By Jeff Horwitz | Photography by Brian Flaherty for WSJ. Magazine
THE TASTE of young poison oak is surprisingly mild, grassy and only a little bit tart.
Two dozen glossy green-and-red leaves disappear entirely when mixed into a smoothie with a banana, berries and a little bit of kale. Blended with ice and sipped through a straw -- I did not want to expose my lips to this -- the beverage coats my tongue before dissolving in a slushy, calming swallow.
I started eating poison oak in January, when the first buds began to swell on the hazardous plant's bare stems. To those who know me, it wasn't surprising. As a middle-aged man clinging to adolescent invulnerability, I firmly believe any vessel can be opened with my teeth. I would rather get stung in the face countless times teaching myself how to beekeep than take lessons. And I usually settle debates about whether food has gone bad by eating it.
So within a few weeks of reading that consuming poison oak would not kill me and could potentially render me immune to it (with some discomfort along the way), I was in my kitchen shaking frozen Costco fruit into a blender with freshly harvested leaves.
Most authorities would advise against this practice, but it wasn't just some dangerous social-media challenge I was doing for fun. Where I live, in Northern California, poison oak is a native plant that is impossible to avoid if you enjoy hiking, camping and foraging. The most conventional treatment for exposure is to promptly lather up with dish soap or Tecnu, a specialized cleanser.
There was, however, a different approach to desensitizing people like me who are allergic to poison ivy and oak. And it had a track record of success dating back hundreds of years, including a little-known history of pharmaceutical products, now discontinued.
I did not expect it to be painless, but my chosen career as a reporter has only reinforced the idea that worthwhile work is rarely comfortable. Usually I learn something from my exercises in self-disregard. In this case, the term pruritus ani, medical Latin for "itchy butt." (More about that later.) But also, why decades have passed without improved poison-oak and poison-ivy treatments hitting the market.
Was DIY immunity, I wondered over the nasal whine of my Ninja blender, even attainable? And if so, at what personal cost?
Every year, between 10 and 50 million Americans develop a blistering, itchy rash from even the most glancing contact with urushiol, the common chemical that gives poison oak, ivy and sumac their shared name. By the time you absentmindedly scratch an itch on your calf, the window to scrub this invisible oil off has expired. God help you if you've rubbed your eye or used the bathroom.
Urushiol is an allergen. Some people just don't react to it. For those who do, the rashes can last for weeks, and they sometimes escalate in severity. At least 100,000 people require medical treatment after exposure, according to a 2023 paper in the journal Wilderness & Environmental Medicine, with 43,000 ending up in the emergency room. Urushiol rashes are the No. 1 reason that national park rangers miss work, and they're a daily threat for fire crews.
While deaths are rare, a bad case of contact dermatitis laughs off most home remedies. Aside from prescription-strength topical steroids, a scalding shower is the only thing that can provide a respite from the urge to scratch your skin until it bleeds.
Poison ivy grows in 47 states. The only exception in the contiguous U.S. is California, which compensates for its absence by providing ideal growing conditions for its cousin, poison oak. A 2020 paper in the journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness noted that, rather than burns or smoke inhalation, rhus dermatitis -- the rash caused by poison oak -- was the most common ailment seen by doctors for California's Emergency Medical Services Authority, accounting for more than half of all treatments in the field.
The clearest way to prevent a breakout is to learn to identify the plant and avoid it. But I just can't do that: Near my home, poison-oak habitat overlaps heavily with chanterelles, golden, meaty delicacies that can cost $25 a pound in the grocery store but are free in the woods. I've foraged for them on winter hikes since I was a kid, often crawling through thickets of brush to pick them. Afterward, I'd rush home to the bottle of Dawn dish soap in my shower.
This was no way to live. If I wanted true immunity, and I did, there was only one path left to try.
B ACK in elementary school, I learned that California's native coastal tribes desensitized themselves to poison oak by drinking a tea made with its roots and eating young leaves. Afterward, they could use the plant's flexible switches to weave baskets with bare hands.
Today, most reputable authorities on poison oak don't speak of ingestion. Those that do
are unambiguous.
"Eating a poison ivy leaf can cause death," reads a fact sheet from the state of Maine.
