My first experience with an hallucinogenic substance was decades before I'd ever heard of salvia divinorum or the recent efforts to criminalize it.
Though, at that time, I didn't have the sense or experience to know what I was getting into, I was with people I trusted in a safe, comfortable environment, and I had an immensely pleasurable experience.
After the drug had been administered, I remember lying back in the Naugahyde recliner and staring at a poster featuring a collage of 1930s movie stars. Before I could focus on any one image, the previously bland music they were playing became a thumping roar. Clark Gable, Boris Karloff and Judy Garland began to swirl, and even though my eyes were open, I began to see stars. Millions of brilliant points of light shot past me as if I was going into hyperdrive, and then my body began to lift from the chair and elongate. Like a rubber band powering a propeller in a toy airplane, my legs felt as if they were twisting about time after time, wrapping themselves into a coiled rope.
I was mesmerized by the sights, sounds and feelings I was experiencing, and the only interruption was the occasional request I heard from my handlers to "open big."
I was eight years old, getting my first fillings at the family dentist. I'd been told the stuff I was breathing was laughing gas, but though it was fun, I didn't even giggle. I was in awe, and when it was over, I wanted more. Upon returning home, I asked my mom if I could get some for Christmas.
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In the past few weeks, there has been a strange hypocrisy at work on Beacon Hill: Massachusetts voters have overwhelmingly decided in favor of decriminalizing marijuana in amounts of an ounce or less, while at the same time lawmakers are debating outlawing salvia divinorum. Currently salvia is legal and can be purchased locally. It's part of the sage family, like mint, but it's the only member of that genus known to have mind-altering qualities when consumed.
Like pot, salvia is a botanical—a flowering plant that grows in the wild. Both, when harvested and dried, can be smoked or eaten to produce a state that is similarly euphoric (for some users) but as different as Vermont and Texas in the experiences they provide. Like the laughing gas I took, salvia, when smoked, affects all the senses of the person taking it. The height of intoxication only lasts five or 10 minutes, but in that time, the imbiber is largely incapacitated and not at all good company. Like all drugs, results may vary depending on the user, but some who take it have visions, some laugh uncontrollably, and some have out-of-body experiences. Some feel simply a tingling in their legs, and others feel nothing. For those that it does affect, after the initial burst of trippiness, there's another half hour or so of feeling giddy or enlightened, and one's limbs feel strangely elastic.
The state representatives who have introduced legislation to criminalize this plant, Vinny deMacedo of Plymouth and Daniel Webster of Pembroke—both Republicans—don't appear to have any direct experience with salvia, and since there's no report locally or nationally of injuries caused by it, their drive to forbid its use is not based on fact but fantasy.
The "evidence" that damned the plant and fired up the reps' legislative fervor was videos on YouTube that local police forwarded to them, showing young people acting absurdly after smoking salvia. The dozen or so videos I've watched show teens and twenty-somethings hanging out with their friends, either laughing their asses off or staring at nothing, agape and agog. But for the smoking involved, the videos are entirely G-rated. There's no sex or violence, and the subjects all appear to be enjoying themselves immensely. Minus the beer in plastic cups, it doesn't look much different than the behavior at Fenway after a home team grand slam.
Even though it's been centuries since the first Puritans set foot in our state, and we've progressed far enough to allow gay marriage and contemplate decriminalizing pot, it appears some segment of our populace still thinks persecuting non-traditional pleasure seekers is a worthwhile pursuit of government.
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In 1994, UMass professor of comparative literature David Lenson wrote On Drugs, a book that helps explain what the cops and state reps believe about salvia and other substances that scares them enough to make them want to throw users in prison and destroy their lives.
Lenson's approach is radical. What he doesn't do is marshal scientific studies on rats and assemble statistical data from police logs and emergency rooms to explain all the reasons to just say no. Instead, as a drug user himself, he uses his own experiences and abilities to parse language to explain why some of us say yes, please, and why others vilify that choice. It's a far more thoughtful, honest and convincing approach than those who point to a fried egg and try to compare it to a drug-addled brain.
He points out the similarities between the ancient Greek word for drugs and the word for scapegoat (pharmaka and pharmakos) and suggests there has always been a strong relationship between the two concepts. The War on Drugs, he points out, was started by Nixon right after the Vietnam War ended. At the time, recreational drugs were closely associated with those who had resisted the military action and returning soldiers who had become disillusioned with their country. Since then, the greatest number of people imprisoned for drugs have been those already marginalized by society—the poor and minorities—even though there's ample evidence that the wealthy and white indulge just as much, if not more.
Further, he argues, those who spend their money and time looking for pleasure in altering their personal chemistry, especially with hallucinogens and marijuana, offer an apparent affront to consumer culture in general. Instead of being obsessed with purchasing more and more of the objects everyone else has, those who get high or trip are looking for an intangible, personal experience.
