DALLAS: With a friend videotaping, 27-year-old Christopher Lenzini of Dallas took a hit of Salvia divinorum, the world's most potent hallucinogenic herb, and soon began to imagine, he said, that he was in a boat with little green men.
Lenzini quickly collapsed to the floor and dissolved into convulsive laughter.
When he posted the video on YouTube this summer, friends could not get enough. "It's just funny to see a friend act like a total idiot," he said, "so everybody loved it."
Until a decade ago, the use of salvia was largely limited to those seeking revelation under the tutelage of Mazatec shamans in its native Oaxaca, Mexico. Today, this mind-altering member of the mint family is broadly available for lawful sale online and in head shops across the United States.
Though older Americans typically have never heard of salvia, the psychoactive sage has become something of a phenomenon among the country's thrill-seeking youth. More than 5,000 YouTube videos - equal parts "Jackass" and "Up in Smoke" - document their journeys into rubber-legged incoherence. Some of the videos have been viewed half a million times.
Yet these very images that have helped popularize salvia may also hasten its demise and undermine the promising research into its possible medical uses. Pharmacologists who believe salvia could open new frontiers for the treatment of addiction, depression and pain fear that its criminalization would make it burdensome to obtain and store the plant, and difficult to gain government permission for tests on human subjects.
In state after state, however, including here in Texas, the YouTube videos have become Exhibit A in legislative efforts to regulate salvia. This year, Florida made possession or sale a felony punishable by 15 years in prison. California took a gentler approach by making it a misdemeanor to sell or distribute to minors.
"When you see it, well, it sure makes a believer out of you," said Representative Charles Anderson of Texas, a Waco Republican who is sponsoring one of several bills to ban salvia in the state.
When the U.S. government this year published its first estimates of salvia use, the data astonished many: some 1.8 million people had tried it in their lifetimes, including 750,000 in the previous year.
Among males 18 to 25, where consumption is heaviest, nearly 3 percent reported using salvia in the previous year, making it twice as prevalent as LSD and nearly as popular as Ecstasy. Recent studies at college campuses on both coasts have yielded estimates as high as 7 percent. The herb's presence on military ships and bases has prompted enough concern about readiness that the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology was tasked to develop the first urinalysis for salvia, and is now testing 50 samples a month.
Though research is young and little is known about long-term effects, there are no studies suggesting salvia is addictive or susceptible to overdose or abuse. Indeed, a salvia experience can be so intense, and at times so unsettling, that many try it just once, and even devotees use it sparingly.
Reports of salvia-related emergency room admissions are virtually nonexistent, probably because its effects typically vanish in just a few minutes.
With little data at its disposal, the Drug Enforcement Administration has spent more than a decade studying whether to add salvia to its list of controlled substances, as is the case in several European and Asian countries. In the meantime, 13 states and several local governments have banned or otherwise regulated the plant and its chemically enhanced extracts.
Known on the street by nicknames like Sally D and Magic Mint, salvia can have vastly different effects depending on dose, potency and the mind-set and tolerance of its users, according to researchers and experienced smokers (though bitter, it also can be chewed or consumed as a tincture). Dozens of online vendors sell mild extracts for as little as $5 a gram, and, more than $50 for the strongest, at up to 100 times the potency of the raw leaf.
Users often report a sudden dissociation from self, as if traveling through time. The experience tends to be solitary, introspective and sometimes fearful: a 2003 bulletin from the Department of Justice concluded that salvia was unlikely to ever become a party drug.
"I've used several psychedelics and salvia's definitely the most intense experience that I've had," said Brian Arthur, founder of Mazatec Garden, which sells salvia and other herbs online from a nondescript house in Houston. "Salvia takes you out of the world and puts you in a different place."
Regular users say it can be a restorative, even spiritual tonic, and recall their visualizations with precision.
One night in August, Nathan K., a 29-year-old father of three from Waco, stretched back in his blue recliner and took a long, purposeful drag from his pipe. As he closed his eyes, he found himself transported into a dream state, he said, as if drifting down a rain forest river. A beatific smile spread lightly across his face.
The effects dissipated after five minutes, leaving him with a sense of well-being. It was, he said, as if a masseuse had rubbed out the knots in his psyche. "Just a very gentle letting go, a very gentle relaxing," Nathan said on the condition that he not be fully identified.
Those who support the contemplative use of salvia disdain the YouTubers for disrespecting the herb's power and purpose.
"They're not really taking it as a tool to explore their inner psyche," said Daniel Siebert, a Californian who pioneered the production of salvia extracts. "They're just taking it to get messed up."
There have been rare claims of salvia-related deaths, but the linkages are speculative.
In 2006, Brett Chidester, 17, described by his family as a model student with no history of mental illness, committed suicide in Delaware at a time when he apparently was smoking salvia several times a week. Entries in his journal, provided by his mother, suggest his salvia use influenced feelings that "our existence in general is pointless."
Several months later, a medical examiner changed Chidester's death certificate to list his salvia use as a contributing factor.
The Delaware Legislature immediately banned salvia by passing a measure it called Brett's Law.
Such laws could pose a substantial burden to researchers at universities like Harvard and the University of Kansas who are convinced that salvia's active compound, Salvinorin A, will aid in the development of new lines of pain and psychiatric medications, and holds great promise.
In 2002, Dr. Bryan Roth, now of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discovered that Salvinorin A, perhaps uniquely, concentrates on a single receptor in the brain, the kappa opioid receptor. LSD, by comparison, concentrates on about 50 receptors.
Though Salvinorin A, because of its debilitating effects, is unlikely to become a pharmaceutical agent itself, its chemistry may enable the discovery of valuable derivatives. "If we can find a drug that blocks salvia's effects, there's good evidence it could treat brain disorders including depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, maybe even HIV," Roth said.
Many scientists said that they believe salvia should be regulated like alcohol or tobacco but worry that criminalization would encumber their research before it bears fruit.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/09/america/herb.php
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