Salvia, can be a very dangerous drug. People don’t understand the effect that this may have. Please be cautious when attempting to to use this drug. Salvia can be right for some people but wrong for others. Use common sense when attempting to alter your mind with this drug called salvia.
Back of beyond in the mountains of northern Oaxaca, Huautla has had a far bigger impact on Western civilization than vice versa. Its valleys are a cornucopia of rare flora and fungi with strange powers, and its ”magic mushrooms” ignited the psychedelic culture of the 1960’s.
The town has 35,000 people, two restaurants, one bar, called the Cup of Forgetfulness, and not a single Lava lamp. But without Huautla (pronounced WOW-tla), a generation of Americans might never have turned on, dropped out or played a Beatles record backward.
Now a second wave of trips to Huautla’s high hills is being set off by a mind-bending mint called Salvia divinorum, a little-understood plant unique to these parts.
After the price of local coffee beans collapsed from the forces of free trade, farmers here turned to cultivating the salvia for a global market. Its leaves are sold, legally, on Internet sites in the United States and Europe, at prices ranging from $40 to $120 an ounce. Foreign tourists are coming to Huautla to experience it on their own — to the dismay of the tribal priestesses who know it, and other hallucinogens, intimately.
For centuries, the Mazatec Indians who live here have used psilocybin mushrooms in ceremonies combining Catholic and indigenous rituals, conducted only at night, before homemade altars adorned with 13 flickering candles and the images of saints. They call the mushrooms ”God’s flesh.”
”They have the power to cure, to heal, to deliver understanding,” said Aurelia Aurora Catarino, 56, one of Huautla’s leading curanderas, or shamans. ”They are not a drug. They are a sacrament.”
In 1955, after decades of searching, a somewhat obsessed mushroom hunter named R. Gordon Wasson, a New York banker, flew here in a private plane. He talked his way into a few mouthfuls of the mushrooms, and soon was seeing ”resplendent palaces all laid over with semiprecious stones.”
Unknown to Mr. Wasson, the Central Intelligence Agency was hot on his heels. The agency had a secret program to discover and develop drugs that could be used as mind-control weapons. Its spies heard about Mr. Wasson’s trip and sent an operative to infiltrate his group.
In 1957, Life magazine published a 17-page spread written by Mr. Wasson about his voyages up to Huautla and into inner space. Millions read the piece, including a Harvard professor named Timothy Leary.
Dr. Leary raced down to Mexico and soon set up the Harvard Psilocybin Project, turning on colleagues, students and friends like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. By the time the United States outlawed psychedelic drugs like psilocybin in 1966, scholars say, more than one million people had taken them.
In the 1960’s, thousands of Americans on psilocybin pilgrimages made their way up the newly built road to Huautla, a glorified goat path that climbs 45 miles and 378 hairpin turns from the two-lane highway below. There were Beatles songs playing in the streets, remembers Henry Munn, an anthroplogist who first visited in 1965.
But ‘’some of these foreigners came here without any respect for the sacraments,” Ms. Catarino said. They still tell the tale in Huautla of the marijuana-smoking, mescal-swigging, mushroom-addled hippie who chased a live turkey down the street trying to eat it whole.
The Mexican Army set up a blockade on the road to Huautla from 1969 to 1976. But recently the flow of foreigners has revived, with hundreds of outsiders, mostly well-heeled Europeans, seeking permission to take part in psilocybin ceremonies each year.
Now salvia-seeking tourists and marketers are also on the road to Huautla. Once again Mr. Wasson, a vice president of J. P. Morgan & Company who died in 1986, was the first to describe the powers of salvia (a cousin of the sage grown in the United States), 40 years ago in a little-read monograph.
The plant, which grows naturally only around Huautla, has an active ingredient, salvinorum, whose effects on the mind are not understood in the slightest by scientists.
”The leaves are much more powerful than the mushrooms,” said Ms. Catarino, who uses salvia outside mushroom season. She strongly disapproves of taking salvia anywhere but in the strictly controlled ceremonies she conducts, which require prior abstinence from sex, alcohol and other temptations.
Those who have sampled salvia report experiences both mystical and terrifying.
Kathleen Harrison, a California ethnobotanist who ate salvia leaves in a traditional ceremony near Huautla, described being transported into ”the presence of a great female being, a 20-foot-high woman,” and feeling like a plant in this spirit’s garden.
Daniel Siebert, another California ethnobotanist, had a different reaction to a concentrated extract of salvinorum. Reporting on a scholarly Web site he maintains on the plant, www.sagewisdom.org, he said it plunged him into ”a confused, fast-moving state of consciousness with absolutely no idea where my body or for that matter my universe had gone.”
