Anyone tried tripping on the herb salvia divinorum? What was it like?

In My Humble Opinion
21

After having researched this online, me and a buddy worked pretty hard to extract something smokable from what looked like random weeds in a roadside ditch. A week or so of tedious chemistry work, and we finally had a small vial of green paste that was supposed to be a completely mind-blowing and legal hallucinogenic drug.

I don’t remember: I had to work, or go out of town, or something, and my buddy ended up trying the salvia paste first. He went out to a local state park campsite and had a few puffs. Over the course of an hour, he said he had the most personal, realistic hallucinations ever; but they weren’t fun. He was having marriage problems and his wife had recently went home to North Carolina with his infant daughter (he was in Kansas at the time) and his ‘visions’ – to the minor, not-very-detailed extent that he described to me – were like a cruel cosmic joke, rubbing his nose in his family issues. Apparently, he was so emotionally devastated after he came down that he threw the whole vial deep into the woods, never to be seen again.

I was pretty pissed afterwards, because we worked so hard to get it; but after he described it, and reading more up on its effects afterwards, I decided it probably isn’t my kind of drug after all.

So there is my brush with salvia story anyway.

22

Obligatory hilarious link: Gardening on Salvia.

“Now, you wanna hold that smoke in until your vision starts to vibrate.”

23

Who wants to party?
I’ve got Jimson/moonflower and Salvia growing in the flower garden.
They were there when I bought the house, I swear!
:eek:

24

Man… this stuff is beginning to sound worse than nutmegging.

25

How to drive on Salvia.

Great denoument!

26

Just like the other psychedelics I’ve tried, my mindset going into the experience seemed to have a great deal with the experience overall. It almost never failed that if I was well rested, stress free, and in a comfortable, safe, secure environment I always had at least an agreeable time. If there was anything troubling going on, if I wasn’t feeling just right, the experiences could range from ho-hum to “MY GOD I CANNOT WAIT FOR THIS TO BE OVER!”

And unlike with some other types, I, too, remember the weird physical sensations with salvia. With most others it was a much more cerebral experience (except for my fascination with the texture of tree bark one time on mushrooms).

27

I thought it was a waste. My skin crawled, and I got an uncomfortable, warm sensation. I didn’t experience any sensory overload or other hallucinogenic effects.

I suspect it hasn’t been made illegal for a reason - if it was any good, the DEA would be all over it.

28

It was exactly like every other illegal drug experience in that it was a very bad thing that I should take care to point out that every sensible person should avoid under any circumstances.

That said, many many years ago (well past the statute of limitations) I used DMT on several occassions, in both synthetic forms acquired on the black market, and also in an organic form made in my kitchen from grass brought home from nearby Burns Bog. It was interesting enough that I did seek to repeat the experience several times.

To select an anecdote specifically intended to illustrate the dangers of this sort of irresponsible behaviour and thereby caution members of this board against it: I once very foolishly took a big hit of DMT at the edge of a swimming pool in the middle of the night. (Do not do this, it was stupid. Clear?) The illuminated surfaces of the pool soon became a fascinating animated fractal pattern, which I went down to examine more closely. This soon became a landscape that I had the impression I was flying over, in open air – surrounded by flocks of birds, no wait, faeries, flying around me and leading me down to a forest. As they circled around me, I had the impression they were trying to tell me something - something important - something they found extremely amusing for me to have forgotten.

One particular faerie, no wait, bird glided in front of me, turned around, and became much more anthropomorphic in order to pantomine… what? What’s that? Louis Armstrong? Sorry, don’t get it. Oh! You’re holding your breath! But you don’t need to breathe, because you’re a faerie, I mean fish. It’s fish schooling around me, not birds flocking. Easy to confuse, the movements are the same. I forgot I was a fish. How could I forget that? Why are you laughing at me like that? Oh, right – I’m not a fish. I’m a human being. At the bottom of a swimming pool. I should breathe soon. Aren’t I breathing now?

I flapped my wings and flew up into the stratosphere, to the edge of the pool, where I found my friends and soon after, my mind.

I could still hear the birds/fish/faeries laughing at me. Stupid human.

29

<Hijack> Uuhh, Whoa!

