>> Salvia divinorum, a mysterious plant with hallucinogenic qualities from the mountains of southern Mexico, is enjoying growing popularity in North America. But it’s a legal high that may not be for everyone, as a Mirror investigation reveals.

by SCOTT SAXON

In the northeast of Oaxaca, Mexico, Sierra Mazateca spreads itself through clouded mountains, deep valleys, lush forests and foaming waterfalls. This is the home of the Mazatec, an agricultural people who produce mainly corn, chillies and beans. The region has often been visited by explorers eager to wander Sistema Huautla, one of the world’s deepest caves, and by botanists intrigued by the Sierra’s varied plant-life, including a number of species unknown elsewhere in the world.

In 1938, one such plant was noted by Jean Basset Johnson, a Swedish anthropologist who had traveled to Oaxaca to study the Mazatec use of psylocibe mushrooms. The Mazatec called the plant ska Maria Pastora, Leaves of Mary the Shepherdess, and used it for healings and ritual divination.

In the ’50s, R. Gordon Wasson, a New York banker who also had a curiosity for mushrooms, spent time with the Mazatec and, in addition to his mushroom testing, became the first gringo known to sample the effects of what the Western world classified as Salvia divinorum.

Wasson’s studies on Mazatec mushroom use hit Life magazine across 17 pages in 1957 and sent Timothy Leary scrambling to Huautla in search of a new consciousness, but Salvia divinorum stayed in the shadows. It might have remained there, were it not for the Internet bringing it into the spotlight. Recently, the media has called it the “new LSD,” and Web vendors tout it as “legal ecstasy.” A Google search for “salvia divinorum” turned up just shy of 17,000 hits. Very few of those pages will tell you exactly what it does, or how.

A hallucinogen unlike any other

A member of the mint family, S. divinorum can be found growing only scarcely in ravines throughout Sierra Mazateca. The active compound—the stuff that gets you wonky—is salvinorin A, which was first isolated in 1982. Unlike other psychoactive agents, salvia is not an alkaloid. It doesn’t play with the same brain receptors as other known hallucinogens, and has been elusive in providing sound answers to why it does anything at all.

In keeping with its enigmatic image, the origins of the ritual use of the plant are also uncertain. Its pre-Conquest history is unknown, and today’s Mazatecs say that it only started to grow after the Spanish came to the New World. Believing it to be the incarnation of the Virgin Mary, the Mazatec treat the plant with great respect, being careful not to trample it or damage its leaves while harvesting them. Non-Mazatec consumers can expend with such concerns, as the Shepherdess has already been picked, dried and bagged, or processed into a salvinorin extract.

The options are great for the Salvia shopper. Many of the peddlers online speak of the plant in mystic terms. They call it “She” and “Her.” They offer fresh leaves, dried leaves, fortified leaves, extracts and tinctures. Choosing what’s right for you can be a difficult task, and almost all sites will tout their wares as the strongest Salvia available.

Many of these people are lying. Sites such as www.salviareview.com are around to help, but the vastness of the marketplace makes buying online a potentially hit or miss experience. One of the more respected vendors is www.sagewisdom.org, a site that is also home to Daniel Seibert’s Salvia Divinorum Research and Information Center. Seibert has been studying Salvia for upwards of two decades, and he is an exhaustive source of information on all aspects of the plant. If Salvia is the new LSD, Seibert is its Timothy Leary, except where Leary encouraged acid to anyone who could stick out their tongue, Seibert prefers to keep Salvia away from thrill-seekers and casual day-trippers. One of the terms one must agree to before accessing his Salvia shop is that buyers make a “personal commitment to use this herb in a responsible, intelligent, and safe manner.”

Heads can lose it

Respect for the effects is a constant theme among sellers, as well as from those who consider Salvia more than just a legal high. Speaking to the Associated Press, an elder Mazatec shaman warned that, “One has to be very delicate with Pastora. It is the most dangerous plant we have.” The legend is that once seized by the effects, the user finds it incomparable to anything they’ve done before.

“It doesn’t give a fuck about people,” I was told by André from Psychonaut, a shop on Roy specializing in psychedelic wares, saying he’s seen serious “heads lose it” on Salvia. He recommended having someone sober nearby for the experience, just in case. He also stressed Salvia’s intensity, and gave me a third tip: “It’s not really fun. That doesn’t mean it’s an unpleasant experience, but it’s not like blotter or mushrooms.” He added that those going into the experience thinking past drug-use would give them an edge over the plant were the ones it would turn on most. It should be taken in total darkness, he said, away from the distraction of noise or lights.

