Fact and Fiction About Salvia (Sage) is a common perennial herb that grows throughout the worldSalvia The Drug

Salvia (Sage) is a common perennial herb that grows throughout the world. The plant grows to be several feet tall and has large light-green leaves. Salvia is a member of the mint family, and is considered a common garden plant. Most common forms of salvia can be found in plant nurseries. They are not hallucinogenic and will only give users a headache if smoked.

Diviner's Sage, Salvia Divinorum, is one of the hundreds of species of the Salvia genus. It is not native to any place - Although it is commonly grown in some parts of Mexico, and now grows wild in some parts of the Sierra Mazatec region.

Although some users take salvia recreationally at a very low dosage, it is not a "party drug." Daniel Siebert, ethnobotanist and salvia advocate, remarks, "...salvia is not 'fun' in the way that alcohol or cannabis can be. If you try to party with salvia, you will probably not have a good experience." He recommends that it be used for meditation, or other spiritual pursuits. 

The active chemical - Salvinorin A - is the strongest naturally occurring psychoactive known to date. It has been used by natives for thousands of years to seek divine spiritual insight. The internet brought the plants psychoactive qualities to attention. In recent years several countries have introduced legislation to make prepared forms of the plant illegal. It remains legal in most of North America because of the lack of media attention, and the very small abuse potential. (See legality section below.)

There is no known lethal dosage of Salvia Divinorum. However, it is very strongly recommended that a trip sitter be present. Because of its short-lasting effects (when smoked), users can take turns being a sitter.

 

 Salvia is an extremely potent drug. Its effects are considered unsettling by some people, and as such, it is important to spend time preparing the setting of the use and your mindset before you use salvia. The first effects are what can be described as a building of pressure in the head, and sometimes of the body, this is sometimes accompanied by a sensation of vibration of the eyes. This is known as the 'coming on' stage, and it can last anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute, and roughly 10-20 seconds after initial inhalation or last 20-40 minutes and start after 5 minutes if sublingually ingested.

The peak can last anywhere from 30 seconds (which is rare) to 15 minutes when smoked, and can last 40 minutes to an hour and a half when sublingually ingested, and can include the following profound effects: Visual hallucinations, auditory hallucinations, hallucinations of touch, smell, and taste, visual distortion, disassociation, synaesthesia (seeing music, tasting colors), anesthetic effects, loss of memory (forgetting things like you took a substance or where you were before the trip began), introspective thinking, regression to childhood, ego death (which, contrary to some rumors, only lasts for the duration of the peak), becoming objects, the impression of seeing through walls, stimulation, intensely skewed sense of time, and a spiritual sensation of witnessing, being near, being watched by, or merging with a mysterious good or evil force greater than yourself. Another effect that occurs in the peak is bouts of laughter. These laughing fits are usually labeled as involuntary, but I have separated them from the other effects to submit that while they do seem to happen at random to the observer, as a user I will vouch that these laughing fits are almost always a response to the unusual images and scenes salvia hallucinations produce, and although they are knee jerk reactions, they are not what I would consider truly involuntary. 

Depending on the mindset and setting going into the experience, salvia's peak can be a beautiful and fun experience, or a frightening and undesirable experience. Salvia tends to be a psychotheraputic substance in that it can bring past traumas, repressed memories, or regrets to the surface. These traumas, repressed memories, or regrets can manifest in very blatant, or very vague ways, and salvia may bring up issues of the past that you are not ready to deal with at this point in time, if there is anything like this in your past and you are not at a place where you can deal with it, salvia is not something you should use, even if in the ideal mindset and setting. If you do not have such issues unresolved in your past, and you are in the correct mindset and setting, salvia may be used as a pleasant and powerful tool for exploring your consciousness, and developing a base of insight for you to refine at a later time. In a partail-dose (a dose that is incapable of completely removing you from reality), salvia can be a great recreational psychedelic/stimulant. Although not ideal for large parties, salvia may be smoked for fun by a small group of friends. although it is important to remember that Salvia only works as a recreational drug in limited doses, and doses that produce a complete fantasy/trip effect would become unpleasant and potentially frightening in a recreational atmosphere, and those high doses are only good for personal exploration and insight!

