There's a new player in the war on drugs. Its users claim it's more powerful than LSD.

It's available at the click of a button, and a KCTV5 News investigation uncovered two big links to Kansas City.

The natural hallucinogen, called salvia divinorum, exploded onto the drug scene when young people started smoking it and posting their drug trips online.

Researchers are working to understand it and police and lawmakers are working to stop it.

At least twice a day every day someone in Kansas City watches one of the videos online, wanders into a downtown herbal shop and asks the question, "Do you have this legal salvia, sally D, salvinorum?

The Internet is flooded with videos of people claiming to be smoking it.

Sean, who's worked at an herbal shop for two years, said rumors about what will happen to you if you smoke it have launched something of a frenzy. "It opens up doors and tunnels into the psyche, and there's always little gnomes involved," Sean said.

One of the online clips received more than 100 million hits in the past year.

"I've had people who have felt that it has alleviated their depression, helped them quit smoking ... however, I do know people who have had week-long -- in their mind -- trips that were only 15 minutes, but to them, it lasted a lifetime and it was a bad, horrible experience."

Sean said he tells customers about the salvia horror stories when they come in trying to buy it. He also reminds them that it is now illegal in both Kansas and Missouri.

Lawmakers stepped in after reports surfaced of one suicide out of Delaware and a string of unsubstantiated YouTube videos, making the Internet responsible for popularizing a drug and outlawing it.

Veteran Reno County prosecutor Tom Stanton helped write the law that recently banned salvia in Kansas.

"I was shocked when I saw what this drug was doing to young people," Stanton said.

For all its hype, no one really knows what salvia does. Researchers at the University of Kansas are studying it. Scientist have said they don't believe it's toxic or addictive, and in the lab, the hallucinogen does things to the brain like they've never seen before.

"We're trying to take salvinorin A and modify it chemically in hopes of developing a medication to treat methamphetamine or cocaine dependence," said Dr. Thomas Prisinzano.

Scientists also have said they believe that in its purest form, s alvia could provide a key to scientists working to unlock some of the more serious and baffling diseases of the brain.

"Certain forms of Alzheimer's disease as well as Parkinson's disease can be associated with hallucinogenic-like behavior, so if we could find a way to understand how salvia divinorum and its active component, salvinorin A, works in the brain, then we could actually come up with compounds that are able to block hallucinations," Prisinzano said.

But work inside the lab may have hit a snag because of the frenzy outside of the lab.

"Certainly with heightened government regulation, it is going to be more difficult to conduct certain types of studies, mainly being clinical studies," Prisinzano said.

Stanton said, "There are ways to ensure that you can legally conduct legitimate testing for those purposes without running afoul of the law."

KCTV5 News sent an undercover producer to a dozen local tobacco, herbal and head shops to see if he could find the drug.

Everyone had heard of it, but no one claimed to sell it, and then something unexpected happened.

In the middle of the KCTV5 News investigation, salvia turned up in a criminal investigation in the heart of Johnson County.

"They found a bag that was sealed. It looked like it'd been delivered," said Capt. Wes Lovett, of the Prairie Village Police Department. "When they came across it, they knew it was salvia."

Prairie village narcotics detectives found the bag labeled salvia during a drug bust a few weeks ago.

They arrested a former Shawnee Mission East High School student and found three current students in the apartment.

Police said they believed the teens got the bag labeled salvia off the Internet. Narcotics officers have watched the same videos online and said they knew it was only a matter of time before it showed up on the streets in the metro.

"So often times, we are reactive, but I believed it was time to be proactive when it came to this particular drug," Stanton said. Prisinzano said, "There really aren't any studies that I know of that show that salvia divinorum or any of its active components actually do have toxic effects or actually produce depression or produce dependent-like states."

Scientists at KU said despite the recent ban on salvia, they're confident they'll be able to launch clinical trials when they're at that point in their research.

Outside of the lab, you can't legally have it on either side of state line, and the teenager caught with drugs in Prairie Village faces a slew of charge.