Program Notes
Guest speaker: Daniel Siebert
05:44 Daniel tells the story about finding a Salvia plant at a Terence McKenna lecture.
12:06 He describes the traditional Mazatec way of taking Salvia divinorum.
24:39 Daniel talks about the various categories of experiences that are possible through the use of Salvia Divinorum.
25:25 “One of the more common types of experiences people have is often people have visions of places that are reminiscent of early childhood, places like school playgrounds or the back yard of their parents’ house where they lived when they were six or seven years old.”
28:49 Daniel talks about his isolation of the active ingredient in Salvia Divinorum.
31:51 “In general, when taken in the traditional fashion of chewing the leaves, the effects are gentle, the onset is gradual, the experience is enriching and it can be utilized in a very controlled, directed, conscientious manner.”
43:18 Daniel talks about the varying amounts of time a Salvia experience can last depending upon dosage and method of use.
50:40 A discussion about the current legal status of Salvia.
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Daniel Siebert’s Web site www.SageWisdom.org
“Salvia divinorum and Salvinorin A: new pharmacologic findings” (PDF file) by Daniel J. Siebert
Legal Status Of Salvia divinorum
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:21 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:25 ►
So, how are you today? I hope your weather isn’t causing you to feel a bit down, unless
00:00:31 ►
of course you live south of the equator, in which case I guess you’re about to begin experiencing
00:00:37 ►
fall weather before long. And that’s my favorite time of year, actually. But if you’re still
00:00:42 ►
out there shoveling snow or wondering if the sun will ever come back,
00:00:46 ►
well, take heart, because spring is going to be here before you know it.
00:00:50 ►
Here in Southern California, we’ve had several days of rain now,
00:00:54 ►
but the water is so badly needed that I haven’t heard anyone complaining about the rain.
00:01:00 ►
It’s not seeing the sun that affects me.
00:01:03 ►
Until I moved here, I’d more or less taken the sun for granted.
00:01:07 ►
But now that I’m used to having almost every day of the year sunny,
00:01:11 ►
it only takes a day or two without it to get me kind of depressed.
00:01:16 ►
But just now, right now as I’m recording this,
00:01:19 ►
the sun just has broken through the clouds and it’s shining in all its glory.
00:01:24 ►
So I guess I’d better get on with this program so I can go outside and play.
00:01:28 ►
Now if you’re a regular listener of the Sea Realm, the Sounds of Worldwide Weed, or the
00:01:33 ►
Dopecast, you know that lately there’s been a lot of email activity discussing Salvia
00:01:38 ►
Divinorum.
00:01:40 ►
Also, I’ve received quite a few emails myself asking for a salvia program, and so I got a hold of my friend Daniel Sievert, who, as I think you’ll learn from today’s program, is perhaps the single most important link between the traditional use of salvia and today’s more powerful experience of the plant through the use of the extract of its active ingredient, Salvinorin A.
00:02:03 ►
of the extract of its active ingredient, salvinorin A.
00:02:07 ►
Until Daniel came along, salvia wasn’t considered to be all that interesting by many people in the psychedelic community.
00:02:10 ►
But all that changed when salvia sought out and found Daniel Siebert.
00:02:15 ►
I guess that may be a bit poetic, but you’ll see where I get that in just a minute
00:02:19 ►
when you hear my conversation with him.
00:02:21 ►
I’m going to begin where we were talking about the fact that it had been quite a while since we’d seen one another,
00:02:28 ►
and then we’ll get into our discussion about Salvia Divinorum.
00:02:34 ►
I was hoping I could have found time to get together with you when I was down in San Diego recently,
00:02:40 ►
but I just didn’t have any spare time to make it over there.
00:02:44 ►
Yeah, I’d love to get back together with you face-to-face again sometime soon.
00:02:48 ►
It’s been far too long.
00:02:50 ►
Yeah, I don’t know where the time goes.
00:02:52 ►
I don’t know.
00:02:54 ►
When you’re having a good time, you know.
