Kanna Leaves: Sceletium tortuosum in its raw form
Kanna is the name Sceletium tortuosum goes by in the smartshop. Botanically the species is now placed as Mesembryanthemum tortuosum in the ice plant family (Aizoaceae), a low succulent from the dry Cape provinces of South Africa. Sceletium comes from the Latin for skeleton: on dried leaves the veins stand out so sharply that little more than a frame remains. Afrikaans calls the plant kougoed, literally chewing stuff, and older texts also use channa.
This bag contains 10 grams of dried leaf. The difference with the extracts on the same shelf is straightforward: nothing has been drawn out or thickened here. You are holding the plant material itself, with everything the plant put into it. That also means composition varies from harvest to harvest; for raw kanna material the literature reports an alkaloid content of roughly 0.05 to 2.3 percent of dry weight. The alkaloids researchers tend to look at are mesembrine, mesembrenone, mesembrenol and mesembranol.
How kanna was traditionally prepared
The San and the Khoikhoi were working with the plant long before any of it was written down; the earliest written mention goes back to 1662, in the records around Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape. Fresh material was bruised, put in a bag to ferment for a few days and then dried in the sun. What came out was chewed, which explains the Afrikaans name. In the trade you will also find kanna as tea, tincture and snuff. If you want to make an infusion from whole leaf, give it longer to steep than finer material, or break or grind it first.
Storage and responsible handling
Dried leaf keeps best in a well closed bag or jar, somewhere dry and dark, out of reach of children. If you take medication, particularly antidepressants of the SSRI or MAOI type, talk to your doctor or pharmacist first. Leave kanna alone during pregnancy and breastfeeding, and it has no place behind the wheel. What you do with this product is your own responsibility, and it is worth checking what the rules are where you live.
Avalon Magic Plants carries kanna in several forms side by side: Kanna Leaves shredded, milled kanna in a tube, Rapé Kanna and the Global Herbs extracts such as Full Spectrum, Happy Calming, Krystal Ultimate and Premium Extreme Strong. Everything ships in discreet packaging.
