Sickening Trip on Jimson Tea Causes Teen to Swear Off Drugs

At 17, Travis Burke says he has experimented with drugs, but it was his nearly fatal encounter Thursday with the common roadside plant jimson weed that made him swear off drugs for life.

“It shows what drugs can do to you,” he said from his parents’ house Friday afternoon, after he was discharged from the hospital. “That’s enough for me. It can mess you up real bad.”

Around midnight on Thursday, Travis and three of his friends cut open 20 of the prickly seed pods from the jimson weed plant and brewed themselves about eight cups of tea, drinking all of it. The four suffered muscle spasms and hallucinations before lapsing into comas.

Helen and Harold Burke, Travis’ mother and stepfather, found the boys around 5 a.m. when they heard Travis having spasms in the hallway and he collapsed halfway into their bedroom. All of the boys were hospitalized Thursday and released on Friday.

Police and poison center officials said they see similar cases each spring, when the weed blooms throughout the western states and Mexico. The weed can cause extreme agitation, high fever and severe muscle and nerve damage. Experts said teen-agers experiment with the plant not knowing how toxic it can be.

While officials have no record of deaths from jimson weed in Orange County, Terry Green of Aliso Viejo said one of his friends died after experimenting with it and another friend was severely disabled.

He said his hope for Travis and his friends is that there are no long-term effects because the one friend has not recovered.

In 1968 Green’s friend was an all-star minor league baseball player who was scouted by the Dodgers and the Boston Red Sox.

He lived in Orange, just a few miles from the house where the four youths brewed their jimson weed tea. He was 20 years old when he went on a trip to Death Valley to experiment with drugs with another friend, Chris Hartwell.

Three days after they left, Green said, Hartwell was found dead in the desert and his other friend was found wandering. Doctors told Green that his friend suffered irreversible neurological damage from drinking jimson weed tea.

The once-star athlete was like a child again, playing simple children’s games at the hospital when Green visited him.

“It’s so pathetic to know the future he could have had as an athlete of some sort, and it just ruined him,” Green said. “I have some real legitimate concerns. Hopefully people that are using drugs don’t want to go out and find this stuff. I think the effects are permanent.”

Travis, who looked pale Friday, said he heard about the weed from one of his friends who also drank the tea. He and his friends, whom authorities have not named, picked the seed pods from a hillside in Orange and brought them back to his house.

He said he tried the weed because he wanted to experiment.

“I just wanted to hallucinate,” he said.

Unlike other drugs he has tried, jimson weed was “way more intense,” he said. “The only thing you can compare it with is LSD, only with LSD you have a more controlled ride. This we just did too much. I ain’t gonna do any more drugs.”

He said doctors told him he has damaged his muscles and his kidneys, although with care he should be healthy.