suicide blamed on salvia.

[crusher101]

http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/p...0356/-1/NEWS01

By MIKE CHALMERS
The News Journal
02/26/2006 In the daily search for reasons behind their 17-year-old son's suicide, Dennis and Kathy Chidester keep coming back to the same answer: salvia divinorum.

The herb, a cousin of the flowering sages enjoyed by backyard gardeners, contains the world's most potent natural hallucinogen, as strong as LSD. The drug is legal in most states, including Delaware, and easily available through hundreds of Internet sites, including eBay.

That aura of legitimacy lulled Brett Chidester, a straight-A senior at Salesianum School, into thinking smoking salvia leaves was safe, even while convincing himself that he had gained incredible insights into the universe, his parents said.

"Salvia allows us to give up our senses and wander in the interdimensional time and space," Brett wrote in an essay his parents found after his death. "Also, and this is probably hard for most to accept, our existence in general is pointless. Final point: Us earthly humans are nothing." Brett acted on that belief Jan. 23.

Dennis Chidester had been trying to call Brett all day with no luck. He came home at 5 p.m., opened the garage door and saw a tent pitched inside -- an odd sight that he didn't process right away.

"I just ran upstairs calling his name," Chidester remembered. "Now my heart's pounding. He's not in his room. I go downstairs, I go into the garage and I open up that tent.

"That's the one thing I didn't want to do," he said, his voice cracking. "I found him in there, dead. He had taken a charcoal grill and ... carbon monoxide poisoning."

Brett's essay, suicide note and actions before his death still leave his parents with more questions than answers.

"We just won't have any answers, and we have to learn to accept that," Kathy Chidester said. "But my gut feeling is it was the salvia. It's the only thing that can explain it."

Abuse concerns DEA

Mazatec Indians have used salvia divinorum to divine spiritual truths for hundreds or thousands of years, experts said. Outsiders discovered it in the 1960s, but it remained a relatively obscure drug until popularized on the Internet, beginning in the 1990s. It's now sold as live plants that can be grown indoors, dried leaves or liquid extracts, from tiny bags costing a few dollars to wholesale shipments for hundreds of dollars.

"You type 'salvia divinorum' in a search engine and you get 10,000 hits, most of which are head shops on the Internet," said Thomas E. Prisinzano, a medical researcher at the University of Iowa. "That's not good. People are going to abuse it."

Experts and users say when the leaves are chewed or smoked, they produce powerful visions that make users believe they're in an alternate place and time. Despite its growing popularity online, law enforcement and health officials, as well as several teenagers and their parents, said salvia is not a common drug in Delaware.

Since 2003, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency has considered salvia divinorum a "drug of concern" because of its wide availability, potential for abuse and unknown long-term effects. Louisiana, Missouri and several countries have outlawed it, but congressional attempts to control it in the United States have failed, in part because of a reluctance to infringe on the religious freedoms of American Indians.

"It's dangerous," DEA spokeswoman Rogene Waite said. "Just because it's not a controlled substance, people shouldn't think it's OK to use it."
Dennis and Kathy Chidester, who divorced when Brett was 3, are uncomfortable talking publicly about their son's salvia use and suicide. But, they said, they are more uncomfortable remaining silent and letting other parents learn through tragedy.

"If other states can [regulate] it, why do we have to wait for a nationwide law?" Dennis Chidester said. "States should act on their own."

Delaware should consider outlawing salvia, two state legislators said. Sen. Karen E. Peterson, chairwoman of the Senate Combat Drug Abuse Committee, and Rep. Pamela S. Maier, chairwoman of the House Health and Human Development Committee, had not heard of the herb but said they would look at the laws in Louisiana and Missouri.

Legislators in those states banned salvia last year over concerns about teenagers' abuse of it and other hallucinogenic plants.

"It was being marketed to high school kids," said Scott Lipke, a Missouri state representative. "It's not a widespread problem, but we were trying to be out in front on it."

Delaware police said they know little about salvia. "I don't think we'd even know what it is," said Sgt. William Wells, Wilmington police spokesman.

Health officials said it hasn't hit their radar screen, either.

"If it's not an FDA-regulated drug, we couldn't track it any more than we could track someone using ginkgo biloba," said Heidi Truschel-Light, spokeswoman for the Delaware Division of Public Health.

Local merchants who sell glass pipes and other smoking supplies said they don't sell salvia, even though customers ask for it and wholesalers have urged them carry it.

"Kids come in here all the time and ask for it," said Randy Neil, a cashier at Frolic in Newark. "But we don't mess with it. As far as I know, the only place you can get it is the Internet. Probably the reason it's legal now is most people don't know about it."

