Several weeks after Miley Cyrus turned 18 last month, a video surfaced showing the pop singer and actor celebrating her adulthood with uncontrollable laughter, garbled speech and a shapely bong. It was neither marijuana nor hashish in the pipe, she explained in the face of public furor, but Salvia divinorum, a powerful hallucinogenic that adults can legally use in California.
The controversy involving Cyrus, the former child star from Hannah Montana, has led to new interest in this psychoactive Mexican herb. Google searches for “salvia” in the United States spiked 600 percent in the days that followed, Twitter went aflutter, and Saturday Night Live spoofed the incident last weekend.
However inadvertent, salvia now has a celebrity endorsement. Since the video was leaked, Black Myst Smoke Shop, a store in Los Angeles that sells the drug by the gram for US$10 to US$60, has seen a surge in business.
PHOTO: REUTERS
“We used to sell one or two a day,” said Steve Kinsman, an employee of the shop. “Now it’s 10 or 15. We’ll get a bunch of young people coming in, then a creepy 40-year-old who’s obviously a Miley fan.”
Once the domain of Mazatec shamans in Oaxaca, Mexico, Salvia divinorum — a name that means “divining sage” — has spent the last decade crawling from stoner novelty to the fringes of the mainstream. Evidence of its popularity is online: A YouTube search for “salvia” reveals thousands of clips showing young people cackling, moaning and tripping out of their gourds under the herb’s influence.
“After two or three hits, I spat everywhere and was coughing and laughing and drooling,” said Lee, a 22-year-old from Brooklyn who tried the drug while attending a university in upstate New York, and who requested that only his first name be used for anonymity. “I started yelling random words, then my legs gave out, and I dropped to the floor.”
While the intense, 15-minute highs are often described as otherworldly, it’s not an experience that everyone is eager to repeat, or try. Several states have banned the herb because of its psychoactive effects; several more have set limits on possession or consumption. Meanwhile, the Drug Enforcement Administration deems it a “drug of concern” rather than a controlled substance.
“Just because something is not controlled under federal law doesn’t mean it’s wise to ingest or smoke,” said Rusty Payne, a spokesman for the DEA. “It does have hallucinogenic effects, and that’s never good.”
The attention given to salvia has provided ammunition for those who insist salvia is a public menace.
“In a weird way, the Miley Cyrus thing has helped to highlight some of the issues,” said New York state Senator John Flanagan, a Republican. He plans to reintroduce a bill next year to render salvia illegal in New York state.
Although salvia has been sold in places like head shops for years, levels of salvia use appear static. A recent Monitoring the Future survey by the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported a slight dip to 5.5 percent in usage from last year to this year among high school seniors. “It doesn’t appear to be a problem,” said Lloyd Johnston, a professor at the University of Michigan who worked on the study.
A rush to regulate may also stifle medical opportunity, some researchers say. The herb’s active component, a complex molecule called salvinorin A that affects the brain’s Kappa receptors, could be useful in understanding Alzheimer’s disease, cocaine addiction and chronic pain.
“We stumbled across a gem,” said Matthew Johnson, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who has studied salvia. He believes it is non-addictive and free of neurotoxicity. “It could be that this is our first glimpse into a whole therapeutic pathway.”
Whether salvia is characterized as a medical wonder or a vicious hell-weed that will transform the nation’s youth into chortling zombies, it seems unlikely Cyrus will be a catalyst for nuanced conversation.
Despite the hype, salvia’s new popularity may be as short-lived as a puff of smoke. Shortly after the scandal erupted, one Web site began offering T-shirts with a picture of Cyrus and the phrase, “Salvia: all the cool kids are doing it!”
According to the site’s owner, at press time the company had yet to sell a single shirt.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located