Legal and Unsafe

The drug culture's quest for the perfect legal high has created a bewildering range of alternatives to marijuana--beyond the reach of the law but sometimes of dubious effectiveness or safety. Psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel, 33, of U.C.L.A.'s School of Medicine reports in the Journal of the American Medical Association that at least 192 herbs are commercially available and used for smoking, either already prepared as cigarettes or sold loose for "roll your own" and pipe addicts. Many are come-ons containing nothing stronger than backyard greenery, but Siegel has found 44% to contain psychoactive substances that can alter behavior and sometimes make the user ill.

Many of the cigarettes are imported from India, some under the name of Mint Bidis. These contain thorn apple, a common term for the botanist's Datura stramonium, also known as Jimson weed. It can be highly poisonous in large doses and yields strong hallucinatory drugs. One patient, who arrived at the U.C.L.A. Neuropsychiatric Institute in a confused state, out of touch with reality, had smoked six to eight Mint Bidis a day for a week; he needed three days to recover. Another, who had smoked about ten in three hours, had the same reaction but recovered within 24 hours. Hare Rama Bidis are an Indian import made from an Asian tobacco that contains up to ten times as much nicotine as the tobacco used in U.S. cigarettes.

For tea highs, Siegel reports an even more abundant choice: he examined 396 herbs and spices available singly or blended. Although 43 of them contain psychoactive agents, most are so weak that only heavy overindulgence is likely to produce mental effects requiring medical treatment. Yet one California tea tripper who made his own brew from Jimson weed "had hallucinations with scenes of demons, devils and voodoo people chasing him." He wandered barefoot in the woods for hours, over nettles and thorns that lacerated his feet and left them bloody, but felt no pain. He set fires to keep away the voodoo people, which led to his rescue by a forest ranger. A longtime LSD user, he told the doctors that his tea high was the worst ever.

By coincidence, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has recently tightened its regulations and now prohibits the sale of teas made from sassafras if they still contain its essential oil, safrole, a suspected cause of cancer. But not one of the plethora of regulatory agencies in Washington appears to have responsibility for the hundreds of other teas and smokes that are freely peddled in health-food stores and "head shops." The FDA says the teas are not sold as foods and are therefore beyond its jurisdiction. The Federal Trade Commission, unaware of false advertising, does not contemplate any action. Neither does the Drug Enforcement Administration. So far, only the doctors who have to cope with the stoned victims seem concerned.

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