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The Salvia Ban Wagon

How does terrible drug policy get made? The mad rush to criminalize a psychedelic herb provides a textbook case.

Jacob Sullum from the December 2009 issue

A couple of years ago, John Bulloch watched an alarming report on an Atlanta TV station about an exotic-sounding drug called Salvia divinorum. Bulloch had never heard of the plant, a psychoactive relative of sage that the Mazatec Indians of Oaxaca, Mexico, have used for centuries in healing and divination rituals. But according to the news report, salvia was becoming increasingly popular among American college students, who sometimes called it “Sally D” or “magic mint” (since salvia, like sage, is a member of the mint family).
The most horrifying fact of all: Salvia was perfectly legal. In their far-reaching crackdowns on drugs that people enjoy, state and federal legislators somehow had missed a plant that contains the most powerful naturally occurring psychedelic known to man.

Bulloch—a Republican state senator who represents the area around Ochlocknee, Georgia, a tiny town near the Florida border—was astounded. “I thought, ‘Why hasn’t somebody already jumped on this?’ ” he told the Florida Times-Union in March 2007. “I hurriedly got legislative counsel to draft the bill”—legislation making it a misdemeanor to grow, sell, or possess salvia. “Since then,” the Times-Union reported, “Bulloch has been scouring the Internet to find information about salvia. None of what he has learned has dissuaded him from trying to make it illegal.”
Bulloch’s approach to salvia—ban first, ask questions later—epitomizes how drug policy is made in America. Although his bill has not yet passed, 15 states have banned salvia since 2005, and many others are considering similar legislation. Their precipitous action makes the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which has been monitoring salvia as “a drug of concern” since 2003 but still has no definite plans to classify it as a prohibited substance, look rational and reticent by comparison.

The penalties for violating state salvia laws vary from modest fines to decades in prison. Kenneth Rau, a North Dakota bottling plant employee who has the dubious distinction of being the first American arrested for salvia possession, bought eight ounces of leaves on eBay for $32 in December 2007. He says he did not realize a state ban on the plant had taken effect the previous August—a plausible claim, especially since the plant matter that police discovered in his home was clearly labeled “salvia.” Last spring Rau received three years of probation for simple possession. But he originally was charged as a dealer and could have received a prison sentence of up to 20 years, all for a bag of leaves that was legal in North Dakota four months before he bought it and remains legal in most of the country.

To drug policy historians, the reasons for the rush to ban salvia are familiar. Sensationalistic press coverage, in this case supplemented by salvia users’ documentation of their own trips on YouTube, has attracted the attention of legislators eager to grandstand as guardians of vulnerable and impressionable “young people.” Few politicians can resist the allure of a drug described as “cheaper than marijuana, stronger than LSD, as fast-acting as crack cocaine, and legally available to minors” (as The Ithaca Journal put it in 2004). The endless repetition of a few anecdotes that supposedly demonstrate salvia’s dangers—most conspicuously, the story of a Delaware teenager’s 2006 suicide—has found a receptive audience among politicians who automatically assume that an unfamiliar psychoactive substance must be a menace. And since these lawmakers bridle at the notion that anything good could possibly come from altering your consciousness, they see no downside to banning salvia before it becomes a problem.

The idea that salvia “could become the next marijuana” (as the Associated Press warned last year) is mostly misbegotten. The salvia experience is so unpredictable, so incompatible with social interaction, and so frequently boring or unpleasant that it’s safe to assume the herb will never be as popular as pot. But the comparison rings true in several other respects: Both salvia and marijuana are psychoactive plants linked in the public mind to Mexico, both appear to be nontoxic for all practical purposes, and both have intriguing medical potential. Salvia’s detractors, like marijuana’s in the 1920s and ’30s, claim it causes insanity and violence. In both cases prohibition occurred at the state level first. If salvia continues to follow the pattern set by marijuana, it will ultimately be banned throughout the country, despite a dearth of evidence that it poses a serious threat to individual health or to public safety.