00:02:57 ►
So, you know, there’s so much to talk about here,
00:03:01 ►
and both your name and your website, sagewisdom.org,
00:03:06 ►
has popped up in a lot of emails that they’ve received on the Cannabis Podcast Network,
00:03:12 ►
and I know KMO does podcasts over in the Sea Realm,
00:03:16 ►
and he and I were just talking this morning, in fact, and he’s familiar with your site.
00:03:21 ►
I guess, you know, for years I’ve known you kind of as the go-to guy for information about salvia,
00:03:28 ►
but I’ve never asked you how you got into it in the beginning.
00:03:31 ►
How did this all start for you?
00:03:34 ►
Oh, boy, I don’t know where a good place to begin that story is, but let’s see.
00:03:41 ►
Well, it really first started, I first became aware of salvia in reading books about psychoactive plants.
00:03:48 ►
When I was a teenager, I was interested in psychedelics particularly, and was reading books about them.
00:03:58 ►
And then I came across a mention of salvia back in mid-’70s.
00:04:07 ►
And, you know, it sounded interesting.
00:04:12 ►
It was very obscure back then, and hardly any Westerners had tried it.
00:04:16 ►
It was really almost used exclusively by the Mazatec Indians.
00:04:23 ►
But so I heard about it, but it was obscure and difficult to obtain in this country. There were a few people who had plants from botanical gardens and few private individuals,
00:04:28 ►
but it wasn’t readily available commercially.
00:04:32 ►
So I just didn’t have another opportunity to look into it further until many years later,
00:04:39 ►
sometime in the late 90s.
00:04:41 ►
I came across it again and came across a couple of people who had tried it.
00:04:47 ►
Terrence McKenna’s ex-wife, Kat Harrison,
00:04:51 ►
had tried the leaves once with Ralph Metzner in Hawaii,
00:04:56 ►
and she told me about her experience, which was underwhelming.
00:05:01 ►
She basically didn’t have much of an effect,
00:05:03 ►
and it was so subtle that she kind of wondered whether it really
00:05:06 ►
did anything. And a few
00:05:09 ►
other people I had talked to
00:05:10 ►
who had tried salvia had the same
00:05:13 ►
experience. They said, well,
00:05:14 ►
I’m not sure it really does anything.
00:05:18 ►
So
00:05:18 ►
that was my first
00:05:20 ►
early exposure to it.
00:05:22 ►
It was this up-here plant that
00:05:24 ►
was rumored to be a hallucinogen,
00:05:27 ►
but apparently didn’t really do much.
00:05:31 ►
And that was the reputation it had in the sort of psychedelic community.
00:05:38 ►
But not many people had tried it,
00:05:39 ►
so these reports were few and far between.
00:05:44 ►
And one day at a Terence McKenna lecture I went to, I think it was in Hermosa Beach,
00:05:51 ►
someone in the audience was carrying a potted salvia divinorum plant.
00:05:56 ►
And I had recognized the plant because I had managed to obtain one from a specialty plant grower a couple years previously.
00:06:06 ►
But the plant arrived in the mail and was severely wilted when I opened the package,
00:06:13 ►
and it just died within a few days.
00:06:15 ►
It was traumatized from rough handling during shipment.
00:06:20 ►
And so it only lived for, well, it was almost dead when I got it.
00:06:25 ►
So I’d seen the plant, and I’d seen pictures of it in some books.
00:06:29 ►
So I recognized this plant that this guy was carrying at Terrence’s lecture.
00:06:34 ►
And I went up to him and said, oh, I know what that plant is.
00:06:37 ►
I tried to grow that once.
00:06:40 ►
And he said, oh, well, you know, I’ve been having good success growing it,
00:06:44 ►
and I just bought this because it was an extra.
00:06:46 ►
I thought I’d share it with people here if anyone was interested.
00:06:50 ►
And so he snapped off a branch and handed it to me so I could root it and try again to grow it.
00:06:59 ►
So that’s what I did.
00:07:00 ►
I brought it home.