Since his usual stock from Amsterdam was sold out, I walked out of the shop with a half-gram of Mexican-made 5X extract, enough for two full doses. André told me the Mexican-made was a cruder product and not as good as the Amsterdam variety.

To hedge my bets, earlier that day I had ordered an ounce of dried leaves from www.peruvian-journey.com, a New York-based seller whose site has since been taken offline “due to non-payment,” according to the provider’s message. The leaves arrived the next week via airmail in a bubble-wrap envelope marked at customs by the U.S. Postal Service as “incense.” Extract, $20, leaves, $45 (U.S.), butane lighter, $85 (a butane torch lighter will vaporize the salvanorin more efficiently, and is recommended over the standard flame of a match or gas lighter). I was all set for a well-rounded visit with the Sage Goddess.

A fickle mistress

Smoking Salvia is foreign to the Mazatec. The traditional method was to make tea from fresh leaves, or roll leaves into a quid and let it sit under the tongue, gently chewing every few seconds. Salvanorin is absorbed through mucous membrane and seems to be rendered inactive by the gastrointestinal system. Even large-dose Salvia caps are said to have no effect when swallowed.

Using the traditional methods, Salvia’s effects build over a 10-minute period and plateau for about an hour. The effects from smoking hit fast, but the strongest are gone in 10 minutes, and continue to bring you down to the zero point over another 20 to 30 minutes.

For my first attempt, I decided to smoke the extract. André had recounted the tale of a Salvia smoker who dropped his pipe when the trip started, so I chose to smoke in the bathroom, the least flammable room in the house. I sat down, lit the pipe and inhaled. My first thought was, “It tastes like a mouthful of grass.” I inhaled again, holding the smoke for about 30 seconds before exhaling in a fit of coughs. Then I waited.

After a short period I began to feel something, but wasn’t immediately sure what it was. I knew it was similar to something I’d felt before, but couldn’t recall when or why. Ah, yes… it was the feeling that I’d been had. Nothing was happening. No visions, no sensations, nothing to go ask Alice.

According to Seibert’s Salvia divinorum FAQ, about 10 per cent of people need higher doses to experience the effects of the plant. Some are unaffected altogether. In other cases, several uses are required to sensitize oneself to Salvia, the effects increasing with each go. André had told me that if no effects were felt, a waiting period would be required before another shot at it should be made. He suggested 24 hours. I waited a week and tried smoking the leaves. The effects were similar, save for a sense of mild drunkenness that lasted about 10 minutes. If this was the spirit world, I’d been there before.

A week later, I took a shot at the more traditional quid method. I rehydrated the dried leaves and rolled up three quids. I went down to the basement, got comfortable and popped the first into my mouth. After 20 minutes, I spat it out and began on the second. This one kept me busy a little longer than the last, and toward the 30-minute mark, I felt lightheaded. I spat it out and got to work on the third. As I started to chew it, I began gagging. I took the quid out of my mouth, composed myself, and put it back in. The lightheadedness dissipated and my mind began to roam.

Free-flowing thoughts

The feeling was comparable to those few minutes before sleep, where you’re conscious enough to know you’re awake but can’t keep focus on any one thought. The thoughts free-flow into each other, each sparking the theme for the next in some subtle way until the whole image has you wondering what you were just thinking about, and how you suddenly got to where you are now. I couldn’t remember how long I’d been chewing, but it seemed like I’d been at it for hours. I thought, “Guess I should stop chewing now,” and kept chewing. “How long have I been down here?” I wondered. I took note of the presence of my watch but didn’t check the time. I was convinced it had been too long, and suddenly got very restless. I decided to go up to bed. On the way, my girlfriend stopped me.

“What did it do?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. I repeated her question twice in my mind, and answered her again, “Nothing. It didn’t do anything… stop asking me that.”

“You’re slurring your words.”

“I’m so tired of your lies,” I said, and continued upstairs. Moving was a curious thing. I knew I had intentionally walked upstairs, but being there caught me a bit off guard. With each step I took, I felt that I was suddenly somewhere completely detached from where I just was. I checked the clock as I lay down, and realized that that last quid couldn’t have been in my mouth for longer than about four minutes. My arms started to feel tight, and I lay there stretching them. Then my girlfriend came in and tickled me, which was easily one of the most unnerving sensations I’d ever felt. It also seemed to chase away my buzz, and again I felt as I would were I slightly drunk. Within 90 minutes, I was back to my pre-Salvia state. For the record, when I listened back to my tape of the whole thing, I had indeed been slurring my words.

