A tip for Lorain cops on Salvia

Today’s Plain Dealer reported that cops in Lorain are trying to crack down on the psychedelic herb Salvia divinorum, a plant in the sage family that is dried and sold — so far legally — on the Internet and in headshops. Lorain cops found baggies of the herb being sold at a local cell phone store.
While kids from the ‘burbs have only recently discovered Salvia, the drug has been used in Mexican Indian rituals for thousands of years. It was also used extensively by my college roommates and me during our freshman year at Ohio University. Trust me, it sucks.
The year was 1999, and my roommates and I had grown tired of taking bong rips until our faces were numb and going to the wok bar at the dining hall every day. It was time to try something new. So we ventured online and found a site that sold Salvia — the “Divine Sage.” The site described the drug’s effects as an out-of-body experience. It was apparently so potent that some people had been known to jump out of windows while under its spell. “Dude, let’s order that shit,” I’m pretty sure I said after reading that.
The ounce-bag of dried leaves arrived from Hawaii with a simple set of instructions: smoke as much as you can in the shortest amount of time possible. We were up for this challenge. Our arsenal of smoking devices was widely known in the dorm as the mightiest around. There was “Twister,” a foot-and-a-half glass bong, and “G,” our gravity bong, which we’d constructed from a massive pretzel barrel from Sam’s Club, a family size apple-juice jug, and a bowl so big you could have raked your fall leaves into it. But none of these would do the trick. We needed to think outside the box — it was time for the gas mask.
The gas mask was just that, a rubber mask with a breathing tube like the military uses for chemical weapons attacks. But instead of keeping the gas out, we wanted just the opposite. Our gas mask had a bong attached to the end of it. We were sure the Indian medicine men would have been proud.
Sitting around in a circle one afternoon, my roommates and I prepared for lift-off. I volunteered to go first. I packed the bowl as tightly as I could with the leaves, put a flame to it, and inhaled. My eyeholes instantly went white with smoke. The stuff tasted awful; it was like smoking cardboard. It had to be good, I thought.
After breathing in and out for a few minutes, I took off the mask, and waited, and waited. Nothing happened. I even tried humming and sitting Indian-style — figuring I might have been getting some bad reception from the Mexican Indian gods. Nope. I hadn’t been this disappointed since me and my friend smoked a tea-bag out of a corn-cob pipe in 7th grade.
My advice to the Lorain Cops: don’t waste your time. And my advice to anyone wishing to try Salvia: just stick with the weed. — Jared Klaus

This article appears in Apr 4-10, 2007.