Until I came across this news item the other day, I had not been aware that a number of U.S. states have already outlawed the possession salvia, which is more commonly known in English as sage.
There are a number of varieties of the plant. This medicinal and incense herb grows wild in abundance in rural areas throughout the southwestern United States and in Mexico. Here in Kumeyaay territory, there are two varieties that grow in the wild that can be used as a medicinal tea for gastrointestinal conditions. Both varieties also make a nice ceremonial incense when dried out first, especially the salvia indio, which has a nice, sweet fragrance to it.
Salvia doesn't have a particularly pleasant taste when smoked or chewed and doesn't have any particular medicinal benefit when smoked, although it can nevertheless alter mood and state of consciousness when the leaves are smoked in a pipe or rolled as a cigarette, or when the leaves are chewed.
I have previously blogged about cannabis, peyote, and other mood and mind-altering psychotropic plants on this blog, so I won´t go into detail about them from an Indigenous American traditionalist perspective here again, only to say that salvia is suffering the same fate as the other mood and mind-altering plants in relation to the asinine police statist War on Drugs.
Authoritarian social conservatives in America in particular have conflicting notions about what is natural and what is not and how to respond to what they perceive as being unnatural.
Calvinistic religious sects and Mormons in particular believe that the consumption of mood-altering substances are sinful, and like good theocrats along with paternalistic nanny statists, they believe that whatever makes people feel better, especially mood-wise, ought to be illegal unless it´s a synthetic prescription medication approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
Non-Indians at some point in time discovered that they could get high off of smoking salvia, and as a result of that and documentation of it posted on YouTube, paternalistic, prohibitionist scumbag Republican legislators in particular want to ban its possession everywhere.
If the federal government ever decided to try and ban salvia, they will have to exempt Indian reservations from it because if they don't, most reservations in the southwest would be burnt to the ground as the only means of eradicating all of the salvia that grows wild on them.
Preferably, I would rather see the God of Lightening strike down dead the botanical Nazis that have or are attempting to basically outlaw one of Grandmother Earth´s ancient natural remedies just because of what boils down to some young white people enjoying getting high off of this harmless plant.
I have added to the list of links in the right hand column the link to Stop the Drug War.org, which goes into much more detail about the insane war on salvia. The direct link to one article on this subject can be accessed here. Salvia.net
2009 update: The Salvia Ban Wagon
