Psychoactive plant takes users on intense, cosmic ride - and it's perfectly legal

from canadia press

SHERYL UBELACKER

(CP) - Hunter knows how to mellow out on marijuana. It's something he does all the time. But the first time he smoked the leaves of a plant dubbed the "magic mint," he felt as if he'd been slammed into another dimension.

As drug trips go, this one was more terror than pleasure.

"The first time I did it was with a lot of people," recalls Hunter, a Toronto university student who asked that his real name not be used. "That was probably a bad idea because I did it and before I even knew what was happening, I was just like transported into another world.

"Then someone was around me and they just tapped my shoulder, and I forget if I was annoyed by that, but it felt like spikes going into my body. I felt like I was being stabbed, but obviously it was the Salvia."

Salvia divinorum, that is - a member of the sage family of plants that has been used for hundreds of years by the Mazatec indigenous people of southern Mexico as a medicinal herb and means of divination.

Today, it continues to be used in shamanistic rituals. But it has also become popular among the university and college crowd in Canada and the United States - although for many, once is enough, experts say.

What may be surprising, given its powerful hallucinogenic effects, is that cultivating, selling or using Salvia divinorum are all perfectly legal in Canada and most of the U.S.

In Canada, neither Salvia divinorum nor its main active ingredient, salvinorin A, are regulated under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, says Health Canada spokeswoman Carolyn Sexauer. The substance can be imported and sold provided no health claim is made regarding its effects.

"Health Canada is collecting data regarding evidence of abuse of this substance and its dependence potential, and we continue to monitor Salvia divinorum," Sexauer says.

The Diviner's Sage, as it's sometimes called, is sold in specialty "head" shops across Canada and the United States, and can be ordered over the Internet. Most of it comes from Mexico.

But the plant is not a substance to be smoked lightly, says Chris Bennett, co-owner with his wife, Renee Boje, of Urban Shaman in Vancouver, which specializes in plants used for shamanistic and religious purposes, including peyote and Salvia.

"We have a self-imposed age limit of 19 in our store," says Bennett, explaining that anyone under that age will not be sold psychoactive plants. "When people do come in and they start talking about, 'Just get me ripped,' we start explaining what our shop's about. We start laying a rap on them about the spiritual use and the history of the substances. And they generally get uncomfortable and leave."

At Urban Shaman, about two grams of dried Salvia leaves sell for $8 and a 10-times stronger extract goes for about $25. But prices vary widely across the continent, depending on the source.

Bennett says it takes about 10 deep inhalations of Salvia smoke to achieve its full effect, which is short-lived as drugs go, lasting anywhere from 10 minutes to half an hour.

Salvia-induced hallucinations are as individual as the people who partake of the plant.

When he first smoked it, Bennett says the world around him went flat, "like the second dimension." Another user described having a sense that he had become a native in the Amazon jungle and then merged with a tree. Others experience panic because they find the cosmic ride too intense.

"There's a real dissolvement of the ego . . . that sometimes can be quite frightening for people who have a hard time letting go. But for people who have an easy time letting go, it can be quite a blissful experience."

Dr. Bryan Roth, director of the psychoactive drug screening program at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, says the chemical structure of the plant's active ingredient is "totally unique."

Roth, whose lab at Case-Western University in Cleveland was the first to map its molecular makeup five years ago, says salvinorin A is a "kappa-opiate agonist" that binds to a single type of receptor in the brain.

"It's amazing that this drug targets that particular receptor," he says. "Most drugs are not so selective. LSD hits about 50 receptors."

As a result, Salvia is creating a real buzz among scientists in the pharmaceutical arena. While pure salvinorin A is unlikely to have any use as a medication, its derivatives could be useful, and about 200 have been isolated so far, says Roth. Compounds that could block the effects of Salvia may be candidates for treating depression, schizophrenia or Alzheimer's-induced dementia.

"It's a really, really hot area in medical chemistry right now," says Roth.

When it comes to recreational use, Roth is reluctant to pronounce Salvia divinorum "dangerous," although he doesn't encourage people to smoke the leaves or extract (or take any other mind-altering drug, for that matter) - and he's never used it himself.

"The big problem with it from a safety standpoint is that people are pretty incapacitated when they take a hefty dose. They're pretty much disoriented in space and time and they could wander off a building or walk in front of a car and not know where they are."

That's why Bennett of Urban Shaman warns that anyone taking Salvia "should always have somebody there with them. That's a Number 1 rule.

"Because you enter into a waking kind of dream state in which you lose your critical judgment in a similar way you might in a dream. So you want to make sure a person remains sitting down or lying down."

That's advice Hunter can relate to: the second time he smoked the plant's dried leaves, he did it alone in his room.

"I remember looking at what was like a spinning top, like a Jewish dreidel. It was spinning and the faster it spun, I felt like I was spinning with it. And then all of a sudden I looked down and I was it. I became it.

"For a second, I thought I went insane because if you don't have someone around to, like, hold you down, you might get a little bit panicked. It can be a terrifying experience."

Still, Hunter says that when he feels ready, he may try Salvia again.

"It's strictly about information, no pleasure," he concedes. "You can't call it a high. You go just into an altered stare of being, really. You feel the effects of life through different eyes."

goddamn i hate all the exposure it's gotten in the recent years..

i can't even read it...


its not going to be legal much longer...it's been in the top list on most agencies for a while now..

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Originally Posted by killerkat

goddamn i hate all the exposure it's gotten in the recent years..

i can't even read it...


its not going to be legal much longer...it's been in the top list on most agencies for a while now..

