Birmingham Blues

…when they pry it out of my cold, dead hands. The WTF story for the day (well, aside from this week’s Doctor Who cliffhanger *spoiler alert*) is this one from Loretta Nall. There is a move underway in Alabama to outlaw a particular type of salvia, salvia divinorum, which is apparently a hallucinogen.

Deborah Soule, executive director for the Huntsville-based Partnership for a Drug Free Community, said efforts are currently under way to outlaw the drug once and for all. Since 2007, Soule has personally contacted many of Alabama’s legislators and Gov. Bob Riley to bring attention to the drug.

She had limited success during the last legislative session, when Sen. Roger Bedford Jr. sponsored a bill to make salvia a controlled substance. However, the bill never made it made it out of committee.

“It just got caught up in a log jam of a Republican filibuster,” Bedford said.

To Soule, the real problem with the bill was the lack of education about salvia.

“The biggest problem in the Alabama Legislature is a lot of people didn’t know about it,” Soule said.

Well, goodness, let’s get busy and inform the legislature about this terrible danger lurking in our midst. And, at the same time, clue in the kids who are supposedly at risk. Loretta makes some excellent points here:

Once Ms. Soule, in collusion with our legislative clowns, make it illegal, we will see a huge jump in its use by kids. We’ll see prison imposed for possession of a geranium plant, teens and college kids saddled with felony criminal records (according to Sen. Bedford they are the main consumers), lives ruined, forced treatment, drug court and all kinds of crazy stuff that we don’t see now when it is legal and not widely known all because of the raging, moralistic crusade to outlaw anything that might give someone else pleasure. What will they outlaw next, spinning around in circles until you get dizzy? That also alters ones state of consciousness.

Let me add my concern. How will the salvia police know which plants are illegal? I googled an image of salvia divinorum and came up with the same one Loretta uses at her place, which looks way too similar to pineapple sage. Pineapple sage like the one on my back deck. Yeah, a plant expert could tell them apart, but how many police officers will get botanical training before they’re sent out to fight the terrors of, um, sage? Especially when they can use the guilty-till-proven-innocent asset forfeiture laws to grab houses, cars, and cash from homeowners or plant nurseries that harbor suspect plants.

I’d like to hope our legislators would resist the lure of yet another headline-grabbing “tough on crime” measure, but I’m not holding my breath. Guess I’d better start building a priest’s hole for my pineapple sage.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Garden Blogging, What Were They Thinking?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.