Cover photo: Humoyun Mehridinov · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
In a Tehran kitchen or an Istanbul shop doorway, someone tips small dark seeds onto hot charcoal. They pop, a sharp smoke curls up, and it is waved over a new baby or a bride to keep the evil eye away. The seed is esfand, harmal or Syrian rue.
Swallowed, those seeds have killed people, pregnant women among them. They also clash with pills found in plenty of Australian bathroom cabinets.
Educational only: not medical, legal or regulatory advice, and no encouragement to obtain, prepare or use this plant. Legal content read September 2026.
Emergency: ring 000. Otherwise ring the Poisons Information Centre on 13 11 26, day or night, from anywhere in Australia. Their advice governs.
- Esfand smoke and a swallowed seed are very different exposures.
- The seed clashes with antidepressants and some everyday medicines.
- Pregnancy: never. Pregnant women have died after taking it.
- No controlled trial shows it treats anything in people.
- On our reading, national poisons law catches the seed; Queensland lists two of its chemicals as dangerous drugs.
The smoke and the cup are two different things
An old custom, still alive.
Burning esfand against envy and bad luck stretches from Morocco to western China, at births, weddings and shop doors, with a blessing over the crackle. Weavers in Iran and Anatolia once dyed carpet wool orange and yellow with the seed.
Sitting near the burner is a small exposure, and little of it gets far into the body; mostly you get smell and noise. Chewing the seed or drinking a brew of it is a separate act with separate consequences.
Nothing here mocks a family custom. The danger is swallowing, not smoke, but the law below covers the seed itself: read it before buying any.
A scruffy bush with a borrowed name
It grows in dry country, including ours.
It makes a low, many-stemmed clump with thin, strip-like leaves that stink when crushed. Pale five-petalled flowers give way to small round pods in three chambers, full of tiny dark-brown seeds dimpled like a golf ball.
“Rue” in English usually means the garden herb Ruta, an unrelated plant. Syrian rue runs wild in South Australia and drier Victoria and New South Wales, poisoning stock.
Never taste a seed to identify it, and get legal advice before collecting or moving the plant.
What the seed does inside a person
It jams an enzyme your body relies on.
About a tenth of a dry seed’s weight is two related chemicals, harmine and harmaline. They block MAO-A, an enzyme that clears serotonin (a messenger chemical of brain and gut) and several medicines. While the block holds, anything that raises serotonin can push it to a dangerous level; with those medicines, that is the likeliest fatal route.
Think of the bathroom cabinet: SSRI antidepressants, triptan migraine tablets, tramadol, and cold remedies with dextromethorphan or pseudoephedrine. St John’s wort too; the full article has the rest.
In poisoning, harmaline, the larger share, drives vomiting, trembling, unsteady legs, a slow heart and hallucinations. Wild seed varies batch to batch, so a home-made brew has no knowable dose.
A home-made brew has no knowable dose.
Harmal was long used to bring on a period or end a pregnancy, and medical reports describe pregnant women poisoned by it, some fatally. Some also put the seed in home-made ayahuasca, and poisonings are rising as that spreads.
On any prescription medicine, especially an antidepressant, migraine tablet or tramadol, keep this seed out of your cup. Pregnant, or might be: not in any form.
The law reaches the seed
What the national and Queensland rules say.
Nationally, the seed’s main chemicals are on the Poisons Standard’s prohibited list; so is DMT. Narrow exemptions cover only tiny amounts; on the Institute’s reading, raw seed and any real extract are well over them.
Queensland’s drugs law names harmaline and harmalol as dangerous drugs, inside a seed or not. Holding, producing (which covers growing) or supplying one without authority is a serious crime there. These rules change; this is our reading, not legal advice.
Keep esfand, or found the bush? Get legal advice before you hold, grow or move it. Other states have their own laws; read yours, and check the national list with the TGA.
No trial shows it treats anything
The real science is on one purified chemical.
We looked for a controlled trial of the plant, in any form, for any illness, and found none. The only human studies give purified harmine with DMT to healthy volunteers, which tells us nothing about a seed brew’s safety.
Online claims for diabetes, cancer or low mood rest on cells in dishes and animals. Purified harmine can make human insulin-making cells multiply in the lab and in mice, which may one day lead to a medicine. It is no reason to eat the seed. Nor could we trace the old claim that it cures migraine, and no trial has tested it.
If someone sells you harmal for blood sugar, pain or mood, the pitch outruns the evidence and the law. Its old place is the coals, where somewhere tonight a grandmother is passing its smoke over a sleeping baby.
The short version of AIP Literature Review and Critical Analysis LR No. 2 by Dr Thomas Ridley:
- Jesse Kirby — wrote this edition fresh from his own notes on the review, built it around the smoke-versus-swallowing question, and chose the household medicines a reader is most likely to own
- Zoe Bennett — set the page title and search description, and shaped how it will be shared: the evil-eye custom first, the medicine warning straight after
- Theo Karras — picked the fruiting cover and the five section banners from the review’s licensed photographs, opening on the nazar bead and closing on the garden plant, with the seed close-up for the chemistry
- Leah Bianchi — built the page: the red safety box, the one-minute card, the pull quote and a what-this-means card closing each of the five sections, and checked it reads on a phone
- Dr Luke Iggulden, Chief Scientific Officer — Senior author. Authorised the research this edition retells, as lead researcher
Contributors
- Dr Thomas Ridley — wrote AIP Literature Review and Critical Analysis LR No. 2, the article this page retells
Image credits. All photographs are reused from the parent review via Wikimedia Commons. Cover: Humoyun Mehridinov, CC BY-SA 4.0. Nazar bead: Alev Akın, CC BY-SA 4.0. Seed pods: Roger Culos, Muséum de Toulouse, CC BY-SA 3.0. Seed cluster: J.H. Kirkbride Jr, C.R. Gunn & M.J. Dallwitz (2006), public domain. Kentau market: Yuriy75, CC BY-SA 3.0. Poznań garden: Krzysztof Ziarnek, Kenraiz, CC BY-SA 4.0.
AIP Explainers are the plain-language editions of the Institute’s technical articles, published alongside the original. Everything here is carried by the full article, where the references, the evidence and the regulatory sources are set out. The legal content is the Institute’s published reading as of September 2026, may change, and is not legal advice. Found an error? Write to our contact form. We would rather correct a claim than repeat it.
Jesse Kirby
Head of Community Outreach
Australian Institute of Pharmacognosy
Cardwell QLD, Australia
australian-pharmacognosy.org · our contact form
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