YouTube yields data

At first, the YouTube videos seemed hilarious -- young people smoking Salvia divinorum, laughing uncontrollably, falling over furniture. But the more Jason Daniel, a fourth-year PhD candidate in public health at San Diego State University, watched, the more it was simply disconcerting -- people lying on the ground, losing control of their limbs, convulsing. "They didn't look like they were having a terribly good time," says Daniel. After weeks of watching YouTube videos three to four hours per day, featuring people getting high on salvia -- a potent but short-acting hallucinogen legal in most countries and 41 states -- it just got boring. But that was a good thing, says Daniel, who was watching the videos as part of his thesis project on the effects of the drug. It allowed him to objectively focus on the scientific research at hand.

Salvia divinorum
Image: Wikimedia commons

YouTube is not an ideal medium for a drug study. There's no possibility of a control group, and only a self-selected sample of users -- those that feel a need to videotape or allow someone to videotape and post their 'trip' on the Internet -- are available. In addition, humorous effects of a drug might be more likely to be posted than disturbing ones, and videos uploaded to the sharing site can only be ten minutes long. But studying the effects of salvia fits uniquely into the YouTube format: An average salvia 'trip' lasts eight minutes, and there are thousands of salvia videos on YouTube. "It occurred to us that we have all these videos of people using [salvia] in natural settings," says linkurl:James Lange,;http://www.aodinitiatives.org/AboutUs.html a professor of psychology and social work at SDSU and senior author on the study. The group reported linkurl:their findings;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20031341 last April in Drug and Alcohol Dependence. And studying amateur videos of drug users under the influence does have its advantages over other methodologies commonly employed by addiction researchers and pharmacologists. Asking a subject to recount their experience of taking a drug is very subjective, and it is unlikely that a researcher will be invited to watch a person or group get high. YouTube offers researchers an in-the-room experience of observing humans in their "natural" state. "I like idea of using existing technology to conduct unique and interesting research," says Daniel. After developing and verifying a coding system to record observations of the hallucinogen's effects, three coders, including Daniel, analyzed video after video for salvia effects on speech and physical impairments, body movements and more. In total, 34 videos were rated for the final analysis, each of which included an entire unedited drug trip. Users typically began to experience symptoms -- such as involuntary muscle twitching, uncontrollable laughter, and problems speaking -- within thirty seconds of taking a hit. The time it takes for salvia to kick in for YouTube users agrees with in vivo studies in baboons demonstrating that salvia reaches peak concentrations in the brain within 40 seconds, nearly ten times faster than cocaine. Symptoms typically dissipate within eight minutes. And, as might be expected, Lange and colleagues found a direct relationship between dose size and length of the effects.

From their observational data, the team created a dose response curve, one that is strikingly similar to a graph made in a linkurl:2008 study;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2464626/?tool=pubmed of the pharmacokinetics of salvinorin A, the active component of salvia, in the brains of baboons. Salvia is a well-studied drug, says linkurl:Jacob Hooker,;http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/martinos/people/showPerson.php?people_id=1096 director of radiochemistry at the Martinos Imaging Center in Charlestown, Massachusetts and author of the linkurl:2008 study,;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2464626/?tool=pubmed one of great interest to pharmacologists because of its "ridiculously high" affinity for binding the kappa opoid receptor in the brain, a possible therapeutic target for pain relief. "Groups have been studying [salvinorin A] in a research context, in animal models and humans, for years now," he says. While the YouTube study is interesting -- "sort of a formalized anecdote," says Hooker -- it doesn't add much to the wealth of literature that already exists for the drug. Lange, however, hopes that organized observations of the impairments caused by the drug could help neurologists identify the systems affected by the drug and some of the drug effects that might be missed in a controlled laboratory setting. "When we want to catalog what a drug can do and how it can affect behavior, seeing it both in a lab and also a natural setting is important," says Lange. "[YouTube] opens up a window to users in private settings that I think will turn out to be interesting for not just salvia, but other drugs as well."
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[5th February 2010]