”It is tearing apart the fabric of existence,” he wrote under its influence. ”It is madness.” His Web site recommends using salvia only with a sober companion so as not to ”physically injure yourself” while intoxicated.
Ms. Catarino said: ”Foreigners come here without thinking, looking for a cure from reality. The purpose of these sacraments is to purify, and to open the road. When it opens, it’s as clear as the blue sky, and the stars at night are as bright as suns.”
”But in the wrong hands, it can be a disaster,” she said. ”It can send people to hell.”
Photo: Aurelia Aurora Catarina, a curandera, or shaman, held a handful of Salvia divinorum while talking about the trancelike state it induces. (Tim Weiner/The New York Times) Map of Mexico highlighting Huautla de Jiménez: Salvia divinorum grows naturally only around Huautla in Mexico.
BEFORE voting Tuesday to ban the sale and possession of the hallucinogenic drug Salvia divinorum, Lynne C. Nowick, a Suffolk County legislator, showed her colleagues two videos posted on YouTube.
In the first, a teenager waves his left arm while seated and staring blankly as someone else laughs. A voice in the background attributes the boy’s actions to Salvia. In the second video, a teenager appearing to be in a daze after smoking Salvia is encouraged to sit down. He does, and minutes later crawls along the floor on all fours.
Ms. Nowick, a Smithtown Republican, sponsored the bill to ban Salvia divinorum (pronounced SAL-vee-ah dee-vin-OR-um), which is inexpensive, easily accessible and legal in most of the country.
She said she began researching the drug a year ago after seeing a news report about a 17-year-old Delaware high school student who committed suicide in 2006 after smoking Salvia. The medical examiner ruled that Salvia divinorum contributed to the boy’s death, and Delaware lawmakers banned the drug.
The Suffolk County law, which was passed, 17 to 0, includes penalties of up to a $1,000 fine and a year in prison. Steve Levy, the county executive, said he would sign the ban into law after conducting a public hearing within the next 30 days. It would become effective immediately.
According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Salvia divinorum is a perennial plant native to Oaxaca, Mexico. Salvia divinorum, an herb similar to the sage plant, has large green leaves that when smoked or chewed induce ”mystical or hallucinogenic experiences,” the agency says.
Until now, Salvia divinorum has been sold on the Internet and in several smoke shops in Suffolk, the Suffolk County Police said. Susan E. Eckert, an aide in Ms. Nowick’s office, said she bought about a half-ounce of it Feb. 27 for $15 plus tax at a store in Commack.
Krista R. Whitman, a chemical dependency coordinator at the Pederson-Krag Center in Smithtown, an outpatient behavioral health and chemical dependency treatment center, said teenagers as young as 13 began reporting their use of Salvia divinorum about two years ago.
”We have noticed that adolescents are using it frequently because it is legal and it can’t be detected in urine drug screenings,” she said. She said the highs are strongest in the first few minutes.
Ms. Whitman said that since the beginning of 2006, there has been a 30 to 40 percent increase in Salvia use by those treated at her agency. ”It went from something we didn’t even think to screen for to something we now ask all the kids about,” she said.
Dr. Humayun J. Chaudhry, commissioner of the Suffolk Department of Health Services, said Salvia divinorum has no medicinal use.
Although there are no federal restrictions on the sale or possession of Salvia divinorum, a growing number of states and countries are clamping down. The federal Justice Department said seven states and eight nations had placed controls on Salvia divinorum or Salvinorin A, the plant’s active component, and a dozen states, including New York, were considering restrictions.
Anthony T. Ferrandino, a drug and alcohol counselor in the Northport-East Northport School District, said he recently began asking students if they used Salvia.
”Several of the kids admitted experimenting with it, and one kid described the high,” Mr. Ferrandino recalled. ”He said it was like an out-of-body experience — like he was in an altered reality state. He said it lasted 15 minutes.”
Maureen Rossi, president of Kings Park in the kNOw, a group of 20 residents formed to educate parents and children about the dangers of substance abuse, said that although the use of Salvia divinorum ”is not a huge problem here, some kids have used it.”
”Just look at YouTube,” she said. ”Will this law keep Suffolk County teenagers from using Salvia? No, because they can still buy it on the Internet. But at the end of the day, it creates an important dialogue and is a step in the right direction.”
DALLAS — With a friend videotaping, 27-year-old Christopher Lenzini of Dallas took a hit of Salvia divinorum, regarded as the world’s most potent hallucinogenic herb, and soon began to imagine, he said, that he was in a boat with little green men. Mr. Lenzini quickly collapsed to the floor and dissolved into convulsive laughter.
Nathan K. calls his use of salvia “just a very gentle letting go, a very gentle relaxing.”
