I FEEL LIKE I’M TAKING CRAZY PILLS!

Here you can discuss anything related to Christopher McCandless.
ronlamothe
Posts: 9
Joined: Thu Aug 18, 2011 7:16 pm

I FEEL LIKE I’M TAKING CRAZY PILLS!

Postby ronlamothe » Thu Aug 18, 2011 7:28 pm

In my recent post about the “I AM INJURED” line in Chris’s S.O.S. note as it pertains to Back to the Wild, I mentioned that I feel a bit like Al Pacino’s character in the Godfather series when he says, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” Well, when it comes to the subject of Hedysarum alpinum and the posters who cling to poison plant theories, I must admit I am now starting to feel a bit more like Mugatu in Zoolander when he shouts, “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”

Although I care a lot more about the essence of who Chris was, and what he and his travels represented, and also understand the nature of artistic license in Hollywood docudrama (for example, whether Chris took a canoe or a kayak isn’t that a big deal for me), I do feel the facts surrounding his death, and their subsequent depiction, meet the threshold of mattering. We can speculate on a lot of things regarding his time out there, and why he wasn’t able to walk out, but here are some facts, and an important disambiguation (addressing a revisionist theory put forth by one of this site’s most knowledgeable and prolific posters, apparently via Chris’s sister Carine):

1. These plants are not poisonous. They are not poisonous. They are not poisonous. I don’t know how else I can say this. Dr. Clausen at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, try as he might, failed to find toxic compounds in either the plant that Penn puts forth (H. mackenzii) as the cause of Chris’s death, or the species Krakauer sticks to (H. alpinum). These results were known as far back as 1997. By the way, I also spoke directly with the medical examiner who did the actual autopsy on Chris McCandless, and he told me that it was his firm belief Chris died of starvation, and was not poisoned. As for the most recent Jon Krakauer “epiphany” about moldy seeds, hurriedly put forth in the wake of the September 2007 Men’s Journal article (“The Cult of Chris McCandless”) that for the first time in the Lower 48 revealed the falsehood of the H. alpinum theory, it is once again an untested theory, and one based on a dubious photo and an obscure case in the veterinary literature where some horses in North Carolina ate large quantities of moldy red clover hay. He provides no evidence in support of the idea that this particular mold (Rhizoctonia leguminicola) has been found in Alaska on Hedysarum alpinum plants and linked with swainsonine. Nor can he provide a single case where a human has ever, anywhere, been poisoned in this way.

If one needs further evidence that Chris simply starved to death and was not poisoned, consider the detailed analysis that we did of Chris’s Body Mass Index (BMI) out on Stampede Trail (see the Into the Wild DEBUNKED link on tifilms.com), which shows that in a day-by-day comparison of his energy expenditure (BMR) with his caloric intake there was a consistent caloric deficit, and that by Day 113—the day it is believed he died—his Body Mass Index had dropped into the range of 13 kg/m2, a level considered incompatible with life. If a plant did cause his starvation in the way suggested by Krakauer, Chris’s BMI chart would look dramatically different—there would need to be a dramatic fall off beginning in early August to get his BMI to fatal levels.

In any case, all of this clinging to the poison plant theory by Krakauer and others harks back to the old astronomers who continually tried to get it right by creating more and more complex ways, with more and more contingencies, to explain a geocentric universe, when all along what they needed to do is step back and allow for the possibility that the earth rotated around the sun and not vice versa. I have great respect for what Chris was trying to do, and for the fact that he was able to last as long as he did, but there’s a very thin margin of error up in Alaska, and in the end, his circumstances (his deteriorating nutritional state, perhaps exacerbated by an injury he sustained at some point) were such that he succumbed to starvation. As I have said before, it’s a case of Ockham’s razor.

2. Although reading through this site I have gained a great respect for this particular poster, and think that he has an excellent grasp of the facts surrounding the McCandless story—and indeed gave my film a far more insightful assessment than the guy who claimed to have written a review but seemed entirely focused on the DVD that somehow got scratched up during shipping (I am so appreciative when folks get and respect what I was trying to do with the film, both aesthetically, as a form of raw and reflexive direct cinema, and critically, as a multi-vocal, multi-layered documentary)—I must say that his recent post on the “inaccuracies” in my documentary was somewhat disappointing. Somewhat understandably, I suppose, he assumed that whatever Carine said about the case, or my film for that matter, must unquestionably be true. In fact, and underestimating his own encyclopedic knowledge of the McCandless story, he wrote that “I'm going to have to believe that she [Carine] knows more about it than I'm ever likely to.” I don’t think this is necessarily the case.

