utenzi

Have you ever heard of Salvia divinorum? I hadn't until this morning. There's a brief article about it in The Daily Tarheel , the student newspaper here at UNC. Salvia divinorum is a hallucinogenic drug that's legal in most states and available in head shops The article even identifies the two locations here in Chapel Hill that carry it. Scary stuff, especially if you have college age kids. I'll have to forward the article to my brother and his wife. The active ingredient in it is Salvinorin-A, C 23 H 28 O 8 , which is available from chemical supply houses though I suspect it's regulated to some degree. The drug was characterized recently by Bryan Roth, a pharmacology professor here at UNC, back in 2002 in an article in PNAS. According to him, the only affect Salvia has is on the kappa opiate receptor in the brain. The psychoactive mechanism for this was identified by Daniel Siebert back in the 1990s. The drug was originally derived from a plant that is a member o...