As a follow up to the article on Issues in Prosecution, here's alittle website I found interesting.

http://www.sagewisdom.org/

Apparently this stuff is gaining popularity at a surprising rate.

I saw this being openly sold by a guy at a little table/booth during the most recent "First Thursday" event on South Congress in Austin.

It is not the kind of sage herb that you put on your food and its not the sage bushes with the purple flowers.

Reading that web site linked above makes me think this will not be commonly abused because the effects are not pleasant and you need to chew or suck on it for a while before it gives hallucinations and it has a very bad flavor... same reason there arent throngs getting high sniffing gasoline.

The first time I ever heard of this substance was several years ago when the Houston Press (free newsweekly a tad less liberal than the Austin Chronicle) ran this article.

Here's the link:

http://www.houstonpress.com/Issues/2003-10-30/news/downing.html

Several members of the staff there tried some in a semi-controlled atmosphere. There were several mentions in the article of headaches among the testers from the substance. There apparently was an effect of sorts but not necessarily euphoric for all of the testers.

Here is the conclusion of one of the test participants:

"Nearly everyone at the Press said the scientific testing was fun but they probably wouldn't try salvia again. Its most definite plus is that it is legal. But that headache thing was hard to get around. And the next day several people said their sleep had been disturbed by nightmares. One pointed out that not enough testing has been done on salvia, unlike marijuana, which has been tested for decades and never killed anyone. Overall, salvia seemed like a lot of work for a fleeting return."

This is what the author of the article had to say:

"Intense, somewhat intense, rush that didn't last long but a rush all the same -- our research scientists reached consensus that they felt something. Some got it right away; others said they needed three or four hits before anything kicked in. Several also got an almost instantaneous mild headache that would nag them for hours.

One volunteer said she felt glued to her chair; she couldn't move. Several others said they felt leaden, suddenly uncoordinated. Legs and arms didn't work right. Lethargy reigned. The presence of our "watchdog baby-sitters" (there in case something went wrong) seemed superfluous, a paranoid level of overprotectiveness. No one was going to dance around and fall down. No one wanted to get up. Still, someone might catch the couches on fire, and since we were sitting on these couches and couldn't seem to get up, that could be trouble."