It might be legal, but there’s still a stigma

Recently the editorial board of the school’s newspaper shut down Western Albemarle senior Scot Masselli when he tried to write a story about salvia use among students there. We asked him to share his experience.—Ed.

Illegal drugs make for tense conversations, no question, but what about when the substance in question is legal? Enter Salvia divinorum.

When I first got the idea to write for my school newspaper about salvia, a potent hallucinogenic that is legal in Virginia (for a while longer, anyway), it started as a joke. While we were brainstorming stories, one editor facetiously suggested that one of the seniors could use salvia and write about the experience, noting that the drug was legal for adults. Everyone chuckled and then forgot the matter, except for me. Days later, I mentioned the topic to my advisor, Jill Williams. Ms. Williams focused me in another direction, challenging me to develop a feature package about people at WAHS using salvia. I instantly accepted: This was the hard-hitting story I’d been looking for all year. A legal drug that was comparatively unknown; it would be a journalistic gold mine, the perfect storm. Unfortunately, that perfect storm hit at the board meeting.
 
Though I cannot disclose the arguments that ensued at that meeting, I can attest to the high emotion and the strong feelings that the story provoked. Once everyone had spoken their piece, the board killed the story on a 6-2 vote, leaving me to feel the effects of the stigma surrounding salvia. Though in researching the story I had taken precautions to protect my sources and myself, at no point did I waver in my desire to report on the subject. Unfortunately, the board wasn’t as firm. Their reasoning to quit the story came down to this: It would be unethical to print it, and we did not want to be seen as promoting salvia. The board couldn’t even be persuaded by a proposed article about the health risks involved in using salvia, not to mention its legality; the most I could get was a page in the Student Life section, a major step down from Feature. While it was never my intent to glorify salvia, my colleagues feared this would be the result. The decision to not run it as a feature was made without even consulting the Western Albemarle principal, Mr. Chris Dyer, about his feelings on the story. Beyond a doubt, whether you seek to condone or condemn, the topic of drugs is sensitive. Obviously legality means nothing and the stigma surrounding the substance means everything. With that said, it was not censorship by the school, but stigmas and tensions surrounding the word “drug” among my teenage colleagues that have silenced my paper.