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Harry’s Freedom Foxhole - Salvia Is Not Just for Miley Cyrus

The New York State Senate announced that they have passed a bill to ban salvia, the lame drug that makes you feel like you've traveled through a cheese grater.

Sometimes I feel pretty good about the prospects of the drug war ending, or at least slowing down. More people than ever before support making pot legal, which is nice because that’s a totally reasonable thing to support. And everyone loves The Wire, and that show suggested that the persecution of drug dealers might be worse than the actual drug dealing. So you might expect the US’s drug laws to get looser and more relaxed over time, or you would if you were a dummy who doesn’t know that the way laws are passed in this country has very little to do with logic, public opinion, or even what David Simon thinks. Nope, our drug policy continues to be driven by fear, confusion, and a bunch of white dudes in suits elected by old people.

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The latest bit of drug-war-related bad news I found came last week, when the New York State Senate put out a press release announcing they had passed a bill to ban salvia divnorum.

Salvia, in case you don’t know, is a pretty lame drug. If you smoke the plant leaves, you trip aggressively for several minutes then come out on the other side feeling like you’ve traveled through a cheese grater. The times I’ve taken it I’ve had really overpowering hallucinations, been unable to distinguish sound from sight, and imagined I was tunneling through an unfriendly universe while lying on the carpet. It’s far more intense than it is fun, and it’s impossible to get addicted to it for the same reason no one is addicted to punching himself in the face until they see stars. It’s so lame that it’s legal in a bunch of states, probably because no one bothered to make it illegal. There’s no salvia “epidemic,” no teens dropping out of school to blow dudes for salvia money. The worst thing salvia does, besides cause New-Age shamanism, is make Miley Cyrus even more unbearable.

So why does the New York State Senate want to make it illegal? Well, bill sponsor John Flanagan trotted out the usual, “Communities fighting against drugs, we’ll help them win that fight blah blah blah” stuff, and also referred to salvia as a “gateway drug,” which is just… bizarre. I’ve never heard of salvia as a gateway drug, since so few people use it and because it’s such an odd experience that it seems more likely to turn you off of drugs entirely. (That’s assuming “gateway drugs” exist, which they don’t.)

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The press release also references Ryan Santanna, a 21-year-old who jumped off a 15th-floor balcony after allegedly smoking salvia. It made the local news because the “psychedelic drugs cause people to flip out and do horrible things” angle is always a winner, but generally we don’t pass laws against things because they might have killed one person—if we did, it would be illegal to have alcohol and guns in your house, and who would want that?

There are actually some pretty serious drug problems in New York State. For instance, there’re all of those Long Island teenagers using heroin, which is just fucking terrifying and… Don’t use heroin and ruin your life, OK? Jesus. But that problem has nothing to do with salvia, and banning salvia won’t help anything. It’s like, “Hey, we’ve got a lot of gun violence around here. BETTER BAN SPORKS.”

Hopefully, this bill that the Senate passed won’t become a law (it still has to pass the state assembly and get signed by the governor) on the grounds that it’s fucking silly. Unfortunately, silly laws get passed all the time, like the one making it illegal to lie about receiving military medals. The anti-salvia bill passed 58-2, because no politician wants to go on record as being “pro-drug,” or “soft on crime,” even when this particular drug doesn’t cause any crime at all and doesn’t addict anyone and caused the death of only a single person in the past two years. But that’s how policy works these days—some senator reads a newspaper about a drug he’s never heard of, panics, starts a stampede among his cattle-like colleagues, and something else becomes illegal for no good reason.

@HCheadle

Previously – Mike Bloomberg Is Your Dad