'Getting deep'

Dennis and Kathy Chidester had never heard of salvia until Brett's cousin told them last summer that she was worried about his salvia use.
About the same time, a friend showed Kathy Chidester Brett's site on MySpace.com, an Internet service where teenagers can chat and share pictures and music. Brett's site contained a video of him and a friend smoking salvia. She confronted him.

"He kept saying, 'Mom, it's legal. It's just an herb. The Indians used to use it to divine knowledge of the universe,' " she remembered. He told them he stopped using salvia, and they believed him.

Still, when Brett was out with friends, his parents would stay up until he came home.

"I thought, if he's doing this stuff or he's drinking, I'm going to know," Kathy Chidester said. "And when he came home, he would be normal, always normal."

Experts said salvia's effects last from a few minutes to an hour or two, with no hangover or other symptoms. Daniel Siebert, a California botanist who sells the herb online and promotes its "responsible" use, described the experience as similar to a vivid dream. "It's like your mind is on autopilot," Siebert said. "Your brain is generating images that have some kind of narrative line to them. It puts your mind in a very introspective place. It's a way of getting deep inside yourself."

Siebert said crowds and loud music make a salvia-induced trip unpleasant, so it's unlikely people would use it as a "party drug" more than once or twice. He supports some regulations on salvia, such as age restrictions and penalties for driving under the influence of salvia.

"People take their experiences way too literally and read too many things into it," Siebert said. "If you take it literally, you really believe you've traveled to other dimensions and met other beings that told you things. Minors are particularly prone to not understanding that."
That doesn't stop some Internet merchants from billing salvia as a legal, albeit more expensive, alternative to illicit recreational drugs.
The site where Brett Chidester got at least one batch sells it in packages dubbed "mind bender," "mood mix" and "freshman selection." It sells a "party pack" of three different strengths of extract, plus four ounces of leaves, for $207.90.

Promising medical use

Salvia does have legitimate research value.
Prisinzano, who earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of Delaware in 1995, is studying whether salvia's main ingredient, salvinorin A, could be used to create a nonaddictive painkiller. Also, he said, understanding the way salvia creates hallucinations could help scientists better understand Alzheimer's disease and mental illnesses that alter patients' perceptions of reality.

"It's actually become a hot area of research," said Bryan Roth, a leading salvia researcher at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. In 2002, he discovered how salvinorin A travels through the brain.
One salvia user described watching a mountain lake turn into a desert, Roth said. Another said she found herself in a room with an alternate future behind each door. She picked one door and saw the death of her child, he said.

"Depending on the dose, it can cause a mild sense of distortion," Roth said. "In the extreme, people are basically shot out into another reality, another place and time."

A changed son

Dennis and Kathy Chidester think that's what happened to Brett.
About the time Brett began using salvia, he became more melancholy and had trouble sleeping, his parents said. He was sometimes angry for no reason. Because Brett had never displayed typical teenager moodiness, they thought he was just catching up to his peers.

"He definitely changed," Kathy Chidester said. "It wasn't a drastic change. I just figured well, this is the other shoe dropping. This is what teenagers are like and we haven't experienced it."

The week before Brett's suicide, Kathy Chidester called him from Austria, where she was leading an annual ski trip for the Wilmington Ski Club. Brett said he was fine and probably was going to make the Salesianum honor roll again.

The next Saturday night, Jan. 21, Brett went to his girlfriend's homecoming dance. In the few months they had been dating, the relationship had become serious, his parents said. Brett noted in his daily planner that he was going to buy her flowers and take her to dinner for Valentine's Day.

Brett spent much of the weekend writing college application essays, hoping to become an architect. Brett was off work Monday, Jan. 23, from his job in the dining room of Cokesbury Village, an assisted living facility.
He was still sleeping when his father left the house that morning.

"Mom and Dad, don't worry about me," Brett wrote in his suicide note. "Please don't cry. I love you guys so much. I always have. Take a vacation. You deserve it. Please do not be sad. I want you to carry on your lives. Remember me and be happy when you think of me, not sad. Tell yourselves I'm in a better place, because I am. I'm sorry I didn't get to say goodbye before this, but I love you."

[Offspring123]

dang

i bet they are going to make it illegal because 1 person died, not FROM it, even though there are thousands dying FROM ciggs and what not. that kinda stuff pisses me off.

[SenorDingDong]

Wow, I read the whole thing, pretty intense. . . . . .For him to not be able to appreciate and cherish earthly life is pretty tragic.

