Prohibiting salvia will create crime, not fight it
Leilani Graham-Laidlaw, Staff Contributor
Salvia Divinorum is an herb, part of the mint family. sometimes smoked for its intoxicating effects. It’s currently being touted as the next LSD by the Harper government.
On the Health Canada information page for salvia they list such scary adverse affects as “hallucinations, dysphoria (feeling anxious, depressed or restless), out-of-body experiences, uncontrollable laughter, loss of consciousness, short-term memory loss, lack of physical coordination, slurred speech and awkward sentence patterns.” Honey, that’s me before I’ve had my morning coffee.
Jokes aside, there may be more to the science than that, and it’s impossible to tell what the effects are going to be on individual people. As well, little is known or documented about salvia’s long-term effects, though it’s been used by the Mazatec people of Southern Mexico for ages.
Ottawa believes that salvia poses a growing “potential for abuse, especially among young people.” Given that only 7.3 per cent of people aged 15 to 24 have admitted to trying the drug in the Canadian Drug Use and Monitoring Survey, it doesn’t seem to be particularly endemic to me. Maybe more people will rush to try it, as the government seeks to add it to the Controlled Substances Act.
In a Feb. 21 press release announcing the government’s intent, the effects of adding ssalviaalvia to the Act were outlined: it would be illegal to possess, sell, import, export or grow. The government will give the public until March 21 to respond, before attempting to prohibit the substance.
Criminalizing salvia will really just give smugglers, dealers, and the criminal organizations that benefit from illegal trade a whole new market, and would remove the safety inspection aspect of having salvia overseen by Health Canada. Right now it’s classified as a Natural Health product, meaning that Health Canada technically has to OK every formula and version of salvia that’s sold—down to what’s necessary to include as Nutritional Information and warning labels. That seems like a logical approach: make sure it’s as safe as we can make it.
By making salvia illegal, dealers and thugs would be free to add whatever the heck they wanted, in whatever potency they wanted, while selling the stuff for a higher price to the people who right now see it as a natural, accessible alternative to weed or other, harder drugs.
The move to criminalize salvia is really all just part of the Harper government’s “Tough On Crime” mandate, like when they decided to build extra prisons for “unreported crime.” It’s easy to be tough on crime when you’re creating new things to criminalize.
When it comes to trying to grab more votes, logic doesn’t seem to be their strong suit. Maybe someone in Ottawa’s been doing a little too much ‘personal research’ into Salvia.
I say, leave it to the pros: if it’s unknown what the long-term effects are and how bad this thing could be, fund independent research into it. Don’t ban the stuff out of fear and rhetoric.
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