YouTrip: Salvia Is Web 2.0's Favorite Hallucinogen

Drug gains popularity through YouTube
By Gabriel Winant,  Newser Staff
Posted Apr 7, 2009 2:38 PM CDT

Salvia, the highly hallucinogenic herb still legal in most states, may have been discovered by ancient Mazatec shamans, but its current popularity is due to something rather more modern: YouTube. The Daily Telegraph reports that widely viewed videos of people on salvia trips have fueled the drug’s spread. “What we are witnessing is no less than the world's first internet-driven drugs explosion,” says a San Francisco doctor researching salvia.

In one video, viewed over 2 million times, a young woman named Ashley laughs wildly and says, “I can’t control it. My mouth is going to fall out.” Comments another online salvia user, “It felt like my soul was locked in a dark room in another dimension in which the ceiling was slowly moving down to crush me.”
(More salvia divinorum stories.)

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