DeMacedo says he has neither evidence of hospital visits nor any data demonstrating salvia’s harm — the logical link between the existence of a drug and the need to regulate it. Armed with just the concerns of local police and buoyed by anecdotal evidence from YouTube, the Massachusetts legislators will need to convince the public and fellow lawmakers that salvia prohibition would work. Like other anti-drug advocates around the country, deMacedo and Webster are applying the logic of marijuana prohibition to the salvia dilemma, despite the fact that the current marijuana policy is demonstrably ineffective at keeping kids from smoking pot.
This country’s experience with prohibition has proven only that outlawing drugs creates underground black markets — on the street, it doesn’t matter how old you are, as long as you have cash. Those black markets are also ground zero for much of the violence and social disorder people attribute to drugs.
By contrast, alcohol regulations are much more effective at actually keeping alcohol out of kids’ hands. Massachusetts imposes strict penalties on bars and liquor stores that sell to minors, which in turn serves as a powerful deterrent. One local high-school student even says that he can buy marijuana much more easily than alcohol due to strict ID-checking policies.
As such, the primary hoped-for benefit of criminalization — reduced usage — might not occur. And enforcing drug laws is costly: for comparison’s sake, note that arresting and prosecuting marijuana offenses costs Massachusetts about $130 million per year, according to a 2005 study by Harvard professor Jeffrey Miron. Though enforcing salvia laws would be far cheaper, it reminds us that law-enforcement budgets could instead be going to health care or education.
A moderate alternative to prohibition could be to license shops and tax salvia, as we do for alcohol and cigarettes, thus avoiding some of the costs of criminal prohibition. Minimum-age requirements, such as Maine has for salvia, could prevent kids from buying the hallucinogen while preserving for adult citizens the choice to experience altered perceptual and spiritual states.
Because salvia is traditionally used as a spiritual aid, criminalization could also interfere with religious freedom. Two years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal that the federal government did not identify a compelling state interest that would justify preventing a New Mexico Christian church from using a hallucinogenic tea in its ceremonies.
A clean slate
No local shopkeepers were willing to talk about salvia on the record, as they wanted to avoid publicity. But one explained, on condition of anonymity, that his store’s employees voluntarily check customers’ IDs to make sure that they are selling salvia only to people over 18. Several shopkeepers believe that market demand for entheogens like salvia is naturally limited, and would disappear altogether among teenagers if possession of small amounts of marijuana were not a crime. DeMacedo, however, says he opposes marijuana-policy reform because it sends kids the message that even a little toke is okay.
This is a popular argument among opponents of drug reform. But Alex Coolman, a California attorney who has written about salvia on his Drug Law Blog, says that, though legislators’ concerns for salvia’s risks are sincere, they discount the collateral harm of drug laws and forget that those laws can result in kids getting permanent criminal records for just one screw-up.
