"Every great anti-drug PSA ends with the descent into madness. Before Helen Hunt starred in Mad About You, she snorted a fistful of PCP synthesized in a high school chem lab and threw herself out a window in Desperate Lives. Scott Baio was a ganja-fueled near-manslaughterer on Stoned, and 12-year old David Faustino sniffed coke and drowned in The Drug Knot."
"You'll forgive me then, for not believing my local Cheech when he told me God was in the Georgia wilderness, on the vines of a shrub with serrated leaves. He called it "moonflower": a nightshade with faded lilac blossoms. Apparently a friend of a friend had eaten its seeds and now had a vacant look behind his eyes. Sometimes he could not tell whether he was dreaming or awake."
""'For three days, I had no idea what was happening to me,'" he quoted. "'I remember, at one point, I was climbing a mountain, going up rock by rock, hand over hand. Then I came back to myself, and I was actually crawling along the sidewalk on my hands and knees.'" He was talking about moonflower. The plant (common name: jimsonweed) was as described: a days-long hallucinogenic trip from hell."
Anti-drug media historically portrayed substance use as a rapid descent into madness, with television films dramatizing extreme, often fatal outcomes. Childhood exposure to such PSAs produced skepticism when personal observations of casual users contradicted those depictions. A plant known as moonflower or jimsonweed (datura stramonium) grows in the Georgia wilderness and carries faded lilac blossoms; ingestion of its seeds or flowers induces vacant expression, disorientation, and an inability to distinguish dream from wakefulness. Personal and literary accounts describe days-long deliriant experiences that destroy rational thought, producing terrifying, incoherent hallucinations and behaviors far removed from classic psychedelic trips.
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