Kanna Leaves shredded: finer material from the same plant
Kanna is the trade name of Sceletium tortuosum, a low succulent from the dry Cape provinces of South Africa, botanically placed these days as Mesembryanthemum tortuosum in the ice plant family (Aizoaceae). The species name points at the skeletal pattern of veins left on a dried leaf. Afrikaans calls the plant kougoed, chewing stuff, after the way it used to be handled.
This bag contains 10 grams of shredded leaf. It is the same plant material as the whole leaves, only cut smaller, and it is emphatically not an extract: nothing has been drawn out or thickened. The difference shows in handling. Fine material weighs out more precisely, blends better with other herbs and gives up its contents faster in an infusion than whole leaves do, simply because there is more cut surface. Anyone who prefers whole leaf, to break or grind it themselves, will find that version on the same shelf.
Where the material comes from
The San and the Khoikhoi worked with this plant long before anything about it was recorded; the oldest written mention dates from 1662, in the Cape records around Jan van Riebeeck. Traditionally, fresh material was bruised, left in a bag to ferment for a few days and then dried in the sun, after which it was chewed. Today you will also find kanna sold as tea, tincture and snuff. The alkaloids research focuses on are mesembrine, mesembrenone, mesembrenol and mesembranol; in raw plant material the total content varies considerably between harvests, reported in the literature as roughly 0.05 to 2.3 percent of dry weight.
Storage and responsible handling
Shredded material has a lot of surface area and picks up moisture and odours easily, so keep the bag firmly closed or tip it into a jar, somewhere dry and dark, out of reach of children. If you take medication, in particular antidepressants of the SSRI or MAOI type, run kanna past your doctor or pharmacist first. Do not use it during pregnancy or breastfeeding, and keep it away from traffic. What you do with it is your own responsibility, and it pays to check the rules where you live.
Avalon Magic Plants also stocks kanna as whole Kanna Leaves, as milled powder in a tube, as Rapé Kanna and as Global Herbs extracts including Full Spectrum, Happy Calming, Krystal Ultimate and Premium Extreme Strong. Everything is sent out in discreet packaging.