"Instead of chomping down on a big bowl of poison ivy salad, opt for prevention," advises Backpacker magazine.
"The common belief that eating of a few leaves of poison ivy will lead to the development of an immunity is totally unfounded," says the West Virginia Department of Agriculture. "Don't attempt it!"
In obscure outdoor forums, however, one can find vocal advocates of eating the stuff. One poster in a forum on High Sierra Topix wrote that swallowing the leaves had freed him from rash-induced hospital visits: "IT WORKED, I'M IMMUNE TO POISON OAK!!!"
As a reporter covering social media, I'm intimately familiar with the perils of seeking confirmation online. With just a few keywords, those bold enough to question the curvature of the earth or entertain ivermectin as a cure-all can access a body of knowledge hidden like a passageway behind a trick bookcase. So I dug into the actual literature.
In 1624, Captain John Smith was the first European to write about poison ivy in the New World. The plant later popped up in an 1829 medical treatise on "certain Poisonous Vegetables."
Poison ivy's unambiguous potency made it a subject of interest to pharmacists in an era when most drugs were derived from nature. Soon, extracts hit the market.
By 1936, poison-ivy extract was being used to prevent annual summer outbreaks of exposure to the plant at a New Jersey state-run boys home. In 1954, a randomized, double-blind experiment found that 94 percent of Coast Guard personnel given poison-ivy-extract pills received "full protection" from the vine-choked banks of the Mississippi River, demonstrating the treatment's efficacy "with a very high and conclusive level of statistical significance."
By that decade, a raft of poison-ivy-extract pills and shots could be purchased from companies including Merck Sharp & Dohme and Parke-Davis, a major American drug company later incorporated into Pfizer. The makers of one poison-ivy pill, Aqua Ivy AP, advertised "season-long immunity to poison ivy and poison oak."
In the late 1970s, when the federal government began scrutinizing old "grandfathered" drugs, a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel noted that oral urushiol treatments had been "tested and proven to be effective." Pharmaceutical manufacturers could continue to sell them, so long as they could demonstrate an ability to produce functional doses of consistent strength.
The drugmakers never did, despite repeated FDA extensions to file the data. The FDA's history office said it was unable to pull records on the process. Representatives of Merck and Pfizer said they couldn't find records relating to predecessor companies' decisions around the drugs.
I N EARLY JANUARY, I donned a pair of gloves, pulled up a few dormant poison-oak plants and brewed clippings with mint tea and honey. Through a straw, I drank the pleasantly earthy tea. Two weeks later, while traversing a steep hillside, I snapped off six or seven unseasonably early buds from a poison-oak plant and popped them into my mouth, chewing gingerly before swallowing.
Then I waited.
After two days, I didn't notice much. Perhaps my immune system was quietly acclimating, though it seemed more likely that I wasn't consuming enough urushiol. Before ramping up the dose, I decided to call some academics.
Most contemporary researchers on poison-oak and poison-ivy rashes whom I contacted were unfamiliar with the history of desensitization.
"I may not be of much help when it comes to folk remedies and their efficacy," one wrote curtly, ignoring my follow-up emails.
The scientists who had performed the research I'd been steeping myself in were mostly dead, and efforts to build upon their work had gone with them. Then I found Mahmoud ElSohly, a pharmacologist who was working to develop an injectable drug containing urushiol with the biotech startup Hapten Sciences. After clearing early safety trials, Hapten said it is a couple of months away from commencing a new trial to identify the correct dose. If all goes well, a drug could be on the market by 2026.
ElSohly said desensitization to urushiol occurs when urushiol enters the bloodstream and becomes affixed to the membrane of a particular cell, familiarizing the immune system with the chemical.
The problem with the old poison-ivy pills was that most urushiol wasn't absorbed via the digestive tract or was immediately filtered out of the blood by the kidneys, ElSohly said.
"It's not like it doesn't work," he said, of my eating poison oak. "It's just a question of how much it works relative to the problems you get as a result of ingesting mega doses."
I asked ElSohly if he thought that I might seriously damage my health by trying. He said no -- the urushiol might put a little strain on the kidneys, but nothing serious. The real drawback to eating poison-oak leaves in the quantity needed to achieve desensitization was that the cure might be worse than the disease.
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