- Plants
- ›Vascular Plants
- ›flowering plants
- ›Dicots
- ›Sunflowers, Bellflowers, Fanflowers, and Allies
- ›Sunflowers, Daisies, Asters, and Allies
- ›chicories, dandelions, and allies
- ›Lettuce, Chicory, Dandelion and Salsify Tribe
- ›Lettuce subtribe
- ›Lactuca

bitter lettuce
Lactuca virosa
Lactuca virosa is a plant in the Lactuca (lettuce) genus, ingested often for its mild analgesic and sedative effects which are similar to those of ibuprofen. It is related to common lettuce (L. sativa), and is often called wild lettuce, bitter lettuce, laitue vireuse, opium lettuce, poisonous lettuce, tall lettuce, great lettuce or rakutu-karyumu-so.
Where it lives
Recorded sightings
—
geo-referenced records in GBIF, from museums, herbaria and field observers.
Drag the globe to turn it. Dots are where records exist, not a range map; darker means more records.
In the old herbals & bestiaries
In the stacks
Searching the stacks…
Every page naming Lactuca virosa in the Biodiversity Heritage Library →
This page is assembled live from iNaturalist, GBIF, Wikipedia, the Source Library and the Internet Archive. It is not yet part of the hand-edited codex. iNaturalist taxon 53108.


