Brett's Law - Opinion

Opinion

San Francisco attorney Alex Coolman has commented - "It's remarkable that Chidester's parents, and only Chidester's parents, continue to be cited over and over again by the mainstream media in their coverage of the supposed "controversy" over the risks of Salvia divinorum."

Tiffin University psychologist Jonathan Appel, who co-authoured a 2007 paper in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction on the rising popularity of salvia, expressed reluctance to draw any firm conclusions about Brett Chidester's death. "I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying it caused him to commit suicide," he says. Such explanations are, "a way to try to make sense of something that's pretty senseless. We're always looking for rationalizations and reasons, particularly when there aren't any."

Bryan Roth, a psychiatrist and pharmacologist at the University of North Carolina who has led the research into how salvia's active constituent salvinorin A works, says it's difficult to say what role the drug might have played in Brett Chidester's suicide. Although "it's tragic that this young guy killed himself," he says, "there's no way of knowing if salvia had anything to do with it. It would seem, given the apparent widespread use of salvia, that if these are side effects, they don't occur at very high prevalence. Otherwise, the ERs would be filled with people having bad salvia reactions."

Salvia expert Daniel Siebert has said, "He must have already had some thoughts about suicide. I don't think salvia's just going to put thoughts into peoples' heads. Mentally healthy people don't decide to take such a drastic action based on they had during a drug state. Psychedelics basically amplify a lot of your own internal stuff. If you're already having some kind of dark thoughts, a psychedelic experience could amplify that, and it could lead to a problem for some people."

Richard Glen Boire, a senior fellow at the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, has said that the theory that using salvia encouraged Brett to reach conclusions about the nature of life that were conducive to suicide could apply to some of the greatest pieces of art in the history of the world. "It would make Nietzsche a controlled substance. There is a lot of cultural production out there that shows a way of looking at the world that isn't all sunny and rosy."