Something About Mary
Salvia’s ritual use in Mexico goes back hundreds of years, but outsiders paid little attention to it until the mid-20th century. Starting in 1938, anthropologists and naturalists visiting Oaxaca mentioned a visionary tea made from a plant variously called hierba Maria (herb of Mary), hoja de adivinación (leaf of prophecy), or ska Maria Pastora (leaves of Mary the Shepherdess). They reported that the local healers known as curanderos used the potion, traditionally linked to the Virgin Mary, to diagnose illness and locate lost objects, finding clues in what their patients/clients said under its influence.
The self-taught American mycologist and ethnobotanist R. Gordon Wasson, best known for his research on hallucinogenic mushrooms, was the first visitor to describe his own experiences with ska Maria Pastora. In a 1962 leaflet published by Harvard University’s Botanical Museum, Wasson announced “a new Mexican psychotropic drug from the mint family” that he and his colleagues dubbed Salvia divinorum (diviner’s sage). He said it was “a psychotropic plant that the Mazatecs consume when mushrooms are not available,” a “less desirable substitute” for psilocybin-containing fungi.

In a 1961 salvia ceremony, Wasson drank a foul-tasting mixture of leaf juice and water under the guidance of a curandera. “The effect of the leaves came sooner than would have been the case with the mushrooms, was less sweeping, and lasted a shorter time,” he reported. “There was not the slightest doubt about the effect, but it did not go beyond the initial effect of the mushrooms—dancing colors in elaborate, three-dimensional designs.” The second time around, about a year later, Wasson was joined by his friend Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD. They experienced similar effects.

Given Wasson’s lack of enthusiasm for salvia, it’s not surprising that the plant remained obscure for decades, with nothing like the fame or following attracted by LSD, psilocybin, or peyote. That began to change in the 1990s, thanks largely to the efforts of another amateur ethnobotanist.

Daniel Siebert first came across salvia in the late 1970s while researching medicinal plants. Later someone gave him a cutting, which he used to grow a plant that he added to his collection of interesting herbs. About a year later he accidentally broke off part of the plant and decided to try it, chewing up a wad of 26 large leaves. “It was that initial experience that really piqued my interest,” he says. “I found the effects really intriguing, and it was very comfortable and easy to handle—much more manageable than most other psychedelic drugs I had tried.” Today Siebert, who lives in Malibu, runs the Salvia
Divinorum Research and Information Center (sagewisdom.org), the most comprehensive online repository of information about the plant.

The website, which also sells the herb, includes a link to a 1994 article Siebert published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology that helped explain why ska Maria had disappointed so many psychonauts. Siebert’s research confirmed that salvinorin A, first isolated a decade before, was the plant’s main psychoactive ingredient. It turned out to be highly potent, producing noticeable effects at a dose of half a milligram, compared to about 10 milligrams for psilocybin and 250 milligrams for mescaline. (Contrary to some overheated press reports about salvia, LSD, a synthetic psychedelic, is far more powerful than any of these, effective at doses as low as 50 micrograms, or five-hundredths of a milligram.) Siebert’s experiments with volunteers who tried different routes of administration revealed that swallowing salvia was the worst way to absorb salvinorin A, which is “deactivated by the gastrointestinal system.” Two other routes were much more successful: through the oral mucous membrane (by holding masticated leaves or leaf juice in the mouth) and through the lungs (by inhaling the vapor).

This information, combined with the realization that salvinorin A is highly stable and remains in salvia leaves even when they’re dried, set the stage for the plant’s commercialization. Soon it was available from head shops and online vendors in the form of liquid extracts and smokable dried leaves, often fortified with extract. Holding the liquid in the mouth more closely resembles the traditional method of consuming salvia, with the effects felt in five to 10 minutes and lasting an hour or two. But the alcohol-based extract tastes terrible and produces relatively subtle effects. (See “Salvia and Salivation,” page 42.) The smoked form produces faster, more intense, and shorter effects, appearing within 30 seconds and subsiding after five to 10 minutes. It sells much better.

According to the latest data from the federal government’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 1 million Americans used salvia in 2007, up from 750,000 in 2006, the first year the survey asked about the drug. Those numbers make salvia currently more popular than LSD, used by 620,000 Americans in 2007. (In terms of lifetime use, however, acid droppers outnumber salvia smokers by nearly 10 to 1.) Salvia, like other psychedelics, is most popular among 18-to-25-year-olds, 2 percent of whom report past-year use.

As is often the case with drug fads, interest in salvia has been driven partly by the same press coverage that has encouraged legislators to crack down on it. Salvia distributors say they see spikes in sales after anti-salvia articles appear. “Every time there’s a news story on it,” says John Boyd, CEO of Arena Ethnobotanicals in Encinitas, California, “it brings it to people’s attention.”
Still, salvia is much less popular than marijuana, used by 25 million Americans in 2007. It is also less likely to be used more than once. Tiffin University psychologist Jonathan Appel, who co-authored a 2007 article on the rising popularity of salvia in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, says, “We’re talking about a small percentage of people who are using it and an even smaller percentage of people who go back and use it again.”