Brian D. Arthur is founder of Mazatec Garden, which sells salvia and other herbs online.
Readers’ Comments
“Adults should be able to put in their own body what they will as long as they accept the responsibility for their actions.”
Tom Paine, Windham, NH
When he posted the video on YouTube this summer, friends could not get enough. “It’s just funny to see a friend act like a total idiot,” he said, “so everybody loved it.”
Until a decade ago, the use of salvia was largely limited to those seeking revelation under the tutelage of Mazatec shamans in its native Oaxaca, Mexico.
Today, this mind-altering member of the mint family is broadly available for lawful sale online and in head shops across the United States.
Though older Americans typically have never heard of salvia, the psychoactive sage has become something of a phenomenon among this country’s thrill-seeking youth.
More than 5,000 YouTube videos — equal parts “Jackass” and “Up in Smoke” — document their journeys into rubber-legged incoherence.
Some of the videos have been viewed half a million times.
Yet these very images that have helped popularize salvia may also hasten its demise and undermine the promising research into its possible medical uses.
Pharmacologists who believe salvia could open new frontiers for the treatment of addiction, depression and pain fear that its criminalization would make it burdensome to obtain and store the plant, and difficult to gain government permission for tests on human subjects. In state after state, however, including here in Texas, the YouTube videos have become Exhibit A in legislative efforts to regulate salvia. This year, Florida made possession or sale a felony punishable by 15 years in prison. California took a gentler approach by making it a misdemeanor to sell or distribute to minors.
“When you see it, well, it sure makes a believer out of you,” said Representative Charles Anderson of Waco, a Republican state lawmaker who is sponsoring one of several bills to ban salvia in Texas.
When the federal government this year published its first estimates of salvia use, the data astonished many: some 1.8 million people had tried it in their lifetimes, including 750,000 in the previous year. Among males 18 to 25, where consumption is heaviest, nearly 3 percent reported using salvia in the previous year, making it twice as prevalent as LSD and nearly as popular as Ecstasy.
Recent studies at college campuses on both coasts have yielded estimates as high as 7 percent. The herb’s presence on military ships and bases has prompted enough concern about readiness that the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology was asked to develop the first urinalysis for salvia and is now testing 50 samples a month.
Though research is young and little is known about long-term effects, there are no studies suggesting that salvia is addictive or its users prone to overdose or abuse. Indeed, a salvia experience can be so intense, and at times so unsettling, that many try it just once, and even devotees use it sparingly.
Reports of salvia-related emergency room admissions are virtually nonexistent, likely because its effects typically vanish in just a few minutes.
With little data at its disposal, the Drug Enforcement Administration has spent more than a decade studying whether to add salvia to its list of controlled substances, as is the case in several European and Asian countries. In the meantime, 13 states and several local governments have banned or otherwise regulated the plant and its chemically enhanced extracts.
Known on the street by nicknames like Sally D and Magic Mint, salvia can have vastly different effects depending on dose, potency and the mindset and tolerance of its users, according to researchers and experienced smokers (though bitter, it can also be chewed or consumed as a tincture). Dozens of online vendors sell mild extracts for as little as $5 a gram; the strongest, at up to 100 times the potency of the raw leaf, sell for more than $50.
Users often report a sudden dissociation from self, as if traveling through time. The experience tends to be solitary, introspective and sometimes fearful: a 2003 bulletin from the Department of Justice concluded that salvia was unlikely ever to become a party drug.
“I’ve used several psychedelics, and salvia’s definitely the most intense experience that I’ve had,” said Brian D. Arthur, founder of Mazatec Garden, which sells salvia and other herbs online from a nondescript house in Houston. “Salvia takes you out of the world and puts you in a different place.”
Regular users say it can be a restorative, even spiritual tonic, and recall their visualizations with precision.
We came across this remarkable news story from the Canadian town of Trail, where a local pawnshop was summoned by the city to cease the sales of salvia divinorum, because of ‘concerns’.
“Informed by Trail RCMP, Trail city council decided it was in the best interest of residents to proceed on a cautionary basis, asking LeMoel to take the drug off the shelf.
“The city is concerned that salvia may be a hallucinogenic substance potentially harmful to the public, and as such, it is felt that the sale of the product should be restricted,” explained Trail administrator Michelle Ferraro. “(Casey) LeMoel was asked to cease the sale of the product from his new and used shop. Failing compliance, the matter would have been advanced to council to consider the suspension or cancellation of his business license.”
In other words, if the owner of the pawnshop would not comply, the city would take his business license – for selling a product that is 100% legal? How does that make sense? Are they after the local supermarket too, for selling glue? And what about liquor stores?
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