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Not-So-“Natural” Drugs
If it’s natural, it must be safe, right? That’s what the manufacturers of “natural drugs” want you to think. Web sites that promote drugs such as “herbal ecstasy” claim that they will give you a safe and natural high. But just because something is said to be natural doesn’t mean that it’s safe or smart to put it into your body. Feces is natural too, but eating it will make you very sick!
So what is really in these “natural” drugs? They’re usually a mishmash of things such as caffeine, nutmeg, or mushrooms. Some contain ephedrine, a substance known to have serious side effects and that can even be fatal. Others have some kind of psychoactive ingredient, which can affect your mind in unpredictable ways. Also, because these drugs aren’t regulated or tested, you never know how much of any ingredient is really in them.
Sick and Tired
Dave, an Internet blogger, learned that “herbal” doesn’t equal “safe” when he took herbal ecstasy pills. “I found that I couldn’t concentrate on anything or keep still,” he writes. “I could feel every heartbeat throughout my body . . . as if my heart were a fist beating on my chest.”
“I can’t really remember too much, but I know that my mouth wouldn’t close and I felt the urge to chew on something. I had to run to the bathroom and hurl.” After school classmates told Dave he’d taken either herbal ecstasy or ephedra, which scared him. He said they’d laughed at his stupidity, after which he had walked off and collapsed in the middle of a field, where he’d lain semiconscious for hours.
“Looking back on the whole thing, I realized I was being pretty stupid. I was told they were legal, and so I assumed that they couldn’t be that bad. I was completely wrong.”
The Bottom Line
The truth is that “natural drugs” aren’t necessarily natural at all. They’re unpredictable, containing unknown amounts of various substances that can make you sick or, in some instances, even kill you. Beware of advertisers who try to mislead you with words like “natural” or “herbal”—those words do not mean safe.
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