By Margie Boule

Boule: Effects of drug can be all over the board

It was bad enough when Sharon’s 17-year-old son was arrested for possession of dexadrine. Sharon was devastated. “I have zero — zero — tolerance for drugs,” she says.
It was worse when she went on a drug hunt soon after and found a clear plastic bag with dried leaves inside, in her son’s car.
“My first thought was, this is dope. But it didn’t smell like marijuana and didn’t look like marijuana.” Then Sharon saw the label on the front of the bag. Since when were drugs being sold with fancy packaging, she wondered?
Since now. In the bag was Salvia divinorum, an herb native to Mexico that contains the most powerful natural hallucinogen known on Earth.
(Sharon, who lives in Milwaukie, has asked that her last name not be used. “My son has enough problems right now,” she says.)

After she found the bag of herbs, Sharon spent days online researching the drug and could not believe what she learned: Salvia divinorum is growing in popularity among young people, who are spreading the word through e-mail chains and buying it in head shops and on the Web. (Last week three plants were for sale on eBay.) Users smoke or chew the leaves and go on trips that are even more intense than LSD experiences.
But the worst was when Sharon got to the Drug Enforcement Administration Web site. “Not listed in the Controlled Substances Act,” it said.
The drug is legal.
“I’d never even heard of it,” Sharon says. She called her son’s high school counselor, “and he didn’t know about it. He said they’d just had a drug seminar class, and this did not come up. The principal didn’t know about it, either.
“My concern is people need to be aware of this drug, how easily accessible it is, how cheap it is. It was $30 for a half-ounce, which is a full bag. And my son bought it at a store in downtown Portland.”
Salvia divinorum is not a new drug to the Mazatec Indians who live in the mountains of northern Oaxaca, Mexico. For centuries their shamans have used hallucinogens in religious and healing ceremonies. Outsiders heard rumors of the powerful effects in the 1960s, and soon mescaline and psilocybin mushrooms were being used around the world.
But Salvia divinorum is a wild ride. This is not a drug that simply makes people play Beatles’ records backward. It induces powerful hallucinations that sometimes are terrifying. Use too much, says Daniel Siebert, a California ethnobotanist who grows and sells the drug, and the effect can be close to general anesthesia. Users can have out-of-body experiences, or fits of wild laughter, or nausea.
The unpredictable, sometimes extreme effects of the drug may have kept it from becoming popular when other hallucinogens burst on the scene in the 1960s. But now it’s catching on.
Teen Web sites are full of chatter about what the kids call “salvia.” Music magazines have run articles.
As an herb that can be smoked or chewed, the law says it can’t be sold to anyone under 18. But Internet sale sites can’t check ID. One site even offers “free cute cigarette lighters” with purchase.
“Trust me,” says Sharon, “most high school kids know about it.” But it’s still under the radar of the mainstream adult world.
And it’s not just local school counselors, principals and parents who are clueless. The state Office of Drug and Alcohol Abuse hadn’t heard of it last week. The Office of Mental Health and Addiction Services had heard of it but had little information. The Helpline, a 24-hour confidential drug-and-alcohol information and treatment referral hot line based in Portland, had not fielded any calls on Salvia divinorum. The Portland Partnership has no data on its use. Even the Partnership for a Drugfree America has no mention of the drug on its Web site.
“Kids are always four steps ahead, when a new drug comes along,” says Wendy Hausotter, with the Office of Mental Health and Addiction Services in Salem. “Then as they develop problems with it, they show up in treatment centers, emergency rooms, doctors’ offices. The police also are early detectors. Eventually it percolates up so we in the helping professions start to notice it.”
“Typically the way we find out something is a problem,” says David Westbrook, who runs the Helpline, “is when they figure out how many people per thousand in treatment, are in treatment for that particular drug.”
But they know about Salvia divinorum on the street. “The same thing was true a year ago with Oxycontin,” says Chris Curtis, of the Oregon Partnership. “It was a new thing; they called it ‘Hillbilly Heroin.’ A couple pharmacies got held up so people could get the meds. . . . There’s a buzz around it. Young people are curious about it, and bad people want to begin trafficking in it.”
If the drug is so unsafe that even its promoters advise users always to have a sober companion with them, why is it legal? Some would say it’s because there have been no reported deaths or addiction problems to date.
In fact, it hasn’t been scientifically established whether the drug is addictive or not.
But there are known dangers. Users could pass out driving or walk through windows. “And it apparently can trigger toxic psychosis in people,” says David Westbrook, “especially in people with a pre-existing disorder,” or a family disposition toward schizophrenia.
The truth is, scientists have no idea how Salvinorin A, the chemical compound that triggers the hallucinations, works. Unlike other controlled drugs, it doesn’t attach itself to known neurotransmitters like seratonin or dopamine. So it doesn’t fall into the category of anything outlawed in the Controlled Substances Act.
Australia outlawed its use this year. It’s the first country in the world to do so. Here in the United States, a DEA spokeswoman recently said the agency was “looking at” Salvia divinorum; the FDA has no studies under way.
Sharon doesn’t need any scientific studies. “I’m old enough to remember when LSD was legal, because there was not enough info and it was a brand new drug,” she says. “Just because it’s not illegal doesn’t mean it’s not destructive or wrong. It’s a mind-altering drug.”
Sharon says kids who are on probation for drug use, who are given urinalysis tests, “are getting loaded on salvia, because there’s no marker for it on the tests. It doesn’t show up.”
Sharon wants parents to know if their children are smoking or chewing something that looks like an herb, it could be Salvia divinorum. “Somebody needs to get this out to adults. They need to know about this now,” she says. “Trust me — most of the high school kids know about it.
“Their parents need to know there’s a new drug in town.” Margie Boule: 503-221-8450; marboule@aol.c
 
 

Author: Margie Boule