Archive for May, 2009

Letter received from a www.salviadragon.com customer:

I have smoked Salvia a few times when I was younger and didn’t know what the real purpose of it was.
I used it as a fun thing to do. But now years later I felt like it was calling me back and wanted me to truly understand and experience it. So I ordered it and received it rather quickly from Salvia Dragon. I went to my room, read the “how to use” part of the site and followed the instructions. Skipping ahead to the good stuff. I took a hit and held it in for about 20secs and I felt the same familiar feeling from years before. I exhaled and immediately took another hit. This one was a huge hit. I cleared the pipe and barely had time to put it down and exhale before I was taken on my trip…

The Room began to dissolve into a blackness. I was immediately taken to a place where there where a bunch of figures headed into a great bright tunnel. At the end of the tunnel was a beautiful garden. Full of colors that I have never seen and can not describe though not for lack of trying. These figures all seemed happy and peaceful. I remember that I wanted to go with them I wanted to fill that happy an loved. But I couldn’t not. They said I could not go with them, I asked “why?” They pointed down and I could see my body lying on my bed. They said I couldn’t go because I still have my body and where they were going there was no coming back. I begged and begged and began to cry. I wanted to go so bad but they insisted that it wasn’t my time. That I would be able to go with them someday just not now. Then the garden began to go farther and farther away suddenly I was in a dark room there were leaky pipes on the wall. It was like a basement, I saw my father (who had passed) He showed me my life and showed me how all the things I do, such as Sex, eating, watching TV., playing games, all my emotions, everything were all just masks. They all existed to distract me and keep me from feeling what I should be feeling. Its kind of hard to explain but It was like our bodies are protecting us from feeling the sadness of not being able to be in that loving peaceful garden. So it creates all these situation to keep us busy while here on earth. I cried really hard.

Then I felt myself coming back down to my body. I opened my eyes which were soaked from my tears. I felt peaceful, like a huge burden had been lifted from me. My eyes still tear up when I think of that garden.

I can’t thank Salvia Dragon enough, for helping me get to that place that I will never forget.

If you are a scientist interested in the effect on hallucinogenic substances on the human brain, then you’re probably interested in the research that is going on over the world relating to the naturally occurring – and completely legal – hallucinogenic plant Salvia Divinorum. Salvia – or Sally D or Magic Mint as it is also known – is a plant that grows in Mexico. It has been used by the Mazatec Mexican shamans to help with the expansion of their spirituality for many many years.

If it can help to expand the spirituality of the Mexican Shamans, then what else can it do for us? This is the question that scientists really are desperate to know the answer to. The way that Salvia effects the brain is unique, you see, and there really is so very little known about it that the world has no idea as to the short or long term effects of Salvia usage.

In some ways this lack of knowledge could be one to cause alarm, in others it is a world of rich opportunities: some scientists, for instance, have discovered that the way Salvia causes the brain to react can be used to help find out just what is going on in there when a patient suffers from a degenerative mental illness like Alzheimer’s or other mental problems.

Scientists are really interested in the hallucinogenic Salvia for a wide variety of reasons: mostly though it is just because they don’t know much about it and it is the curiosity that drives them to want to know more.

One of the less scientific tests that I have seen recently revolves around the investigation of how people felt after the crazy Salvia trip had taken hold and then gone. The results were interesting and were most certainly varied.

Over 40% of respondents claimed an improved mood after the trip; 12% claimed an inability to concentrate properly, and a massive 47% of people interviewed claimed to have had increased insight and connection with the Universe. That certainly is interesting, but I’m not sure that it is something that I would want to define quantitatively in a scientific context.

There were an impressive number of positive benefits resulting from the use of Salvia and this makes a mockery – if a mockery were not being made already – of the claims by so many lobbyists and politicians that Sally D is dangerous. Not only is there absolutely no evidence to back this up at all, but the only evidence there is points to the contrary opinion!

I saw the results of an interesting test recently. The test was far from scientific in so many ways, but what it did was attempt to quantify just what it was that Salvia made you feel when you took it. Perhaps unsurprisingly to anyone that has tried Salvia more than once, the results were varied.

Some people thought that Salvia made their concentration decrease; others claimed that it actually increased concentration. Some felt relaxed while others ended up agitated. A lot of people claimed that Salvia helped to increase their feeling of connection with the Universe, but I’m really not sure what that means, so I won’t be reading too much into it!

The fact is that Salvia is a completely subjective drug; if you take it twice then you will have two different experiences. If you take it on your own you will have a different experience than what you would have if you were to take it with another person. The trip is affected by the amount you take and how quickly it affects you… and so on. I strongly suspect that if the respondents in this case were to undertake the interview after taking Salvia again then their responses would be completely different!

I am a regular Salvia user and I am thrilled to hear that scientists are really interested in my favourite hallucinogenic drug. I thought that this might mean that the US government and the state politicians would reconsider the many moves that are afoot to ban the substance from use. I was wrong, of course.

But it is still a good thing, and it should help to win Salvia some support from those individual people that have not yet been brainwashed by lawmakers and the media. The brainwashing is really quite an irrational thing and it smells to me a lot like posturing in order win political points. But hey, what do I know, I’m only a long time user.

