It seems most appropriate to me to use this occasion to declare my debt and my thanks to the Society for Economic Botany for inspiring and furthering the course of an investigation which is possibly one of the more useful of my various activities over the past several years. For one thing, in early May, 1970, at the request of the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Richard Evans Schultes, our Editor, and Joseph Sutton, Managing Editor of our journal, Economic Botany, stopped Volume 24, No. 2, on its way to press in order to include my paper, "Tentative Correlations of Plant Usage and Esophageal Cancer Zones." The members of this Society are entitled to a resum6 of developments in this study since that time. But, before going ahead, I should step back a little, for the benefit of new members who may not be aware of what was going on at that time. I shall be very brief and I ask you to bear with me because I will be leading up to a conclusion which has a bearing on the benefits or otherwise of plant usage by you and me and people everywhere. Esophageal cancer has a peculiar geographic distribution with striking variations from high to low incidence between adjacent areas. Remarkably high mortality rates (over 100 per 100,000) exist in the Province of Honan, China, the Turkmen and Uzbek regions of Russia and neighboring northern Iran, and in the Transkei in southeastern Africa. Areas with the next highest rates are the Normandy Peninsula of France, and the islands of Curacao, Netherlands Antilles. Other relatively high regions are Bombay, India, western Kenya and northern Chile. In the United States as a whole, the incidence is low (3.28 per 100,000), but it has been steadily rising among non-white males for the past 21 years, reaching over 20 per 100,000 in certain localities. In the three areas of highest incidence in the world, and in Curacao, the male-female rate is nearly equal. In most other high-incidence areas, the male rate is 2-10 times the female rate; in France, 20 times. In Durban, South Africa, the rate among Asian women far exceeds that among males. The disease was first noted among the Bantu people in the Transkei in 1943; by 1953, there was found to be a five-fold increase. This situation attracted world-wide attention and much speculation as to the cause. Dr. Rex Burrell worked among the Bantu for ten years and prepared a list of the local plants used by the people for food and folk-medicine. In 1962, the National Cancer Institute asked me to evaluate this list and select the plants most worthy of investigation. Subsequently, they asked that I prepare a comparative list of South African herbs and those of the Netherlands Antilles or,