00:07:01 ►
By the time I got home, it had been sitting in a hot car for a few hours, and it was completely wilted.
00:07:09 ►
I thought, there’s no way this is going to survive, but I stuck it in some water, and it revived and rooted, and I grew it for about a year.
00:07:25 ►
much interest in trying it because now that I had a plant growing, I had asked around more people and tried to get some more information about it and read what there was to read about
00:07:29 ►
it, which wasn’t much at that point.
00:07:33 ►
And the more I learned about it, the less interesting it seemed.
00:07:37 ►
It really sounded like it just wasn’t really worth the trouble that there are other mind-altering
00:07:42 ►
plants that were more worthwhile.
00:07:45 ►
So I grew it mostly out of curiosity.
00:07:48 ►
But one day, the plant had gotten about 7 or 8 feet tall
00:07:54 ►
and was bumping up against the roof of this little greenhouse I had in my backyard at the time.
00:08:00 ►
And it had a severe infestation of scale insects all over its stems.
00:08:06 ►
So I decided, well, I’ve got to get this out of the greenhouse,
00:08:11 ►
and I’ve got to try and get these scale insects off.
00:08:13 ►
And it’s sort of crowded in the corner of the greenhouse.
00:08:16 ►
It clearly needed to be moved and attended to.
00:08:19 ►
And so I lifted the pot up to take it out the door,
00:08:23 ►
And so I lifted the pot up to take it out the door.
00:08:32 ►
And when I moved the pot, the plant just leaned over and broke off right at the base.
00:08:35 ►
So I had basically just, you know, killed my plant.
00:08:41 ►
But I thought, well, you know, what am I going to do with this?
00:08:47 ►
Well, I’ll try and salvage some cuttings and try and reestablish some plants from cuttings. So I took a few cuttings from some of the healthier pieces,
00:08:50 ►
but I was still left with a lot of material
00:08:53 ►
that was just going to go in the compost heap.
00:08:56 ►
And I decided, well, it’s a shame to throw all this stuff away.
00:09:00 ►
Maybe I should save some of the leaves
00:09:02 ►
and try and find time to try it.
00:09:05 ►
So I put the leaves in a plastic bag and stuck them in the refrigerator
00:09:10 ►
and waited until I had time to schedule an experiment with them.
00:09:18 ►
At that time, it was commonly believed that the leaves only worked when they were taken fresh
00:09:24 ►
and that they had to be taken orally.
00:09:28 ►
It was thought that the active constituent, which wasn’t really identified with any certainty at the time,
00:09:35 ►
it was thought that whatever the psychoactive constituent was, that it was something that was very unstable because previous attempts by Albert Hoffman, Jose Diaz, and others were unsuccessful in isolating an active constituent from the plant.
00:09:52 ►
And they assumed that, well, that was because whatever it was was very unstable.
00:09:59 ►
And this implied that drying the leaves would make them inactive.
00:10:04 ►
And reports from the Mazatecs also indicated that that was the case.
00:10:09 ►
They claimed that the leaves only work when fresh.
00:10:12 ►
They never dried the leaves for smoking or anything.
00:10:15 ►
They just eat the leaves fresh.
00:10:19 ►
So I saved the leaves fresh in the refrigerator.
00:10:30 ►
So I saved the leaves fresh in the refrigerator, and about a week later, I got together with a good friend of mine and my girlfriend as well,
00:10:33 ►
and the three of us decided to eat these leaves.
00:10:39 ►
Yeah, well, while I was growing the plant, I was researching it and trying to find out about it, and most of what I had learned gave me an impression that it really wasn’t worth bothering with.
00:10:46 ►
It’s sort of an interesting plant that supposedly had some mild hallucinogenic effects.
00:10:51 ►
But there’s a lot of plants out there that are reported to have some kind of hallucinogenic or mind-altering effects.
00:10:58 ►
But most of them either have a lot of undesirable side effects or the effects are not really properly considered hallucinogens.