When I interviewed Lenson on the efforts to criminalize salvia divinorum, and remarked on how weak the case against it appeared to be, his response was, "Of course there's no correlation between the legal taxonomies and botanical taxonomies when talking about drugs." I'd only frustrate myself looking for logic in the legislators' arguments.
"The vote to decriminalize marijuana in Massachusetts is a high water mark in the War on Drugs," he said. "No one could have imagined this a decade ago" (when he'd written his book). He saw similarities between what was happening between pot and the end of alcohol prohibition in the 1930s. As with alcohol, as states stop enforcing the laws against pot, "the bricks are starting to fall out of the wall" in the federal government's case against the drug. He also pointed out that "the U.S. spends the same capital on petroleum as it does on illegal drugs," and given that salvia's popularity is slight in comparison to other drugs, banning it would have little effect on the government's overall agenda.
What effect might Obama have on the War on Drugs? It was still unclear, he said, pointing to the president-elect's apparent affinity for those who worked for the last Democratic president: "Clinton was as bad as Nixon. He had his own brother arrested for cocaine. But if Obama focuses on the plight of African-Americans, he might recognize they are a great percentage of those serving time for drug offenses."
As the interview ended, he asked me if I'd been given the same spiel on salvia that he'd gotten: "I was told you'd meet an entity, and you needed to prepare a question for him. So I formulated my question, but when I tried the salvia the first time, I had spectacular visions, but I didn't see an entity. I tried it again, and still no entity. I'd thought it would be huge, and I wondered if I wasn't looking in the right place. When I explained this to another user, he said the entity wasn't huge at all, but small. The size of a clock radio."
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I first encountered salvia divinorum about a month ago at the Underground, a gift shop in Brattleboro. I had stopped there with some friends on our way for a weekend up north, and while browsing in the 18-and-older section at the back of the shop, amongst the glass pipes I spotted the small canisters of pure salvinorin-a, the active ingredient in salvia. Packaged and distributed by Purple Sticky Salvia, the canisters don't contain the plant itself, but the drug extracted at different potencies, ranging in price from $40 (10x potency) to $90 (30x potency). The packaging states that it's an "aromatic incense" and says nothing about its effects. As my friends and I considered the options for a while, the store clerk asked us if we'd ever tried it before, and when we all shook our heads, she firmly but kindly advised caution.
She reminded us it was intended as an incense, but if we should choose to inhale it, she recommended doing so with a water pipe, and only using a small flake of it at first—less than the size of the head of a thumbtack. If that didn't work, we weren't to double the dosage, but only take a fraction more; when it did kick in, we'd be tripping before we were able to put the pipe down. Seeing our uneasiness, she suggested we try the dried leaves instead of the extract. For $30, we bought a pouch of the leaves, which we were assured were less intense and could be smoked with rolling papers.
While my friends didn't experience much smoking the leaves, the effect to me was similar to my first experience with laughing gas. Sitting in a chair, I felt a sudden rush and the world became a blur, as if I were traveling through it quickly. I tilted my head back and it felt as if it were drooping all the way down to the floor. For five minutes or so I could hear my friends talking distantly around me, but I was so absorbed in what was happening in my head and body, I couldn't make sense of it. Then it was over, and I sat quietly reflecting on what had happened.
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When I returned to the Underground to take photos for this story, I met the co-owner of the store, Christine Grant. She reiterated much of what I'd been told the first time, emphasizing the need to have someone sober around should the user decide to inhale. I asked if the product was popular. "Very," she said. "My co-owner has been selling it here and in some of his other stores for six to eight years, and it's always sold well. We get people driving a long way for it. But demand's always the greatest whenever there's controversy in the press about it."
I asked if anyone had ever complained, or if she'd heard of any bad experiences. "No one's asked for their money back," she told me. "Once in a while someone does too much, or does it without a sober buddy, and they don't have a great time." But it wasn't the norm.
The plant's Latin name translates as "sage of seers," and it originates from Oaxaca, Mexico, where it is still used by the Mazatec shamans for divination, and in smaller doses, as a cure for diarrhea, anemia and headaches. It has not been much studied in Western medicine, but a 2007 report in the Houston Chronicle quoted Bryan L. Roth, director of the National Institute of Mental Health's Psychoactive Drug Screening Program: "We think that drugs derived from the active ingredient could be useful for a range of diseases: Alzheimer's, depression, schizophrenia, chronic pain and even AIDS or HIV." If it were made illegal, though, research would grind to a halt.
Rather than asking whether or not salvia divinorum should be criminalized, I think the far more important question is whether it's acceptable for our legislators and law enforcement officials to use YouTube as a tool to cast judgment and set policy. I used Wikipedia as a research source for this story, but since it is an Internet source, I know it's not always authoritative, and I double-checked the information elsewhere. Shouldn't we, at the very least, expect the same from those who write and enforce our laws?"
