Hallucinatory Drugs

Resting on a hospital bed beneath a tie-dyed wall hanging, Pamela Sakuda felt a tingling sensation. Then bright colors started shimmering in her head. She had been depressed since being diagnosed with colon cancer two years earlier, but as the experimental drug took hold, she felt the sadness sweep away from her, leaving in its wake an overpowering sense of connection to loved ones, followed by an inner calm. "It was like an epiphany," said Sakuda, 59, recalling the 2005 drug treatment.

The Bush administration on Wednesday won a Supreme Court stay that blocks a New Mexico church from using hallucinogenic tea that the government contended was illegal and potentially dangerous. The government has been in a long-running legal fight with the Brazil-based O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal over hoasca tea, brewed from plants found in the Amazon River Basin. The church won a preliminary injunction in a lower court, and the Supreme Court was asked to intervene.

The U.S. Supreme Court sided Friday with a New Mexico church wanting to use hallucinogenic tea as part of its Christmas services, despite objections from the federal government that the tea was illegal and potentially dangerous. The high court lifted a temporary stay issued last week against using the hoasca tea while it decided whether the Brazil-based O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal was permitted to make it a permanent part of its services.

Three Santa Paula teenagers were hospitalized after they apparently drank tea brewed from a flower called jimson weed, a toxic plant known to cause hallucinations, police said Wednesday. Santa Paula police responded to a residence in the 1200 block of Ventura Street about 10:30 p.m. Tuesday after relatives of an 18-year-old man reported that he was hallucinating and unresponsive. An ambulance took him to Santa Paula Memorial Hospital after he fell into a seizure, Police Chief Bob Gonzales said.

A federal appeals court has decided that a New Mexico church's use of hallucinogenic tea is likely to be protected under freedom of religion laws. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver upheld a preliminary injunction against the U.S. attorney general, Drug Enforcement Administration and other government agencies that sought to prohibit use of hoasca tea by Brazil's O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal church, whose U.S. operations are based in Santa Fe, N.M.

Two teenagers were hospitalized in serious condition Friday night after they and several others drank a tea possibly made from jimson weed, a toxic plant known to cause hallucinations, authorities said.

Sue Stevens was severely depressed after her young husband, Shane, succumbed to kidney cancer in 1999. She took large doses of numbing antidepressants to get through the day, and conventional therapy didn't help. Then, last fall, the 32-year-old Chicago woman chose a more radical approach. She traveled to the West to see a psychologist whom she had learned was using the illegal drug Ecstasy for a handful of patients suffering from severe trauma.

There has been an explosion in recreational Ecstasy use in the last several years. Between 1993 and 1998, use of the drug increased by 500%, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. The heaviest use is by people age 18 to 25, with an estimated 1.4 million young adults using the illicit drug regularly. Ecstasy has become as common as marijuana in high schools. One in 10 youths ages 12 to 17 have tried the drug at least once, according to a study by the University of Michigan.

Looking like an Old West preacher, with an earnest manner and long wavy hair, an amateur botanist from Malibu takes the podium and soberly lectures a small but keenly interested audience on a hallucinogenic drug that is legal and available. This is Daniel Siebert, the local apostle of an unlikely Mexican herb called salvia divinorum, or diviner's sage.

Cats do it. Lab rats do it. Even water buffalo do it. Get looped, that is. "The mongoose, when grieving over the loss of a mate or when its burrows are wiped out by a monsoon, will very often eat a plant that has psychedelic qualities," says Ronald K. Siegel, a UCLA psychopharmacologist who has studied drug use in animals for 25 years and who wrote "Intoxication: Life in Pursuit of Artificial Paradise" (Dutton, 1988).