Salvia’s one thing; Jimson Weed is quite another.

Seriously.

No matter how much of a psychedelic enthusiast you think you are, no matter how bored you are, no matter how much Castenada you’ve read, and no matter who told you you’d be tripping balls, you really do not want to try Jimson Weed. Ever.

You’ll be the sorriest fool on Earth if you do.

I know whereof I speak.

</hijack>

30

Three times.

First was the natural leaf form; I was in the country with some friends who shared an interest in shamanic practices and peculiar vegetation. The fella with the salvia gave us each a leaf to crumble it into a pot pipe. As advised, I tried to burn and inhale the entire leaf in one huge blasting toke and hold it as long as humanly possible.
It was the nastiest tasting smoke I had ever inhaled and did not improve.Inwardly, though, omething subtle but real, happened; I noticed that I was noticing sort of energy-wave patterns emanating from the autumn meadow we were sitting in, and interpreted the visual as seeing the plant’s intelligence or devic presence. Once it was over I thought “meh. maybe it was a hallucinotion, maybe it was real; don’t know, can’t say for sure, wasn’t worth that lungful of burning truck tire.”

Fast forward several years. I had heard plenty, online and in certain magazines, about the wonders and terrors of the various Salvia Divinorum extracts: enough to make me curious. Plus I had trhe idea it was a similar experience to DMT, and I liked DMT. So I bought a gram of 20X extract at a headshop, and a little water pipe to smoke it in. I had the butane torch lighter already.

I waited a few days to try it, out of respect for a new psychoactive and until the circumstances seemed okay to me. I was at my apartment with my amigo Bobby, a huge and very gentle person, and asked him to keep an eye on me --as in, gently but firmly disallow me to climb out the wqindow if I seemed thus inclined.

So I sat down in front of our beautiful aquarium, loaded the one-hit waterpipe with the grainy black stuff, torched it and sucked it all in. It tasted far, far nastier than the untreated leaf! And it burned my throat and chest, too, but I held it in for 30 seconds just like I’d read.

The main thing I was conscious of was that nastiness in my lungs

Exhale – shockwaves! Shockwaves with Lovecraftian undertones!

I didn’t know what was going on but I was certain I did not like it. Everything was skewedf to the left. There was some dreadful knowledsge about always circling back into the furnace and being burned up again. An entity like Grandfather Clock from Captain Kangaroo, but malevolent, was involved somehow. Eithger the drug has an amnesiac effect or my mind blocked the memory of most of the experience right away.

I was scared and disoriented, and not where I’d been sitting when I last noticed. Bobby was holding up one of my stuffed animals, and asking me “Who’s this, Lux?”

“Arfbot” I said; it was that toy dog’s name.

“Who am I, Lux?” he asked. “Bobby” I croaked. "Your friend Bobby. That’s right. You know me…“I realized I was all the way across the room from him, kind of cowering behind a chair.”

“Y’okay, Lux?”

“Think so…now.”

“Jesus, man, from the looks of you, I don’t never want to try any of that shit”

His version: after I exhaled I stretched out my arms like a cross, threw my head back and screamed a loud long horrible scream. Stood up and began creeping around the edges of the room with a very odd look on my face, until I got too close to a window and Bobby said “please don’t go near the window, Lux” at which I looked at him, screamed again-this time, one he thought might fetch the cops – and leapt sideways across the room to where I had just found myself. I had stood there looking frightened and grunting for several minutes, he said, before nhe thought I seemed to be coming back some. And then he showed me Arf-Bot.

Third time was not that dramatic, but also pretty unpleasant.

I do not want any more.

And it wasn’t like DMT at all.

I think the whole appeal of Sal Div is based on the fact that it’s legal while more desirable psychedelics have become all but unobtainable thanks to law enforcement intrusion.

31

Yikes, I have some Salvia extract. I tried it once. Having heard similar stories to those above, I started with a pretty tiny amount. It did not much at all. A few visual effects, but I was looking for them, so it may have been ‘staring too hard eye tricks’. I don’t remember any totally horrible taste, but I also haven’t rushed right back to try a bigger dose.