00:11:09 ►
They’re more like sedatives or stimulants.
00:11:13 ►
Sometimes these plants have been categorized as psychoactive plants
00:11:18 ►
in books on hallucinogens,
00:11:20 ►
but often that information isn’t very accurate.
00:11:24 ►
And I was starting to believe that that was the case with Salvia divinorum from the reports that I’d heard.
00:11:30 ►
But I did hear this one report about an experience that Brett Blosser had had in the Mazatec region in Mexico.
00:11:40 ►
And he had apparently a fairly profound experience taking Salvia de venorm leaves with a Mazatec shaman.
00:11:48 ►
And I didn’t know Brett at the time.
00:11:50 ►
I do now, but at the time,
00:11:53 ►
I heard this story through Kathleen Harrison
00:11:56 ►
and Terrence McKenna, who were friends with Brett.
00:12:01 ►
And so they told me about Brett’s experience,
00:12:04 ►
and the information that
00:12:08 ►
I received was that Brett had taken 13 pairs of large leaves and he was instructed to roll
00:12:17 ►
them up in a little bundle, like a cigar-shaped bundle, and just chew and chew well and swallow
00:12:23 ►
each mouthful of leaves
00:12:25 ►
until he got to the end of this pile of leaves.
00:12:28 ►
So since this was the only person who I’d heard of who had had any significant effect,
00:12:34 ►
I decided, well, I should emulate the method he was instructed to use.
00:12:39 ►
So anyway, I don’t know if you want to hear more about Brett’s experience,
00:12:46 ►
but I don’t want to get too sidetracked here.
00:12:51 ►
Just take it any way you want to go.
00:12:53 ►
It’s a fascinating story.
00:12:54 ►
I’m really enjoying it myself.
00:12:56 ►
Right.
00:12:57 ►
Well, I’ll just make sure I get back to the main point.
00:13:01 ►
Brett was traveling in Mexico
00:13:05 ►
on a speedlinking expedition at the time.
00:13:07 ►
He’s an anthropologist by training,
00:13:10 ►
but he’s also quite an outdoorsman and an adventurer.
00:13:14 ►
And anyway, so he was in the Mazatec region,
00:13:16 ►
and he was hunting for cave entrances in the highlands.
00:13:22 ►
And the Mazatec region is riddled with deep caverns,
00:13:25 ►
and in fact, some of the deepest caves in the highlands. And the Mazatec region is riddled with deep caverns.
00:13:28 ►
In fact, some of the deepest caves in the western hemisphere are beneath the Mazatec region.
00:13:32 ►
So he was hunting for cave entrances.
00:13:35 ►
And while he was out on the trail in that country,
00:13:37 ►
he came across a couple of brothers
00:13:40 ►
and talked to them and kind of befriended them.
00:13:44 ►
And they invited him to stay the night at their place, which he did.
00:13:52 ►
In talking to them, he found out that their father was a shaman
00:13:56 ►
who used psychedelic mushrooms and salve divinorum and various other plants.
00:14:03 ►
He had heard about these things
00:14:05 ►
and was interested in learning more about them.
00:14:09 ►
And to make a long story short,
00:14:11 ►
he spoke with the father,
00:14:14 ►
and the father agreed to lead him on a salvia experience.
00:14:21 ►
And Brett said that he was interested and he agreed to come back after the skating
00:14:29 ►
expedition was complete. So he did and came back and they scheduled this session and they
00:14:36 ►
took the leaves and Brett had quite a profound experience after chewing a bundle of 13 pairs of leaves. The reason I say 13
00:14:46 ►
pairs is because traditionally most Mazatec shamans measure out doses of leaves in pairs
00:14:53 ►
because pairs have ritual significance, apparently representing male and female and perhaps twins
00:15:00 ►
and other things that are symbolically meaningful to them.
00:15:09 ►
Anyway, so he actually took 26 large leaves,
00:15:11 ►
which is a pretty good pile of leaves,
00:15:14 ►
and so the norm leaves are quite bitter tasting.
