the whites of his eyes. And this is evidence of liver failure. Internally there was pulmonary congestion and edema, which is fluid on his lungs. His liver was softened and necrotic with areas of hemorrhage. So basically the tissue was dead. And there were small pinpoint penticular hemorrhages along his kidneys and on the mucosa of his stomach. He died from multi organ failure, it was obvious. And the reason his organs went into failure was most likely due to the mushroom concoction that he had drank. So the question became, what mushrooms were they? We sent the death investigators back out to the apartment to see if they could find the mushrooms that he had consumed. They did find them in the trash. The decedent had gone out in the woods to find a particular mushroom known as a Liberty Bell or Liberty cap. And these are the magic mushrooms that everybody knows. They are little brown mushrooms with a distinctive conical or bell shaped cap that contain the psychoactive compounds psilocybin. Psilocin and bayocysteine. And these compounds can cause visual distortions, mood elevations and auditory hallucinations. After being dried, magic mushrooms can be consumed. They can be cooked up, put in food, crushed into seasonings and of course, made into a tea. But he didn't find those mushrooms. What he found wasn't liberty bells, but instead mushrooms with the scientific name of Galerina marginata, which has the ominous name of funeral bell mushrooms. These are relatively small, rusty brown mushrooms that can have caps that are broadly convex to flat to slightly bell shaped, which makes them easily mistaken for liberty bells. Funeral bells do not contain psilocybin, but instead contain the most potent mushroom toxin known, which is called amatoxin. Amatoxin poisons the body by causing damage to liver cells, resulting in cellular necrosis, which then results in acute liver dysfunction and liver failure. Amatoxin is responsible for 90% of mushroom poisonings worldwide. It's thermostable, which means cooking it won't destroy it, nor does freezing. A single mushroom can contain up to 15 milligrams of the toxin, and 0.1 milligrams kg can be fatal to humans. For perspective, a 180 pound individual is roughly 82 kilograms, and that means 8.2 milligrams would be fatal, which is a little over half a mushroom. After the identity of the mushrooms was confirmed, the cause of death was determined to be amatoxin toxicity and the manner of death was determined to be accident. Case closed. So pull out your answer sheets and mark down your answers. Was it alcohol, meth or women? The answer to this case is it was women. He was trying to impress some of the women at work with his forestry knowledge and his fancy psychedelic concoctions. But he had picked the wrong mushrooms and thankfully the women he was trying to impress didn't come over. So he didn't get multiple deaths. The rest of his drug screen was negative. No alcohol, no methamphetamine even, no marijuana. It was just his poor foraging skills that resulted in his death.