Someday. It’s all set and setting, and I haven’t run across the right time to try it again.

32

So, in summary, if you’re just out for joyriding, Salvia shouldn’t really be on your itinerary.

If you’re looking for legal psychoactives that provide much more rewarding experiences, plants like San Pedro cactus as well as Mimosa hostilis rootbark are also perfectly legal to order online (in the US, at least). At risk of running afoul of board rules, I can’t tell you exactly how they’re used. I can only say that they are effective and Google is your friend.

33

Of course, it’s worth noting (if you care about that sort of thing) that while they’re legal to buy, they are not legal to consume or prepare for consumption. And the preparation may be more trouble than it’s worth.

34

I tried it once. It was like a five minute acid trip, and when it was over, it was instantly over. If I had known what to expect, I might have enjoyed it more, but while the psychedelic part of it was good, I was too worried about feeling like I was physically debilitated and couldn’t control my limbs to enjoy the mental trip as much as possible. I could actually physically function, we got up and went outside to smoke a cigarette while it was happening, but what I remember about it was that the physical effects were so disorienting as to distract me from me from actively enjoying the hallucinogenic part of it. I might try it one more time if it happened to be available, now that I know what to expect, but I would never go out of my way to seek it out on purpose.

35

Another one-timer.
Very intense for 5 minutes or so. Pretty much out-of-body.
Then sort of a tripping “hangover” for an hour or so.
While it wasn’t “unpleasant”, I hadn’t expected it to be so strong.
Very hard to believe this stuff is legal and sold OTC, and pot is schedule 1.
(Well, I believe this year it became illegal in IL.)

36

I have never tried a hallucinogen, but a good buddy of mine is a real expert so I have heard an earfull over the years. He never mentioned Jimson Weed, so I got curious and looked it up.

Holy crap.

37

I have never seen Jimson Weed, but I once made and consumed a preparation of the closely-related datura inoxia.

I would strongly recommend against this, as well. Actual true hallucination, indistinguishable from reality. My brother dropped by and we had a good long conversation about how concerned he was about me. All seemed very solid and normal, in spite of the tiny detail that he had been dead for over ten years at that point.

Oh, and I was practically blind for a day afterward.

38

A highly unrecommended drug with similar effects is diphenhydramine, a.k.a. Benadryl, in very high doses. A friend and I each took 36 of those suckers when we were teenagers (thanks for the tip, Internet circa 1995! :rolleyes: ). He had to go home before it really kicked in, so I spent the evening alone watching cats I didn’t own stroll by, my ceiling fan lazily drop down, touch the floor, and make its way back up to the ceiling, oh, and my personal favorite, sounds of people who didn’t actually exist breaking into the house at 3 in the morning.

The most terrifying thing about it, though, is that unlike every other drug I ever tried, all of these hallucinations seemed perfectly real - it was impossible to tell what my mind was conjuring and what was actually there.

It sounds interesting, and in a sense I guess it was, but it’s not something I’d ever recommend to anyone. You feel like yourself, but do things you’d never do. When I woke up the next day, I found that not only did I have a piss-soaked mattress (yuck), but that I’d been pulling matches out of a matchbook, crumpling them up, stuffing them in my bong, and smoking them! And you don’t really feel high at all; to be honest, I felt quite miserable and I was extremely tired (in addition to being in Benardryl, diphenhydramine is the “PM” in Tylenol PM) but unable to fall asleep.

And my friend who took the same amount I did? I didn’t see him for three days. Turns out he’d been in the hospital. Despite not having a history of epilepsy or anything else that could cause it, he had a seizure about an hour after taking the Benadryl.

39

Interesting thread. I’m actually growing a salvia divinorum plant. Got it last summer for novelty’s sake. Never used it, never would. I’ve got anxiety problems so no way I’d play with something like that. I haven’t even allowed a doctor to prescribe me anything in five years.

40

Salvia is very strange. My first hit tasted terrible and came on like a bulldozer. I closed my eyes and saw a painted scene of a tree-lined avenue. I peered at this image and realised it was made of hundreds of multi-coloured scottie dogs. I laughed uncontrollably and my legs and arms felt very heavy, as though I was wearing Water Wings made of cement.