“Salvia divinorum, or salvia for short, is an herb in the mint family often used for its hallucinogenic effects.
It’s native to southern Mexico and parts of Central and South America, where the Mazatec Indians have used it in traditional ceremonies for centuries.
Salvia’s active ingredient, salvinorin A, is considered one of the most potent naturally occurring psychoactive drugs. The effects of this drug include hallucinations, dizziness, visual disturbances, and more.”
–healthline.com
My Salvia Experience
I learned about salvia in the early 1990s. It was “new” and legal across the U.S. at the time, and some of my friends were experimenting with it. I was visiting one of these friends after work one day when he asked if I’d like to try some. Let’s call him Stan.
“It’s a real trip!” Stan exclaims. “Like nothing else you’ve ever experienced. It can be super intense but only lasts a few minutes, so don’t freak out.”
An introduction like that should have been enough for me to steer clear, but I was in my early twenties and well through a second beer.
“Okay, sure,” I said.
Stan loads the bowl of his glass bong with the equivalent of one “hit” of marijuana: a pea-sized amount of the drug. It even looks like marijuana.
Standing at his table, I put the pipe to my mouth, hold a flame to its bowl, and pull all it has to give deep into my lungs. The smoke is very harsh on my throat and lungs, despite having been cooled in the bong’s water chamber.
Into The Zone
I totter, unsteady on my feet. I don’t remember exhaling. The lights seem to have gone flat and hard, standing out cold and stark in what is now an almost colorless room.
Stan is talking to me, asking what I think. I don’t recall my response. There is a buzzing coming from somewhere. A buzzing that is increasing in volume.
I step out from behind the table and follow Stan’s lead to his toy room. He’s thinking that it will be cool for me to see his toy collection as I experience the drug.
As it’s effects grow, the buzzing keeps getting louder and my surroundings less substantial. This is when I realize that I have been reduced to just a head, and only a partial head at that. A head severed just below the nose from the rest of its body, perhaps in a horrendous car accident. Sliced off and sent sliding down the roadway at a great velocity, the rough surface of the tarmac grinding me down ever further, inch after abrasive inch. The buzzing I hear is the vibration of what remains of my head as it’s chewed away by the pavement.
Below this sense of my head and the road, there is a sharp line, like a flash of light compressed into two dimensions. Under this, another reality. Here my body exists, drizzling away from the head like an animated version of a child’s black scribble of a tornado. It crackles and spits, adding to the buzzing sound. Zizzing and twisting like a live thing as it dangles by a thin shred of tissue from the head above, still grinding along in the other plane.
Amazingly, I am able to experience both the worlds of the drug and the real world simultaneously, if not equally. I see all that I have described here as if from a separate location, like an out-of-body experience, while also experiencing it as the two parts, head and body, yet also still connected to reality.
Touchdown
Stan is rambling on as he directs my attention to a shelf of action figures. I stay with him, calming myself and not letting on about the hell I am experiencing. Or maybe I’m shouting it out at him? Is it that, or is it just my brain describing what it is experiencing to itself, if not to Stan? I don’t know.
The most intense portion of my salvia experience, the “peak,” is quite short. Thankfully. As it fades, its disturbing sensations remain unchanged except in intensity. What is at one point almost a crippling reality rather quickly melts away into an easily ignored shadow of itself.
Because of my distorted sense of reality at the time, I cannot swear to it, but it seems to me that the truly uncomfortable portion of my salvia experience lasted less than two minutes. Effects of the drug overall lasted not much more than 5 minutes. Not that this made the experience anything I would recommend to anyone.
In truth, while I never felt out of control or in danger, all of the sensations the drug produced were uncomfortable. There was no thrill, no euphoria, no revelations, just psychological and emotional discomfort of varying intensity.
I never tried salvia again.