00:15:17 ►
You can chew one leaf,
00:15:19 ►
and it might not seem particularly bad tasting,
00:15:22 ►
but the more you chew, the worse it tastes.
00:15:26 ►
So the process of chewing 26 leaves is actually a bit of an ordeal.
00:15:31 ►
So anyway, back to the main point of my story.
00:15:36 ►
When myself and my two friends got together to try these leaves, we did the same thing.
00:15:38 ►
We each took 26 leaves.
00:15:40 ►
And we were sitting outdoors on a friend’s veranda overlooking the chaparral-covered hillsides in Southern California.
00:15:51 ►
And so it was a fairly peaceful setting, and it was around dusk, so it was starting to get a little bit dark and progressively dark.
00:16:01 ►
And so we chewed the leaves, and you know, I really didn’t have much
00:16:05 ►
expectation of anything
00:16:07 ►
significant happening. I mean, I had
00:16:09 ►
heard about Brett Floss’s experience, but
00:16:11 ►
I didn’t know Brett’s second-hand
00:16:13 ►
information. You know, I was skeptical,
00:16:16 ►
and I actually, you know, I kind of suspected
00:16:17 ►
that he was exaggerating, and you know,
00:16:19 ►
because most of the other reports I had heard
00:16:21 ►
indicated that Sally really
00:16:23 ►
was quite mild
00:16:25 ►
and possibly didn’t really even do anything.
00:16:28 ►
Some people who had tried the leaves and not experienced anything speculated
00:16:34 ►
that basically people who did report effects were just experiencing some kind of placebo effect from it.
00:16:41 ►
So anyway, so the three of us chewed our leaves with not much expectation.
00:16:48 ►
And about 15 or 20 minutes after I had first began to chew the leaves, you know, I started
00:16:54 ►
to notice a slight shift in my vision, something very subtle that, you know, I thought, I don’t
00:17:00 ►
know, I’m obviously looking for some effect. When you’re looking for something,
00:17:09 ►
it’s easy for your mind to imagine things that aren’t.
00:17:11 ►
I know the feeling.
00:17:17 ►
And I thought, well, maybe if I stand up and try and walk around,
00:17:19 ►
I’ll notice some shift in my,
00:17:22 ►
I’ll notice something more profoundly because maybe my sense of movement and balance will be affected.
00:17:28 ►
So I stood up and took a few steps, and I thought,
00:17:33 ►
I definitely feel something is a little different.
00:17:36 ►
And as I looked around, I noticed there was this kind of colored glow around surrounding objects,
00:17:44 ►
almost like an aura-like glow to things.
00:17:48 ►
You know, just sort of pleasant,
00:17:50 ►
slight little few inches of glowiness about objects.
00:17:55 ►
And so when I noticed that, I said to my friends,
00:17:57 ►
yeah, I’m definitely feeling something now.
00:18:00 ►
And one of my friends in response said,
00:18:04 ►
oh, no, I don’t feel anything.
00:18:06 ►
And actually, before he finished saying the word anything, he suddenly just fell out of the chaise lounge he was sitting on and just fell on the ground and started laughing hysterically.
00:18:19 ►
And I said, well, are you okay?
00:18:22 ►
And he couldn’t reply.
00:18:25 ►
He just kept laughing convulsively,
00:18:28 ►
and he tried to get some words out to answer me,
00:18:31 ►
but he couldn’t control the laughter enough to speak.
00:18:36 ►
So at this point, I was feeling the effects,
00:18:39 ►
but not nearly as dramatically as he was.
00:18:41 ►
And the extraordinary thing was that it hit him so suddenly.
00:18:44 ►
One minute, he didn’t think anything was happening,
00:18:47 ►
and within seconds he was just, you know,
00:18:50 ►
throwing into this other state.
00:18:52 ►
It was so dramatic.
00:18:54 ►
And he laughed that way for, I don’t know,
00:18:56 ►
it seemed like an awfully long time.