[NeXXuS]

And let the Government propganda machine begin.

It begins here, It ends with all of us

I'm for savlia being used by people who are fully ready to accept the consiquences. Just like shrooms or LSD, your eyes can be easily opened to new philisophical views or looks on life.
If people are going to abuse Salvia, and end up committing suicide from it, that's not smart. All they're doing is giving the herb a destiny to be looked at as an awful substance and possibly be outlawed.
Maybe this will open up the eyes of some dumbass politicians though. They spend thousands on making sure a harmless herb (marijuana) is kept off the streets when in all reality what they need to be worried about is being sold at local headshops.
I don't think Salvia should be made illegal, I'm not flaming it or anything. But people need to stop being such dumbasses.
Just my views...

[NeXXuS]

And alcohol is responsible for how many deaths a year?

[zalzal010]

damn, some of them trips described sound fuckin awesome, I wish that happened when I tripped. I smoked fat bowls of the shit and it still didnt take me into any alternate realities.

everything going on was fuckin confusing, thats all I experienced - besides the annoying tingling all over.

[Strang3]

man i hope they don't make salvia illegal its fucking intense my trip was pretty crazy and i have some friends who had some insane experiences on it but nothing that makes them want to kill themselves

[Ars moriendi]

Originally Posted by Offspring123

dang

i bet they are going to make it illegal because 1 person died, not FROM it, even though there are thousands dying FROM ciggs and what not. that kinda stuff pisses me off.

2 points

seems awful odd that this shit happens a bit after they push on to ban it...can we say real world propganda? lol

the dude moxed his ass in a tent...in a garage

thats pretty fuckin' creative soooooo mommy should be proud it's not salvias fault her boy was a bit crazy...

really...who the fuck offs themselve in a garage in a tent with some cheap ass weber grill?

oh and if anyone here has tried it they'd know its so intense you don't even wanna walk most of the trip

[Fëanor]

Different people have different revelations on hallucinogens. If he came to the conclusion that human life is worthless, then that came from HIS mind. Salvia just unchained his mind and let it come to the conclusion that was tied up in thought all along.

Anyway, Ars is totally right. When I'm fucked up on Salvia I don't even try walking, my balance is so far off I would probably stumble after 1 step. Besides, even if I decided I wanted to kill myself at the very beginning of my trip, by the time I wrote a suicide note, set up a fucking tent, set up/lit a grill I'd be sober anyway! It doesn't last that long, and no one could possibly set up a tent while they're tripping that hard anyway.

[bob_barker]

What a pitiful and disgusting thing to do to your family. Suicide is a discraceful way to go out, so selfish, so weak. I recently had a friend shoot his head off with a shotgun because of drugs, we think. Tell u the truth, by now, im sick and tired of hearing about this kind of shit. Only 2 minutes into reading and im so drained I could go to sleep. Let them put a ban on it, we will all smoke it anyway. Also reminds me of a certain Red Bull incident I had heard about in Canada.

[Joint]

It's amazing how many people get drunk before killing themselves. Yet there is NO public outcry to limit one of the most dysphoric drugs out there.

Luckily Salvia is a very popular plant that people just have in their gardens. It would be very hard to make it illegal for that reason.

It's far more likely that this kid was just going through that late-teen/early-twenties existentialist question-existance phase. Some kids just take a year off and go to Europe but I guess this guy didn't see the light. It's sad that the parents want to blame the drug though, particularly as, IME, there's not that many lasting emotional effects. For me it's just a short trip then back to reality.

What they really should do is just restrict it's sale to minors. Then there's no more "Think of the children!" arguement.

[RATMEAT]

I had a bad trip on 20x salvia and wanted to die so bad. I can understand what he was feeling but i dont think he was on salvia at the time. He killed himself because he found out that "our existance is pointless" which is probably true but thats why you smoke weed and make the best out of life. I guess not everybody can handle what salvia brings.

[Hazed]

Our life is pointless, his sorry sounds like what id write if I did something like that.

maybe he didnt want to go through 50 years of schooling.

We will all die eventually so why not just wait

[Joint]

Originally Posted by Hazed

We will all die eventually so why not just wait

My personal answer to that question is, I can't have fun when I'm dead. Even at low points in my life, I know in the future there's still time to have fun again, to feel good again. With death, that's it, it's done. No more enjoyment. I mean yeah, we all die, but why not try to have fun while we're here, ya know? There's no big secret in life, or some destination we're supposed to try to obtain. Just finding things to enjoy is enogh. At least that's my philosophy.