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Have you tried it? What was it like for you?

it was my substance of study(not professionally of anything) for ,hell...a few years straight...

and yes...I've tried it easily hundreds of times...

to be honest....of any psychedelic,LSD,mescaline,DMT,psilocybin,iboga..et c,etc anything you can think of...I've researched(literally,not just blindly taken)....and yet..salvia is my favorite..

it's mind blowing...like a smack in the face from a deity you've never known.

in my experince it most closely resembles DMT...but it's still much different..

i could go on and on,but the grill needs tending,hah


i think i posted some long reports and papers on my experinces when i first joined,but i think it was through PM to someone interested..

but yes..the recent years exposure of Salvia just kills me..i hate it,i even stopped trying to help keep it legal(big time petition,group kinda deal),i got so fed up with it...

Salvia is some interesting stuff, but its going to go the way of pretty much ever recently discovered drug and be demonized by the gov't pretty soon, and theyll make up a bunch of bullshit about how it causes parkinson disease or something.

who cares? drugs are stupid. I wish that every one who got high went on a mind bending journey that changed thier frame of mind and opened them up to enlightenedment... but it doesn't. it just makes you see stupid shit and then you sit around with your other loser freinds in your apartment getting high all the time, and then go back to work at mcdonalds afterwards. how about a drug that actually inspires someone to do something produtive with thier life? And making shitty music and art, is not an example, because plemnty of sober people can do that just as well.

this old argument,eh?....while even my 'drugged up illiterate' ass could push so many holes through that it's astonishing...i'm not playing with you again,Amigo...

regardeless,that was tasteless...

the only old arguement here is the the tired, new age hippie bullshit. these people are just out to make a buck and I don't see any difference between this "spirituality" and televangelism. You can ignore REAL scientific studies about drug addiction and psychological and physical damage that these chemicals cause and instead present your own point... actually, why don't you do that? because so far all the peope that makes claims about the wonder effects of "mind altering substances" have yet to give one credivle reason for just why they are so good, other than 'Just get me ripped,' which at least i can respect for it's honesty.

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Originally Posted by Morning Glory

who cares? drugs are stupid. I wish that every one who got high went on a mind bending journey that changed thier frame of mind and opened them up to enlightenedment... but it doesn't. it just makes you see stupid shit and then you sit around with your other loser freinds in your apartment getting high all the time, and then go back to work at mcdonalds afterwards. how about a drug that actually inspires someone to do something produtive with thier life? And making shitty music and art, is not an example, because plemnty of sober people can do that just as well.

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I don't like meth but it does make people productive. I do like cocaine and that definitely makes people in many walks of life productive.

How are you defining music and art as shitty? If you don't like it? If no one likes it? If the creative high person doesn't like it when they are no longer high? What if it moves hundreds of thousands of records? What if it gives a small group of people great pleasure seeing it hang on the wall?

We sold salvia at the porn shop, and while I tried all the hard on pills (yes, they work on women too), I never tried it.

On the illegal drug topic, meth is horrid, horrid, horrid. I was totally fucked up on it. Cocaine never did anything to me, and neither does pot. I don't think I want to try any more, even legal substances.

I so want to try it.

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Originally Posted by incog

I don't like meth but it does make people productive. I do like cocaine and that definitely makes people in many walks of life productive.

How are you defining music and art as shitty? If you don't like it? If no one likes it? If the creative high person doesn't like it when they are no longer high? What if it moves hundreds of thousands of records? What if it gives a small group of people great pleasure seeing it hang on the wall?

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these substances "stimulate" the user, often resulting in prolonged periods of sleeplessness. As to whether these effect actual stamina and increased energy, that has yet to be seen. the question is does this lead to better performance? just like caffiene, it will increase the heart rate and brain activity, making the user feel a sense of "hyped up" or "wired" but studies show that the quality of actions performed in this state are inferior to the one's performed without "enhancement." let me put it this way, you may be able to do ten tasks at once, but each one of those tasks is going to be ten times less efficient than if you did them one at a time.

as for your second question, I would consider the greatful dead to be shitty. My point wasn't that I think that "sober" art is better than "drug induced "art, just that any art is subjective and it's sucess or failure can't be judged by such criteria that really has no baring on the art itself.

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Originally Posted by Morning Glory

these substances "stimulate" the user, often resulting in prolonged periods of sleeplessness. As to whether these effect actual stamina and increased energy, that has yet to be seen. the question is does this lead to better performance? just like caffiene, it will increase the heart rate and brain activity, making the user feel a sense of "hyped up" or "wired" but studies show that the quality of actions performed in this state are inferior to the one's performed without "enhancement." let me put it this way, you may be able to do ten tasks at once, but each one of those tasks is going to be ten times less efficient than if you did them one at a time.

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Actually amphetamines do in fact increase performance, especially in people with ADHD, which is why they are commonly perscribed as treatment for it. They not only increase stamina to a degree but they also make one much more able to focus on a given task.

Also drugs like MDMA and LSD when used under proper conditions have been shown to benefit the psychological well being of the user, although this is only known from testomony of people who use theese drugs because, due to the insane drug prohibition in this country and a lot of others, it hasnt been fully studied, and most of the studies that have taken place have been extreemely flawed and/or slanted against the drug (this is especially true of MDMA).

Marijuana also has a great deal of medicinal uses as well, but thats well documented enough that i shouldnt have to go into it.

As for Salvia, its a relativel newly discovered psychoactive, nit a lot of research has been done on it, but it does give you an an interesting perspective on things, like most psycheelics do. A lot of people fail to realise that psychedelics do a lot more to you mind that just make you see shit, they shift your minds perspective and alow you to realize things about yourself and the world around you that most people would be unable to do otherwise.