page_title: Hallucinogen
section_title: Deliriants
hierarchical_section_title: Hallucinogen / Effects by type / Deliriants
caption_attribution_description: English: Single berry of Atropa belladonna L.&#160;: Deadly Nightshade. In profile, showing both berry and calyx.
context_page_description: A hallucinogen is a psychoactive agent that often or ordinarily causes hallucinations, perceptual anomalies, and other substantial subjective changes in thought, emotion, and consciousness that are not typically experienced to such degrees with other categories of drugs. The common classifications for hallucinogens are psychedelics, dissociatives and deliriants. Although hallucinogens all can induce altered states of consciousness with some overlap in effects, there are quantifiable differences in the induced subjective experiences between classes of hallucinogens that are due to differing and distinct pharmacological mechanisms.
context_section_description: Deliriants, as their name implies, induce a state of delirium in the user, characterized by extreme confusion and an inability to control one's actions. They are called deliriants because their subjective effects are similar to the experiences of people with delirious fevers. The term was introduced by David F. Duncan and Robert S. Gold to distinguish these drugs from psychedelics and dissociatives, such as LSD and ketamine respectively, due to their primary effect of causing delirium, as opposed to the more lucid states produced by the other hallucinogens.
  Despite the fully legal status of several common deliriant plants, deliriants are largely unpopular as recreational drugs due to the severe, generally unpleasant and often dangerous nature of the hallucinogenic effects produced.
  Typical or classical deliriants are those which block the muscarinic acetylcholine receptors (antagonism). These are said to be anticholinergic. Many of these compounds are produced naturally by plant genera belonging to the nightshade family Solanaceae, such as Datura, Brugmansia and Latua in the New World and Atropa, Hyoscyamus and Mandragora in the Old World. These tropane alkaloids are poisonous and can cause death due to tachycardia-induced heart failure and hyperthermia even in small doses. Additionally, over-the-counter antihistamines such as diphenhydramine (brand name Benadryl) and dimenhydrinate (brand name Dramamine) also have an anticholinergic effect.
  Uncured tobacco is also a deliriant due to its intoxicatingly high levels of nicotine.
  The fly agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria, is often informally lumped with the nightshade plants as a deliriant, though regarded as a dissociative with some regularity as well. This may be explained by the familiarity of both A. muscaria and Atropa belladonna to European culture, their formal statuses as deadly poisons, and their generally undesirable, unpleasant, and dangerous nature, with the potential for death from physical and behavioral toxicity a possibility even when dosages are carefully considered.
  Nutmeg has deliriant and hallucinogenic effects as well due to some of its psychoactive chemicals, such as myristicin, which may be anticholinergic like the tropane alkaloids of the nightshade plants, or as suggested by Alexander Shulgin, partially metabolized into the empathogen-entactogen MMDA.
caption: Attractive but highly toxic berry of Atropa belladonna
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