It sounded like a horror movie. A young country boy makes a  desperate phone call to an emergency operator saying that he and his mate felt ill.

By the time paramedics got to them in the Gippsland town of Lang Lang one young man was conscious but dying. Twenty-one-year-old  Stephen Rees and  19-year-old Zac Moore were found staggering by the side of Westernport Road after an ambulance was called about 9.45 p.m. on Tuesday night.

Paramedics tried for more than an hour to revive them. It was too late. One of them did manage to explain that they had swallowed something, a substance Police say was ‘legal’, before he died.

Police took several bottles of liquid from their nearby property and it is still being analysed.  And autopsies are being conducted to determine the cause of death.

I suspect I know. I suspect they died from boiling up the hallucegenic, but poisonous, plant called the Datura Lily and drinking the liquid. The lily is known to grow in the Gippsland area. It’s a native of China but well-known in the United States and Mexico. Variously it is called Datura or Jimson’s Weed.  In the U.S. the seeds are sometimes eaten – as a cheap but dangerous trip -- and there they are known as Moon Lilly seeds.

The lily actually also grows in the Botanic Gardens here in Melbourne. On several occasions people have been known to break in at night to steal the flowers.

And there was a case in Gippsland about twenty years ago involving the Datura Lilly and, it too, ended in tragedy. A group of teenagers went into the bush and harvested some wild lilies. They boiled them up in a cauldron and drank the lily tea. One of the participants drowned and a second was badly burned when, stoned, he fell into the camp fire.

Any dare devil kids  who are tempted to try this stuff  should first surf the Net as I did today. You’ll find things like:

A drug that should not be done, unless you are ready to step one foot into a grave, and risk not returning….

Pass me the rest of the Datura seeds, I'm throwing them out the window so noone else wakes up three days later in the hospital with no recollection.

And another warning:  It’s a highly poisonous plant that can be used recreationally to provide hallucinations, however they are not psychadelic hallucinations like LSD or mushrooms, they are Deleriant hallucinations.

It is bad shit man. Every one of these people, do not remember their actions, and 80-90% of people that try this shit end up in the hospital, and some people, prison.

A pretty dangerous way to have a fling. Especially a final, fatal one.

Thursday, February 28, 2008

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2008