Anyway, he recently wrote: “I have it on good authority that the original toxicology reports were done on the actual seeds found in Chris’s possession at the time of death, whereas later tests done by UAF were done on seeds harvested around the bus at a later season. That makes any results from the later test merely evidence, and not conclusive proof.” In a related post, he later said: “We know that the original test was positive for alkaloid poisons, that would inhibit digestion. That test was done on the seeds that Chris actually had in his possession. Later, UAF goes out, tests the same species of plant, and determines that the plant itself is not actually poisonous. That leaves the poisons from the first test un-explained, unless some kind of mold or fungus or something was responsible for the poison.…If those seeds were somewhat moist when he bagged them, it’s plausible to guess that mold or fungus might grow inside the bag on the seeds.…All I know is that when talking to Carine about Lamothe’s ‘debunking’ of the poison theory, I was told that the original toxicology report was done on the seeds he had, and that it had in fact turned up poisons.”

Okay, let’s clarify what actually happened, and see if we can’t debunk this revisionist theory. First, “good authority” or not, as far as I know, the original toxicology tests were NOT done “on the actual seeds found in Chris’s possession at the time of death.” According to both Dr. Clausen, as he indicates in my documentary (including a CU of a collection bottle labeled as such), and Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild, the original toxicology tests were done on seeds that Krakauer collected in 1993 and gave to Clausen for analysis: “During my visit to the Sushana River in 1993, I collected samples of H. alpinum growing within a few feet of the bus and sent some dried seedpods from this sample to Dr. Thomas Clausen.” Secondly, according to Clausen in the documentary, and Krakauer in his book, both the initial tests that suggested alkaloids, and the further tests that contradicted these initial tests, came from these SAME seeds: “These are some seeds of the plant that we analyzed. These were given to me by Jon Krakauer. These are Hedysarum alpinum, otherwise known as Eskimo potato. We originally thought that maybe the toxic compounds, if there were any in there, would be alkaloids. These are classic compounds you find in plants that generally you don't want to eat. And they're fairly easy to test for. There’s ways to extract them out selectively and there’s reagents that react with them to form colors that are indicative. And so we started with the alkaloid hypothesis, did some extractions, had some preliminary results that were ambiguous and hence promising. We followed that up with four other tests looking for alkaloids and at the end we decided there just simply weren’t any alkaloids in the plant that we were analyzing.” Krakauer writes in his revised edition of the book: “Although preliminary analysis by Clausen and a graduate student, Edward Treadwell, indicated the seeds [I collected] contained traces of an alkaloid, subsequent, more thorough testing turned up no indication of any alkaloids whatsoever, toxic or otherwise.”

I think it is true that at some point UAF may have collected additional seeds, and conducted even further testing (all of which also came up negative), but it is absolutely incorrect to suggest that there was some other mysterious, lost set of seeds found in Chris’s possession indicating toxicity, and that these were somehow never retested. As far as I know, no such seeds were ever collected, or tested, originally or otherwise. And again, it is my understanding that the same seeds that were collected by Krakauer for the original toxicology tests, that still exist and are kept in a small bottle in Dr. Clausen’s lab, are the same ones that initially gave ambiguous results, and are also the same ones that in the end were conclusively shown not to contain alkaloids. As such, there are no “unexplained” poisons that were found on “the seeds he [Chris] had,” perhaps caused by “some kind of mold or fungus.” This is simply untrue. There is not a shred of concrete evidence that such “moldy” seeds ever existed, or that Chris ate massive quantities of them, and we know for a fact that such seeds, even if by chance they did somehow exist, were never tested by Clausen. Moreover, even if they had by some chance existed, and even if Dr. Clausen were hypothetically to have had the opportunity to test them, all indications are that they would not have contained any toxic alkaloids. In fact, just for kicks, a couple years ago an Alaskan high school student under the guidance of Dr. Clausen conducted a science experiment where he “sought to find evidence for whether or not H. alpinum seeds can produce swainsonine when grown with naturally occurring fungi.” In the end, after repeated failed attempts to find any detectable levels of the toxic alkaloid swainsonine in the samples, it was concluded that there was “no evidence to support the hypothesis that a fungus growing on H. alpinum seeds can produce swainsonine.”

Can we please, once and for all, put to bed this notion that Chris was poisoned?

p.s. For anyone not as tired of this subject as I am, and interested in why we keep coming up with such far-fetched ideas, I highly recommend an article written by Sam Thayer and published on the Forager’s Harvest website: http://foragersharvest.com/into-the-wild-and-other-poisonous-plant-fables.

Husky
Posts: 57
Joined: Thu May 19, 2011 6:04 am

Re: I FEEL LIKE I’M TAKING CRAZY PILLS!

Postby Husky » Fri Aug 26, 2011 4:01 pm

Hey Ron, Good post on the poison controversy. What about giardia or other parasites from the water or the animals Chris was eating? There are plenty of beaver in the rivers and creeks along Stampede and those squirrels and birds probably have some parasites. Giardia really knocks some people out...
Here we are in the years
Where the showman shifts the gears
Lives become careers
Children cry in fear
Let us out of here! Neal Young

Don't let fear stand in the way.
There's nothing to it
but to do it! Husky


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