‘The Worst Substance of This Earth’
Siebert says the prevalence of smoking, which produces quick, intense effects, helps explain why many users report overwhelming experiences they are not eager to repeat. High doses are another factor, since vendors compete based on the potency of their fortified leaves, bragging that they are anywhere from five to 100 times as powerful as the untreated plant. “When you smoke,” Siebert says, “the effects come on almost instantly, and it’s disorienting. Suddenly you have this dramatic shift of consciousness, especially if you’re taking a high dose, and it can be frightening and uncomfortable. That starts everything off on the wrong foot.”

Last year a commenter on reason’s blog, Hit & Run, called salvia “THE WORST substance of this Earth,” adding, “If you want kids to stay off of drugs, give them some Salvia and tell them this is what cannabis, hash, and LSD are all like.” Erowid.org, a website that provides information on a wide variety of psychoactive substances for an audience that is more Leary than leery, is less vehement, but it notes that salvia’s effects “are considered unpleasant by many people.” Bryan Roth, a psychiatrist and pharmacologist at the University of North Carolina, led the research that showed how salvinorin A binds to the brain. “Most people will say they don’t like it,” he says. “It’s just too intense. If it has any effect at all, I would say it would be to diminish the tendency for drug abuse.”
Users are apt to be especially disappointed if they are expecting a fun party drug similar to marijuana. “I smoked with a friend last week who became the leg of a table,” says Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. In his 1994 paper, Siebert listed commonly reported themes of salvia experiences, including “becoming objects,” “visions of various two-dimensional surfaces,” “revisiting places from the past,” “loss of the body and/or identity,” “various sensations of motion,” “uncontrollable hysterical laughter,” and “overlapping realities.” Such experiences might be interesting, rewarding, or revealing, but they are not exactly conducive to social activities.

“Salvia is not a recreational substance,” says Jeffrey Bottoms, who works at Mazatec Garden, a salvia importer and distributor in Houston. “It isn’t pleasant. It doesn’t make you feel good. It’s not a mood elevator. If you’re depressed, it’s not going to make you feel a little better. In fact, it will make you feel a lot worse.” Ready to try it yet?
First you may want to check out the videos. Search for “salvia” on YouTube, and you’ll find hundreds of videos of teenagers and young adults staring into space, laughing hysterically, falling over, crawling on the floor, and speaking in tongues while their friends alternately giggle and reassure them that it will all be over soon. These videos, widely credited with helping to popularize salvia, do not make it seem very appealing. Nor are they all that alarming, except perhaps as a sign that a disturbingly large number of people want the world to see their displays of drug-induced idiocy. In some of the videos, the salvia smoker freaks out a little, but these “bad trips” (breathlessly advertised as such) look pretty mild, consisting mainly of restlessness and a repeatedly expressed wish for an end to the ride, which arrives soon enough.

Yet the YouTube videos come up frequently in newspaper stories about salvia and in the comments of politicians who want to ban it. In January, explaining his motive for sponsoring a prohibition bill, Maryland state Sen. Richard Colburn (R-Dorchester County) told the Baltimore Examiner that the YouTube footage is “pretty disturbing,” adding, “Just imagine if that was your child.” Colburn’s YouTube-inspired bill would classify salvia as a Schedule I substance, making people who sell it subject to prison terms of up to 20 years. According to the Santa Fe Reporter, New Mexico state Rep. Keith Gardner (R-Chavez), sponsor of a similar bill, “says all the evidence he needs of the drug’s dangerous potential is available on YouTube.” He told the paper the videos are “dramatic as hell—you gotta watch ’em. At first I thought, ‘This is just somebody pretending.’ It’s amazing how powerful this drug is.”

Texas state Rep. Armando Martinez (D- Weslaco) says he introduced a bill that would ban salvia sales to minors based on “what we’ve seen on YouTube and what a friend of mine’s nephew had mentioned about all this.” He settled on age restrictions, as opposed to a complete ban, because it seemed easier to accomplish. “Any way we could stop this from getting into the hands of our children or adolescents,” he says, “I think that it’s something we need to do. If that means a complete ban, then I would support a complete ban.”

