Hallucinogenic herb from Mexico under scrutiny

In the funky Adams Morgan neighborhood of the nation's capital, just past the yellow "Drug Free Zone" sign, the B&K News Stand sells hookahs, rolling papers and "Purple Sticky Salvia."

The psychedelic Purple Sticky label warns that the contents of the cylindrical package — dried leaves of the hallucinogenic herb Salvia divinorum and a chemical extract of the drug — are to be used as incense only. But at $30 for a pillbox the size of a small jar of lip balm, that's some awfully expensive fragrant foliage.

It's legal to sell, possess and ingest salvia in the District of Columbia. But the same stuff, long used for medicinal and mystical purposes by Mazatec Indians in Mexico, will get you arrested in Virginia, where a ban on salvia passed last year.

Last month, the Ocean City Council passed emergency legislation to ban salvia products, which were being sold at almost 20 shops on the resort town's boardwalk. An identical ban followed suit in Worcester County on Maryland's Eastern Shore, and state Del. Jim Mathias, the former mayor of Ocean City, plans to push for a statewide ban when the General Assembly meets in Annapolis this winter.

Salvia has been gaining popularity over the past decade as a smokable drug whose psychotropic extract provides a short-lived but potent hallucinogenic trip. The 2008 National Survey on Drug Use and Health estimated that 1.8 million people in the United States had tried salvia, "and it's probably even more now," said Matthew Johnson, a psychopharmacologist at the Johns Hopkins University medical school, where he studies salvia and its active ingredient, salvinorin A. "It's really hit a critical mass in the last couple of years."...

Although its hallucinogenic qualities were known by ethnobotanists and in psychedelic drug circles for many years, salvia had a low profile in this country until the late 1990s, when word spread that concentrating the active compound, salvinorin A, and smoking it was like a legal ticket to a magic carpet ride.

"That's when things started changing, around 1998, 1999, and you started seeing mail-order companies offering it," said Daniel Siebert, creator of the Salvia divinorum Research and Information Center, a salvia Web site. Siebert has experimented with the drug himself, "though I haven't done it in a couple of years," he said.

He describes his experience as a journey to another place. "If you take a high dose, you get immersed in this dreamlike trance state," he said. "You're seeing this narrative scene unfold, like you do when you're asleep, and you're not aware of your body or the room you're in. You think you're someplace else."

Siebert said traditional Indian use of salvia was reserved for occasions "when they have a real reason to consult with their inner selves or with divine beings ... usually a problem they're trying to gain insight into. It's a solemn, sacred thing."

Today, however, "more and more people are smoking excessively high doses and being careless," Siebert said. They "are experimenting with it in a party atmosphere while drinking with a lot of friends around, and they're finding it confusing and disorienting."