A New LSD?
Mexican Herb for Sale Online Comes With Divine
Claims, Warnings
By Dean Schabner
April 1, 2002
Will this new LSD-type herb being sold over
the Internet live up to the hype? (www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov)
A Mexican herb that no one really understands
and can send users on intense, brief hallucinogenic trips is being
sold over the Internet touting itself as a legal way to expand
your consciousness that recalls the heyday of LSD.
Little is known about the drug, salvia divinorum,
or how it works on the brain and what its longterm effects might
be. But word of its existence is spreading through e-mail chains
and Web sites praising its potential, which has caught the attention
of the Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA has included it
on its list of "Drugs and Chemicals of Concern" and
is considering whether to add the herb to its list of controlled
substances.
Some researchers who have studied it and other hallucinogens doubt
the DEA needs to worry much, and say they don't believe the herb
will live up to the hype seen on some of the Web sites.
Still, the Internet descriptions of the herb's
effects, albeit more subdued, would be familiar to anyone who
remembers the 1960s, when Harvard University professors Timothy
Leary and Richard Alpert began proselytizing for LSD's power to
help people expand their consciousness.
Then, reports of "bad trips" and
allegations that LSD use would lead to chromosome damage and widespread
birth defects, which were never borne out by studies of users
of the drug, helped to create a backlash against "acid"
that quickly led to it being outlawed.
Forty years later, the fate of salvia divinorum,
is still in the doubt. And there are many differences between
it, LSD and the cultures that surround both. LSD was manmade and
new, while salvia, a perennial in the mint family that is native
to parts of Oaxaca, Mexico, has been used by Indians there for
centuries as a healing and divining tool.
And unlike the champions of LSD in the 1960s,
those running the Web sites offering salvia divinorum are not
portraying the herb as a wonder drug without any potential problems
for users.
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