Texas state Rep. Charles “Doc” Anderson (R-Waco) already does, arguing that age restrictions could “do more harm than good,” making salvia use a mark of adulthood. The New York Times reports that Anderson has tried to stir up support for a ban among his colleagues by citing a YouTube video that shows a salvia smoker behind the wheel of a car. The video in question, “Driving on Salvia,” is part of a humorous series called “Being Productive on Salvia” featuring a Los Angeles production assistant named Erik Hoffstad. Other episodes include “Gardening on Salvia” and “Writing a Letter to Congress on Salvia.” The running gag is that Hoffstad can’t manage to do much of anything after taking a salvia hit. In “Driving on Salvia,” he never actually tries to start the car, and the scariest moment occurs when a cat unexpectedly jumps on the hood.

‘Beyond Anything We Have Seen Before’
Martinez and Anderson both raise the specter of salvia-impaired driving, but neither can cite any real-life examples of it, in Texas or elsewhere. That’s not surprising, since (as Hoffstad’s video illustrates) someone tripping on salvia, unlike someone who has had a few drinks, is in no condition to get into a car, start it up, and drive away. It seems the only way this hazard could materialize is if someone brought a bongful of salvia with him on a drive and lit it up while stopped at a light. Although the driving scenario seems implausible, salvia prohibitionists are right that there is a potential for accidents under the drug’s influence, which is why vendors warn their customers to put away hazardous objects and enlist a “sober sitter” to keep an eye on them during their trip.

When I press Martinez and Anderson for examples of actual harm caused by salvia use, as opposed to hypothetical risks, the best they can do is cite bad but brief trips. Anderson also claims “we are seeing the flashback scenario.” But as Siebert notes, “Any kind of intense or traumatic experience,” including war, car crashes, and near-death experiences, “can produce flashbacks.…Intense psychedelic experiences can be extremely frightening, and it may be that there’s some internal psychological mechanism of revisiting that kind of material later. But it doesn’t appear that there’s any organic, direct reason for this. It’s not like the drug hangs around the system and suddenly pops up in your brain one day. It seems to be more like the way the brain deals with very intense or confusing experiences.”

Last fall Anderson told the Waco Tribune-Herald that “with a single use [salvia smokers] can cause some serious, serious damage to their brain.” Roth, the salvia researcher, says “there’s no evidence for that statement.” In fact, says Siebert, animal studies of salvia give “no indication of it having any significant toxic effects, even at doses that are hundreds of times more than what humans would ordinarily use.” Even salvia’s detractors concede that addiction does not seem to be an issue, since few people who try the drug want to use it on a regular basis. Despite a dramatic increase in use during the last few years, emergency rooms are not seeing a flood, or even a trickle, of salvia users, probably because a hospital trip usually takes longer than a salvia trip.

The lack of alarming statistics helps explain why the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which has the power to ban psychoactive substances without new legislation, is still waiting and watching six years after declaring salvia a “drug of concern.” DEA spokesman Rusty Payne says, “I don’t think we have enough information yet.” And there’s no telling when they will. “It’s going to take a while,” Payne says. “If we decide to schedule [salvia], we’ll publish a notice [in the Federal Register]. If we don’t, we won’t.” Although Payne says the delay should not be read as a judgment on salvia’s dangers, the DEA can act much more quickly when it wants to, as when it banned MDMA on an emergency basis in 1985. “When they say they’ve been looking at it for years,” says Rick Doblin, “it means it’s not much of a problem.”

Nor is salvia a high priority at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Officially, the FDA says herbal products like salvia are “unapproved new drugs” and “misbranded drugs” if they are “marketed with claims implying that these products mimic the effects of controlled substances.” Products are deemed to be “illegal street drug alternatives” when they are “intended to be used for recreational purposes to effect psychological states (e.g., to get high, to promote euphoria, or to induce hallucinations).”

“I am aware of that law,” says Arena Ethnobotanicals CEO John Boyd, “and that’s why if you check our website there are no references to anything like that.” Many salvia vendors do tout the psychoactive effects of their products, promising “psychedelic,” “visionary,” “enlightening,” and “enjoyable” experiences. Yet except for two warning letters it sent in 2002, the FDA does not seem to have taken any enforcement actions against companies that sell salvia. While FDA spokesman Christopher Kelly says “we do not discuss potential, pending, or ongoing actions,” none of the distributors I interviewed was aware of any recent warnings or seizures.

As for Congress, Rep. Joe Baca (D-Calif.) introduced a bill to ban salvia in 2002, declaring, “We know very little about the drug, but what we do know is frightening. This drug’s power is beyond anything we have seen before.” But the bill died in committee, and Baca never reintroduced it. I contacted his office a couple of times to find out why but did not get an answer.