I support the continued legality of Salvia not just because I enjoy using it; my reasons, thankfully, are slightly more involved than that. Think of it this way: banning something like Salvia that has always been legal – in fact has been totally overlooked by the law until very recently – starts a terrible precedent of the Government willingly taking our civil liberties from us. Where does it end?

The other reason is that those scientists and doctors that I spoke about earlier need the law on their side to be able to complete their research.

Those crazy scientists are motivated by many things. In a lot of cases, though, it’s pure curiosity. And so it is with Salvia Divinorum: not a great deal is known about this naturally occurring hallucinogenic plant and scientists feel that it is their duty to learn more about it. Good for them, and good for us if, as suspected, Salvia can bring some benefits other than the obvious fantastic trips.

You see there is just nothing known about the long and short term effects of Salvia because it is so fundamentally different to other types of drugs and even other hallucinogenics like LSD. Many people say that Salvia is like LSD or Marijuana but it genuinely isn’t. People who say this are either mistaken or are intentionally trying to mislead those that are unfortunate enough to pay attention.

That these same scientists are trying to perform experiments with willing human subjects then is no surprise. Many people will jump at the chance to get high on Salvia: there doesn’t really need to be any medical benefit to the process! The research isn’t frivolous and certainly isn’t just blindly academic: scientists believe that Salvia could be used to help in the understanding and treatment of Alzheimer’s and other degenerative mental illnesses.

Scientists are crazy — literally crazy in some cases — and they do get interested by a lot of strange things. Sometimes the things that they get interested in seem to have little or no application to the real world. Others have an immediate, obvious and direct application to real world problems that we may experience every day.

Salvia is one of the things that is exciting the scientific world at the moment. On the one had we have a completely theoretical problem of working out how Salvia effects the brain in the way it does. On the other we have the very real possibility of that Salvia — and more accurately the way Salvia affects us — can be used to help us learn more about degenerative mental illnesses like Alzheimer’s and other psychological problems.

Cures to these things may be only a pipe dream but there is the chance that we can learn something that will point us in the right direction for more effective treatment and research on these terrible afflictions.

Scientists finding willing subjects isn’t a great surprise since everyone loves to get high. There is no shortage of volunteers at Universities and colleges! Try getting volunteers when Salvia is banned, though. That is going to be difficult.

Salvia is an exciting substance in many ways. Not only is it exciting to those that enjoy taking it and experiencing the highs it can give, but also those who want to find out more about this mysterious plant.

Despite being around for many years – and being used as an hallucinogenic drug for this time, too – there is still very little known about it, about how it affects the human brain and, most importantly, the short and long term effects of the drug on the human body and mind. For the moment scientists are scrambling to research Salvia Divinorum because, in a fit of irrational fear and misunderstanding, lawmakers are looking to ban Salvia from the US. When this happens future research plans will largely be moot and we will never be any wiser about the plant or about its potential benefits.

I talk of potential benefits and it might sound like fancy talk from someone who has taken the drug and enjoyed it. It is not just fancy talk: scientists are genuinely hopeful that they will learn something from Salvia that can help in their research of mental illness and disease. It would be sad to see that kind of opportunity shelved.

As an avid Salvia user I really am pleased by the news that there is some possibility — however remote — that Salvia can be used for the common good. Of course I am pleased that it can have a positive effect on people but also I am hopeful that this possibility will make the US Government think again about banning Salvia as a hallucinogenic drug.

I don’t hold much by my hopes and dreams in this case, mind, but you have to dream, don’t you?
Still, the medical question is starting to gain some momentum, and people who previously were dead against Salvia’s legal status have started to question their motives for wanting it banned. Usually these motives do not stand up to scrutiny and I predict we’ll see growing support from prominent medical, scientific and political figures in the months to come.

The banning of Salvia seems, to me, to be a pretty insane move. At best, it is a misguided and ill advised attempt to save us from ourselves, and at worst it is an attack on our civil liberties purely for the purposes of gaining an easy, opposition free vote. Salvia has been with us — and has been used as a drug — for hundreds of years. Why ban it now?

Some scientific tests are more interesting from a common interest point of view than they are from a scientific point of view. So it is with the latest research on the effects of Salvia on the human mind.

Hundreds of respondents were asked to describe how Salvia made them feel. The reference points were before and after the Salvia trip. You guessed, it: there were some pretty crazy answers to the scientists’ questions.

The answers that respondents gave ranged from the obvious “Salvia makes me feel a little strange” to the frankly disturbing: “Salvia increases my connection with the Universe”. Hang on… what? More amazing than the comment itself is the number of respondents that gave this as an answer: think high forty percent.

That the investigation into the effects of Salvia gave such varying results doesn’t surprise me at all. As a user myself I can almost guarantee that the trip I get on any one day is going to be completely different to that which I feel in the same circumstances on another day — even when everything else appears the same.

The thing is, when you think about it as a subjective thing, the experiment would yield completely different answers from the same respondents on a different day. Science? No. Nice report? Sure.