The afterglow effect lasts for 30 minutes to an hour if smoked, and 3-6 hours if sublingually absorbed. It starts as initial dizziness, which leads continuously tampering off euphoria, stimulation, visual distortion, a gentle head buzz. and sometimes random, short lived hallucinations (usually only in high doses)and some people report feeling connected with nature, artistic inclinations, and a headache.

Experience Salvia Video

• Although the raw herb 'Salvia divinorum' itself isn't especially potent, it's psychoactive constituent, salvinorin A, is very potent, reaching thresh hold effects at 200 micrograms (0.0002 grams)

• Salvia is non-toxic: Although the it is unknown what the overdose (LD50) of Salvinorin A is, it is known that there has never been a death attributable to Salvia or Salvinorin A, this is especially reassuring because most doses do not exceed 25 milligrams, though doses of 2 grams of salvinorin A have been recorded.

>the closest thing to a death ever being attributed to Salvia divinorum is the death of Brett Chidester of Delaware, was depressed and was using salvia. His parents claim that salvia was causing his depression, and point to the fact that he smoked salvia a few hours before he committed suicide as evidence of the link. However, salvia has never been known to cause people to manifest depression, and has never been known to since. It is far more likely that he was depressed prior to his use with salvia, and was attracted to it by the unsubstantiated claims that salvinorin A had promising anti-depressant effects that were going around at the time. If salvia played any part, it may have played a sort of catalyst role in reinforcing his depression, as mindset greatly effects experiences with salvia, and if you go in to an experience depressed, it will probably focus on depressing things, however it is extremely unlikely that salvia placed any thought into Brett's mind that was not already present in some form, this is a classic (and unfortunately tragic) case of why it is always said not to do salvia if you have some sort of issue, although if gone unchecked like it had been for months, the end of Brett's tale would have probably gone unchanged if salvia hadn't been introduced. Brett's parents got a law passed in Delaware making Salvia divinorum an illegal drug there based on her son's suicide, which is a shame that a substance can get banned because it had unsubstantiated connections to an event that, based on knoweledge of the substance, it didn't really have.

• Salvia exhibits a reverse-tolerance effect - The effects of the substance become stronger with each use. It may take several uses before a user "breaks-though" into the full effects of the substance.

• If you experience no effects from smoking the substances, there are three explanations. The first is that you did not hold in the smoke long enough. The longer, the better. The second is that Salvia has no effects on you. 5-10% of the population will not be affected by Salvia at all. The third is that you did not hold the flame onto the foliage long enough and the active chemicals were not vaporized.

• Make sure you keep the flame on the salvia and inhale as much as possible with one hit. Salvinorin requires a lot of heat to vapourize, and if you don't supply it you are smoking plant.

• Most users report that any strength of extract over '20x' is uncomfortably too intense.

• Salvia extracts use a measurement of "x's" to label strength in comparison to the raw leaf starting material, the "x" in this system is meant to represent the multiplication "times" symbol in math, and it means literally how it reads, if it reads "10x" that means "10 times [the raw leaf]"

>Raw salvia leaf is on average .25% salvinorin A, therefore on the standardized scale for extract, pure salvinorin A would be 400x >Raw Salvinorin A leaf can vary in potency based on many factors, this means that different companies have different strength starting material to produce salvia extract, as a result, one producer's 10x extract may be unbelievably strong while another's 50x may be shamefully weak, is is important to find a supplier whose extracts remain consistent than to play a guessing game with potency, also, it may be wise to order that companies raw leaf material and check it's potency yourself to know how strong to expect that conpany's extracts.