Even heavy drug users find Angel's Trumpet seeds (Datura) to be the most frightening high of their lives.

It was a tablespoon full of seeds that made LSD feel like M&Ms.

That's how one Winnipeg man describes the high he got from a common plant.

A self-described "heavy user," who tried "everything but heroin," Matt says Angel's Trumpet seeds triggered the most frightening high of his life.

"With datura, all you see is death," said Matt, who asked that his last name not be published. "Datura enables you to see the darkest side of yourself."

Angel's Trumpet, a member of the datura species, grows about one- to two-metres tall, with blooms up to 15 cm long. Also known as jimson weed, its seeds act as a potentially lethal hallucinogen when ingested.

The side-effects of the plant were recently featured in a Sun story after 16-year-old Cory Johnson was sent to hospital after eating the seeds. He'd encountered the plant in a city park.

It was March 1998 when Matt tried one heaping tablespoon of the toxic seeds -- for the first and last time -- at a friend's home in Saskatoon.

Soon after, he began hallucinating and wound up on a street yelling at cars he believed were driving through the living room.

"Then the back alley was actually coming up and hitting me, so I kept on punching the back alley," said Matt, who was 20 at the time. "But in reality, I was falling and punching the back alley, yelling at it and headbutting it. I was bleeding all over the place."

DRAGGED HOME

A friend who supplied the seeds dragged him home and took care of him until he came down from a high that lasted nearly four days.

"If she wasn't there, I would have died. It completely dried up my mucus system. I couldn't swallow at all. I was having problems breathing because of the fact that I couldn't swallow," said Matt. "And I absolutely could not move."

He decided to speak out because he fears recent public awareness about Angel's Trumpet may backfire.

"All you have to do to make a drug desirable is create a demand for it and put in an article that this drug could kill you ... That's just going to play a role in creating a demand for it," he said.

The City of Winnipeg vowed to uproot its Angel's Trumpet plants from public parks and boulevards after Johnson ate seven pods worth of seeds and wound up in hospital for about five days. He suffered vision loss and a heart rate high enough to trigger a heart attack.

Matt supports the push to remove all of the plants from public property -- even those that grow wild.

"All you can do is minimize the risk by getting rid of the plants in key areas where people who happen to be doing a lot of drugs hang out," he said.

Matt said a group of Wolseley residents often pluck and dispose of the plant's seeds to reduce the risk. But he fears an outright plant ban, which could tap into private gardens as well, would add a forbidden appeal to the plant.

"There are so many organic things in this world that can kill you. Are you going to ban them all?" he asks.