Pandanus spp. are important to many aboriginal groups in northern Australia. The leaves are much used as fibre material for making baskets and many other items. The nuts [after dropping to the ground], the fleshy bases of ripe fruit, and soft inner new leaves are eaten as food. The seeds inside the fruits may be eaten raw or roasted. The base of the leaf of P. spiralis is chewed and swallowed to treat sore throat or mouth pain; it has antiseptic, counter-irritant and anodyne activity. The Ngarinyman recognise two varieties of P. spiralis – one which grows along creek lines, and one which grows on sandy flats. The prop-roots of the former variety are decocted and used to treat scabies. A strained decoction of the leaf bases of the latter variety is used as eye-drops, to relieve sore or tired eyes. At Roper River, the nuts are crushed and left in water to ferment, producing a presumably intoxicating alcoholic drink. The Lardil, of Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpenteria, have a strict ownership of individual Pandanus trees, which they mark with knotted leaves – ignoring this sign may result in retaliation by sorcery (Aboriginal Communities 1988; Isaacs 1987; Smith et al. 1993).

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One researcher bioassayed a sample of roasted Pandanus sp. nuts said to lead to ‘karuke madness’, eating up to 1⁄2 a pound [roughly 230g], which he stated to be more than 10 times the suggested dose. He experienced no effects other than nausea and gastric disturbance, which led him to conclude that the ‘karuke madness’ was psychosomatic and consisted of some kind of socially-conditioned hysteria (Stopp 1964). This should be considered a premature assumption, though not one to be ruled out entirely. It seems more likely to me that a) the nuts may be quite variable in chemical content, and b) any intoxication might require an even larger amount of said nuts than Stopp had eaten. If Stopp [and my translation of his article] was accurate in reporting the suggested dose, this would mean a mere 23g or so of roasted nuts – which seems to be far from the ‘large quantities’ usually reported to be eaten for psychotropic effects. It may be [as has been proposed with Boletus and the accompanying ‘mushroom madness’] that other plants are consumed with the nuts to result in the desired effects, through some chemical interaction similar to that seen with ayahuasca [see Banisteriopsis, Methods of Ingestion].
Unidentified Pandanus sp. nuts from Minj, New Guinea, were shown to contain small amounts of DMT, as well as other unidentified alkaloids (Hyndman 1984).