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This sorrowful tale of the fatal poisoning by oleander sticks used to roast treats over a campfire has been part of the urban legend canon for decades, with many of our readers in the United States reporting having heard versions of it in the 1960s and even the 1950s. It was also told as a true, local, and recent tale in the 1970s in Australia. In fact, the tale is far older. A version of it appears in a gardening book published in England in 1886, under the entry for Nerium (which is another name for this plant): Similar is this cite from an 1853 book (which itself references a 1844 publication): We've no idea how valid those claims from 1886 and 1853 are, but at least these entries grant a far better appreciation of the age of this cautionary tale. Oleander is a common outdoor woody shrub found in warmer climates, often used for edging freeways or gardens. It is also quite poisonous, with the ingestion of as little as a single leaf reportedly being enough to kill a child. It is a plant worthy of respect even by those who neither have children nor themselves make it their habit to gnaw on shrubbery, as cats and dogs -- and even horses -- have been killed by oleander poisoning. According to this well-traveled cautionary tale, the unwitting use of oleander branches or leaves in a campfire brings about the death of a group of people either through roasting sticks fashioned from the plant adding a fatal kick to cookout ingestibles or the leaves or branches used to feed the flames creating a deadly cloud of poisonous smoke. Because this is a legend meant to make a point about the danger posed by this particular plant so that those exposed to the tale will afterwards be more careful about their use of plants in the wild, the victims are presented as folks with whom listeners will sympathize: a troop of Boy Scouts or a vacationing family (which implies the presence, and thus the demise, of small children). The use of sympathetic characters makes for a loss deemed especially tragic and adds to the pathos of the story, which in turn helps ensure that the tale better sticks in memory and so makes for a more effective teaching device. Likewise, in this legend the element of horror is raised to the highest possible level in that everyone in the group exposed to the oleander dies: not one Boy Scout survives the hot dogging, nor does any member of the luckless family live through their exposure to the acrid smoke. All die, as they must if the point is to be made. Was there ever such an ill-fated family or troop of Boy Scouts? Though we've searched for news stories about such a tragedy, we haven't found any, not even an account of a non-fatal poisoning. Death by oleander is rare to begin with, and the cases we've located so far involved direct ingestion of the plant. In Los Angeles in 2001, a woman suspected of administering a lethal mixture of antifreeze and oleander to her husband was charged with murder. Also in Los Angeles, but in 2000, two adopted Russian boys (age 3 and 2) died from eating oleander leaves off a neighbor's hedge. Both were found dead in their cribs. Their mother said she saw the children chewing the leaves a few days before they died and noticed they had picked some again the night of their deaths. How poisonous is poisonous? Oleander (leaves and branches) is deemed extremely dangerous, with the poison known to affect the heart, produce severe digestive upset, and to have caused death. The size and relative health of the person ingesting the plant have a great deal to do with the severity of the poisoning. Their relatively small body size places children especially at risk, making oleander a plant one may not want in one's garden if children are part of the household or live nearby. Yet could enough of the plant's deadly essence be transmitted to a foodstuff during a cooking process that involves skewering the item to be eaten on an oleander stick? Highly unlikely says this 2005 toxicological study:
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