Under Salvia’s influence, music and other voices can cause serious unrest. Both seem to easily distract the user from the trip, and trying to converse can be more annoying than it normally is. While the small bit of sunlight coming through the basement blinds didn’t bother me, the bright light upstairs was unpleasant and possibly hurried the end to the sensations I was experiencing.

Indeed, nothing about Salvia makes it the right choice for parties or clubbing, a point made repeatedly by those who hold the plant in any esteem. Seibert, in particular, takes great care in stressing Salvia’s delicate nature, in part because he doesn’t want media hysteria causing a change in Salvia’s status with the DEA. Salvia is currently legal in every country except Australia, whose government became the first to impose laws against it this past June.

The U.S Department of Justice has Salvia listed as one of its “drugs of concern,” saying it is “widely touted on Internet sites aimed at young adults and adolescents eager to experiment with these types of substances,” a claim they are fairly accurate in making. Organizations such as the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics are among those actively trying to keep the DOJ’s eyes open to the safety and potential benefits of Salvia divinorum—including one case study that showed salvinorin to ease a woman’s symptoms of depression.

But the U.S. government isn’t an entity renowned for its clear vision. The fact that Salvia has never been shown to have adverse effects on health or society as a whole could easily take a back seat to the notion of red-blooded Americans hallucinating in their own backyards.

Success by excess

Seibert has broken down the Salvia experience into six levels: subtle effects, altered perception, light visionary state, vivid visionary state, immaterial existence and amnesiac effects. By his descriptions, I’d cap my first smoking and gnawing experiences at level three. The urge to get to six was great, so I made one last run at the Goddess.

I mixed my remaining extract with some leaves and filled the bowl of a Calabash pipe. The bowl was designed to allow a gentleman enjoyment of his pipe tobacco through hours of discussion on the Boer Wars, but was well-suited to hold a generous amount of Salvia. As with my first attempt, I sat down in the bathroom and fired the lighter, inhaling deeply, holding, inhaling, holding. It was her last chance.
I heard rain. Then heavy rain. Then a waterfall. I felt water running down my forehead, and then saw my head, enormous. A section of it above my left eye appeared to be cut out and the waterfall thundered down from it into a jungle river. Then I was moving along with the water, through vines and plants, deep greens and dark shadows blurring alongside me as I sped forward. I tried to push myself back against the wall, but was already there. The jungle gave way to red earth and a desert stretched out in front of me.

Suddenly two or three men were to my right, dark-skinned and wearing white clothes. “Mazatec,” I thought. They were laughing and I knew it was at me. A tall woman stood to my left. She was speaking. I couldn’t actually hear her words, but thought she was saying, “He’s okay” and was telling the men to stop laughing.

This is what I signed on for. “Divine,” I thought to myself, “Divination… ask her a question… ask her something.” I was still hurtling forward through the sand, but she and the men stayed right beside me. When I thought about it later, I realized they hadn’t appeared to be moving themselves so much as gliding just above the surface of the sand. I tried to speak.

“HNNGGGGGUUUUUH…Tsong…TSONGNUUUH!!” is what I said. For a moment, she looked concerned and then was gone. I felt a sudden drop as the desert dove down to the ocean. My sensation of moving forward began to slow, and the ocean rolled back until there was nothing there but a tile floor. I was soaked with sweat.

Beyond middle America

Total elapsed time from the first puff: seven minutes. For a while, I tapped on the wall beside me, then realized I was doing it and stopped. And that was where it ended. I didn’t experience the post-Salvia feelings of euphoria that some users have described, but euphoria is a sense I generally leave untapped.

In the Apocrypha, the book of Ecclesiasticus states, “The Lord hath created medicines of the earth, and the wise man will not abhor them.” The Mazatec culture, like that of most native peoples, developed with great reverence for the union of man and nature. A Mazatec healer said Pastora was one of the most important plants for their ancestors, and contains properties not understood by outsiders.

The temptation of mind-altering substances is an obvious one, but the fact is there are remarkably few “wise men” around, and even fewer when narrowed to the makers of public policy. The first time some Wisconsin teenager wanders into the street naked and urinating, and Salvia is found in his glove compartment, the wheels at the DOJ will start spinning and Salvia will hit the banned substance list.
Or maybe the “adolescents eager to experiment with these types of substances” will figure out that the cost to duration ratio of Salvia divinorum, and the unpredictability of the effects, doesn’t make it the first choice for weekend hallucinations. They’ll decide to stick with substances better equipped to provide users with a Saturday night of sustained mind-travel, feverish dancing and conversation on how the CIA is monitoring their thoughts. The hype will burn itself out and Salvia will return to the shadows. And then the Mazatec will have their Goddess back. :