00:18:58 ►
I mean, it probably was only, you know,
00:18:59 ►
two or three minutes or something like that,
00:19:01 ►
but two or three minutes of uncontrollable laughter,
00:19:04 ►
a lot of laughter.
00:19:08 ►
So anyway, finally he was able to get some words out, and he said, are you in it?
00:19:15 ►
And I said, well, in what?
00:19:17 ►
And because I would say, well, do you mean do I feel something, or what are you talking
00:19:22 ►
about?
00:19:23 ►
And he was just too far gone to really communicate much more than that.
00:19:28 ►
And it wasn’t until later, when the effects were subsiding,
00:19:32 ►
a couple hours later, that we talked about it.
00:19:35 ►
And I said, well, what did you mean when you said, are you in it?
00:19:37 ►
And he said, well, suddenly, when I fell out of that chair,
00:19:42 ►
I suddenly was underground in some cavern someplace
00:19:47 ►
and that’s what he was asking is are we in it were we in the space that he was
00:19:53 ►
in anyway that my own experience was I didn’t I wasn’t in it I was in other
00:20:01 ►
places but not that particular place. But as the effects became
00:20:07 ►
more pronounced, I found myself, well, I never totally lost touch with ordinary reality.
00:20:14 ►
I mean, I was still aware of my environment, but there were things in the environment that
00:20:19 ►
aren’t ordinarily there. Things look different. I described, you know, this glowy,
00:20:25 ►
glowy light quality surrounding things.
00:20:28 ►
But at some point I noticed in the hillsides near us,
00:20:31 ►
which are basically just empty hillsides.
00:20:34 ►
Well, not empty.
00:20:34 ►
They’re covered with chaparral bushes and shrubs.
00:20:38 ►
But I looked up and I noticed these little houses
00:20:42 ►
sort of tucked away, sort of built into the hillside, and
00:20:45 ►
they’re sort of scattered around the hills in the distance. And you could see as it got
00:20:49 ►
darker, these little lights coming from the windows. And it was the oddest thing. They
00:20:55 ►
looked like the closest thing I could compare it to is the Hobbit homes that you read about
00:21:03 ►
in the Tolkien novels,
00:21:05 ►
as well as the film depictions in these little houses that are built into the earth.
00:21:12 ►
You know what comes to my mind right at this moment?
00:21:15 ►
I’m just about to finish Graham Hancock’s new book, Supernatural, which I highly recommend.
00:21:21 ►
He has a big section in there about the medieval fairies,
00:21:25 ►
and what you’re describing is one of the scenes right out of medieval times, I think.
00:21:30 ►
Right, yeah, well, I’m sure those stories were, you know,
00:21:33 ►
a big influence on Tolkien’s writing, so, yeah.
00:21:38 ►
The Hobbit houses came out of European mythology.
00:21:43 ►
But, yeah, it was like that.
00:21:42 ►
out of European mythology.
00:21:44 ►
But yeah, it was like that.
00:21:52 ►
And I had this sense that the inhabitants of these houses were some kind of fairy-like nature spirits that were always there and just not ordinarily seen.
00:21:58 ►
And at the time, it just seemed like, oh yeah, of course, that’s the way it always is.
00:22:03 ►
It seemed completely normal and natural.
00:22:06 ►
And, you know, it didn’t shock me as some kind of revelation or something bizarre or, you know,
00:22:13 ►
or some kind of, you know, twisted mind game.
00:22:17 ►
You know, it seemed like, oh, yeah, it’s just that’s natural.
00:22:21 ►
That’s the way things are.
00:22:22 ►
That’s natural. That’s the way things are.
00:22:30 ►
And that sense of naturalness and familiarity pervaded the entire experience.
00:22:34 ►
I just felt like I was being embraced by nature and sort of tuning into this aspect of the natural world that I’m not ordinarily perceiving.
