Pubdate: Sat, 21 Jun 2008 Source: Cullman Times, The (AL) Copyright: 2008 The Cullman Times Contact: http://www.cullmantimes.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/4796 Author: Derek Price Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/opinion.htm (Opinion) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Salvia SALVIA SHOULD BE BANNED We at The Cullman Times bet a lot of our readers were surprised to learn how some young people in Cullman County are using a hallucinogenic drug, called salvia divinorum, to alter their minds in a fashion somewhat similar to LSD. We suspect you were also surprised to learn that salvia is perfectly legal to buy, sell and use in Alabama. We were definitely shocked. Here in Cullman County, a place where adults can't legally buy a glass of wine with their dinner, it's perfectly legal to sell a hallucinogen to a 15-year-old. Granted, the only local store we know that sells salvia requires the buyer to be at least 19, but that's not the law. It's merely by choice, a decision that we think is made more for public relations reasons than any sense of ethics on the part of the retailer. The presence of salvia in Cullman may have been news to parents, but it's nothing new to many young people here. We didn't have to look far to find teenagers who had used salvia and knew exactly where to buy it, a troubling sign for a substance that serves no purpose but to impose a brief but powerful high. That's why it's important for Alabama to outlaw this drug before it becomes a bigger problem. Some people who oppose the criminalization of salvia say there have been few scientific studies about it, which is true. But shouldn't that be even more of a reason to keep it off store shelves? Because it's a relatively obscure drug, no one knows exactly how much damage it might do to the brain or how addictive it might be for some users. We do know one thing. Salvia is powerful enough to cause its users to drop out of reality, if only for a few minutes, while their senses of vision, sound and touch go haywire. This alone should be enough to outlaw salvia - never mind if it's addictive or physiologically harmful - because these hallucinogenic effects could cause serious societal problems as the drug gained more widespread acceptance. Alabama lawmakers have tried to ban salvia in the past, including in the most recent legislative session, but the bill has never gotten enough support to pass. Perhaps legislators didn't realize how widely available salvia is across the state, or maybe they don't know how powerfully it can alter the mind. Perhaps they just don't care that young people across the state are using salvia to get high, even in places where they can't buy a beer. For them, we only have one question. What are you smokin'?