PARENTS WORRY ABOUT SALVIA, A LEGAL HALLUCINOGEN BIG ON YOUTUBE

Bill Cooper hardly expected to dial into a world of Mazatec Indian
shamanism when his phone went dead and he reached to borrow his son's.

Then he saw one of the text messages: "hey, when were you fixen to blaze
the salvia."

Cooper, a bill collector, suspected it was code lingo for marijuana. But
under parental pressure his 15-year-old finally told him "something
horrifying," Cooper said. He and other Brentwood teens smoked a
little-known Mexican sage sold legally to adults in California, and apt to
launch users into a strong, hallucinogenic and sometimes fearful mind trip.

"Since then he must have had five texts in a week's time saying 'I got the
Salvia, let's blaze,'" Cooper said.

"It's like the new thing. He said the kids are all selling it at the
school," his wife, Caroline, said. "The fact it's legal, it's just crazy."

Salvia divinorum, which local smoke shops sell in packets of dark,
crushed-leaf extract - with a "strictly for incense use only" disclaimer -
has spurred new laws in more than a dozen states in recent years amid a
slew of online videos showing youths speaking or acting bizarrely after
smoking it; and the well-publicized suicide of a Delaware teen in 2006,
with the coroner listing salvia as a contributing cause.

In many of the videos, the smokers often start laughing uncontrollably,
then are rendered incoherent by a forceful high that users describe as much
shorter than LSD, but often more intense. All three of Brentwood's smoke
shops carry the same brand of the extract in their display cases, with
prices ranging by strength from $17 to $40 per 1-gram packet. Several Web
sites also sell it. In several testimonials, users of a plant native to
Oaxaca, Mexico describe a lasting spiritual effect from an herb known as
Diviners' Sage, Sally-D and Magic Mint.

The online videos may create the false impression of a party drug, said the
owner of a Berkeley head shop that sells Salvia. He requested anonymity,
saying he worried his shop would be mistaken for one that sells it to minors.

"We point out this is a very serious thing. It has a very strong effect for
about maybe 10 minutes. You can actually have an out-of-body experience,"
he said.

"It's not euphoric. It's not something where it's necessarily a pleasant
experience, where people want to do more of it because it's fun," he said.
"You have a very serious understanding that there are parallel realities
and things are somewhat relative. It basically exposes elements of
consciousness, like stretching your mind."

According to a federal drug use survey published by the Substance Abuse and
Mental Health Services Agency in February 2008, an estimated 1.8 million
people age 12 or older used Salvia divinorum at some point, including
750,000 that used it in the past year, with use more common among young
adults and males. Contrast that with ecstasy, which was used by 2.1 million
people in the same one-year period.

The numbers may surprise, but one researcher who studies Salvia in humans
doubted that it means rampant use or abuse.

Many people seem to take it just once, said Dr. John Mendelson, a
pharmacologist at the Research Institute at California Pacific Medical Center.

"College kids and friends have done it. Half of them, maybe two-thirds have
a really bad time, very disturbing imagery, lots of fear, lots of anxiety.
This drug appears best done in silence and in darkness and with a sober
companion," said Mendelson.

In lieu of federal regulation, at least 10 states have listed Salvia as a
Schedule 1 drug, like ecstasy or LSD. A California Assemblyman proposed a
ban in California that was rejected in committee. Instead, the state last
year outlawed the sale and distribution of Salvia to minors.

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration now lists Salvia as a "drug of
interest."

"It's like our watch-list," said DEA spokesman Michael Sanders. "It's
starting to become highly popular out there among the younger generation.
I've seen the YouTubes. People start seeing Martians, the wars between the
monsters and the aliens without the 3-D glasses."

Mendelson is among a cadre of medical researchers who say the plant carries
unique chemical properties and holds the potential to advance drug
development for a range of troubling diseases. Unlike other hallucinogens,
the key chemical in Salvia divinorum activates a single receptor, called a
kappa-opioid receptor, linked to a range of medical conditions from bipolar
effective disorder to depression to abdominal pain, he said. Some research
suggests it could help with cocaine addiction, and could even lead to
medicines to fight HIV.

But most of that remains speculative.

"We don't have anything in the library that looks quite like this compound.
There's going to be a lot of scientific exploration here," said Mendelson.
"One of the concerns with drug developers is if something is (restricted),
what that really does is drive away capital" for research.

There is no evidence that Salvia is addicting, or that abusers have shown
up in emergency rooms with symptoms of psychosis, he said. The Delaware
teen's suicide is the lone death linked to the herb. "If we have
demonstrated harms, we should go after it, but we should first demonstrate
the harms," he said.

Assemblyman Anthony Adams, R-Claremont, who proposed the ban on Salvia,
said liberal Democrats chose to defer to the feds, but that he may bring it
up again if use widens.

"When you have an out-of-mind experience, you can do substantive harm to
yourself. The larger concern is the potential harm to a third person," he said.

Mendelson cautioned about treating Salvia like illicit drugs, but also
warned that the risks are in what scientists have yet to learn.

"This is a really novel new human experience. We really don't know the
risks at all at this point," he said.

That fact doesn't seem to faze some of the local high schoolers, Caroline
Cooper lamented.

"These kids are so young and dumb, they tend not to care."