00:22:42 ►
My girlfriend who was there at the time, she said it was like being rocked
00:22:47 ►
in the arms of Mother Nature. And all three of us, when we talked about the experience
00:22:53 ►
later, agreed that there was something very comfortable and natural and nurturing about
00:23:00 ►
the feelings that pervaded the experience. One other thing that I remember from that was
00:23:07 ►
that when we were talking about the experiences,
00:23:09 ►
one of us said something like,
00:23:12 ►
oh, and I remember seeing these kind of fairy-like beings,
00:23:16 ►
but they were kind of like children,
00:23:18 ►
and they had very long eyelashes,
00:23:20 ►
and they had a bit of a cartoonish quality.
00:23:22 ►
They weren’t completely solid.
00:23:24 ►
They had a bit of an ephemeral, almost a colorful transparency to them.
00:23:31 ►
And I forget which of us was the first to comment on that.
00:23:35 ►
But whoever it was, the other two said, oh, that’s bizarre.
00:23:40 ►
I saw those things, too.
00:23:41 ►
And they had those really long eyelashes.
00:23:44 ►
So it’s very bizarre.
00:23:45 ►
Why would three people independently have this feature of these really long eyelash little beings?
00:23:53 ►
Who knows?
00:23:54 ►
Well, you know, Daniel, that’s one of the things that really fascinates me about Salvia
00:23:59 ►
is how similar a lot of the experiences seem to be in the way people describe them.
00:24:07 ►
I’ve had kind of a wide range of friends that have varying degrees of experience
00:24:12 ►
with a lot of substances and some with none,
00:24:15 ►
and they all come back with this feeling of familiarity, being embraced,
00:24:22 ►
a welcome home kind of thing, and the little entities quite often.
00:24:27 ►
It’s just astounding to me because more than any other psychoactive substance that I know of,
00:24:33 ►
the similarity of stories seems to follow with Salvia.
00:24:38 ►
Yeah, there is a lot of similarity.
00:24:41 ►
Although I find that different people have different kinds of experiences.
00:24:47 ►
If you take a population of whatever number, say for argument’s sake like 100, and ask
00:24:54 ►
these people about their experiences and talk about people who have had several experiences,
00:24:59 ►
I find that there’s kind of categories of types of experiences that people have.
00:25:05 ►
And some people might have experiences that vary and fall into different categories.
00:25:10 ►
But some people tend to have one particular type of experience.
00:25:14 ►
But there’ll be lots of other people who also have that type of experience.
00:25:17 ►
And then there’s other people who have a different type,
00:25:20 ►
and they sort of fall into this other group.
00:25:22 ►
I mean, for an example,
00:25:25 ►
one of the more common types of experiences people have
00:25:28 ►
is often people have visions of places
00:25:32 ►
that are reminiscent of early childhood,
00:25:36 ►
places like school playgrounds
00:25:39 ►
or the backyard of their parents’ house
00:25:41 ►
where they lived when they were six or seven years old.
00:25:45 ►
For some reason, a lot of people tune into this particular period of life of early childhood
00:25:51 ►
roughly between six and nine years old, around that period of life.
00:25:57 ►
It’s extraordinarily common.
00:25:59 ►
I’m curious why that particular time in life.
00:26:03 ►
You don’t hear a lot of people saying that they found themselves back in high school or in college.
00:26:09 ►
You know, for some reason they find themselves in these places from early childhood.
00:26:14 ►
So there’s something interesting about that with Sally being able to key into that particular life period.
00:26:21 ►
And certain people, quite a lot of people, have that type of experience,
00:26:24 ►
whereas other people never have that type of experience.
00:26:27 ►
Another very common one, well, in fact, I fall into that category of often having those early childhood visions.
00:26:36 ►
But other people often report experiences of becoming objects.
00:26:40 ►
And I’ve never had that experience, and a lot of people haven’t.
00:26:43 ►
But a significant percentage of people
00:26:45 ►
become objects when they
00:26:47 ►
when they do selfie
00:26:49 ►
and you know it just seems like
00:26:51 ►
such an odd phenomenon
00:26:53 ►
but it’s extraordinary when people describe that
00:26:56 ►
you know they’re often just
00:26:58 ►
you know they make a big point about saying
00:27:00 ►
well it’s not like I just sort of
00:27:03 ►
felt as if I was
00:27:04 ►
a wall or a
00:27:07 ►
refrigerator or whatever.
