Hallucinatory Drugs

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.

Licking toads will not give you warts or produce a fairy prince, but it might get you high. It isn't exactly an epidemic, but the Drug Enforcement Administration says toad licking is the latest way to hallucinate.

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.

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 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.

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.