00:27:08 ►
I was that thing, and there was no question about it, and it was as if that was the way
00:27:14 ►
it was, and I would always be that thing, and, you know, I was concerned that I would
00:27:18 ►
never come back from that.
00:27:19 ►
Wow.
00:27:20 ►
And that’s another, you know, one of those weird salvia effects.
00:27:24 ►
I’m sure that kind of thing can also happen with other psychedelics as well,
00:27:29 ►
but it seems particularly characteristic of salvia.
00:27:33 ►
And there’s another that’s sort of broad categories of types of experiences that people have with it.
00:27:38 ►
Well, you know, salvia is so unique,
00:27:42 ►
and that’s one of the reasons that prompted me to do this interview with you,
00:27:46 ►
is that in hearing some of the other experiences that people are writing into various podcasts about,
00:27:54 ►
it appeared real obvious to me that they hadn’t been to your website to read the free user guide
00:28:01 ►
and really learn more about how to use salvia.
00:28:05 ►
I think some people are thinking they can just, you know,
00:28:08 ►
have a toke or two of salvia and have a quick experience.
00:28:11 ►
And maybe we should cover a little bit about, you know,
00:28:15 ►
what’s really the sacred way to use this to have a true salvia experience
00:28:20 ►
and to respect the plant itself, too.
00:28:22 ►
Yeah.
00:28:23 ►
Well, let me just preface that with something.
00:28:26 ►
You know, I told you about my initial experience with the leaves, and basically it was that
00:28:30 ►
experience that made me, you know, it just, the experience fascinated me.
00:28:37 ►
And that fascination led me to a whole string of further experiments with the leaves and
00:28:43 ►
efforts to, I won’t even go into those, It gets to be a very long story because it’s been years
00:28:48 ►
of experiments and research. But ultimately
00:28:52 ►
it led me to do a string of experiments with salvia
00:28:56 ►
which resulted
00:29:00 ►
in my isolation of a crystalline substance
00:29:04 ►
from the leaves,
00:29:05 ►
which is now known to be Salvinorin A.
00:29:09 ►
And that was quite an extraordinary discovery,
00:29:14 ►
at least it was from my perspective.
00:29:17 ►
It turned out that this compound turned out to be responsible
00:29:22 ►
for the mind-altering effects of the plant,
00:29:25 ►
which was interesting in itself because although this compound had been isolated from leaves previously,
00:29:31 ►
it had not been determined that it was responsible for the visionary effects of the plant.
00:29:38 ►
So I isolated this compound, but when I tried it,
00:29:42 ►
I discovered that this stuff was extraordinarily potent,
00:29:47 ►
which was quite a surprise because it takes quite a lot of leaves to get much in effect
00:29:51 ►
when you take the leaves in the traditional fashion.
00:29:54 ►
So it was a surprise to find that it contained one of the most potent visionary compounds known.
00:30:01 ►
The problem with chewing the leaves is it’s not a very efficient way of getting
00:30:05 ►
that compound into your body because apparently it’s either poorly absorbed or largely deactivated
00:30:11 ►
by gastrointestinal fluids and fungi or whatever before it reaches the bloodstream.
00:30:17 ►
But after isolating salvinorin A and identifying it as the active principle, I published a
00:30:23 ►
paper in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology
00:30:27 ►
describing my findings about this compound.
00:30:30 ►
And that generated a lot of mail from people who read the article,
00:30:36 ►
people wanting to know more about this.
00:30:39 ►
And that was right around the time that the web was just emerging
00:30:43 ►
as a popular phenomenon.
00:30:46 ►
And rather than having to answer the same questions over and over to all these correspondents,
00:30:53 ►
I decided, well, I should just put up a web page and create a central source for information about salivative norm,
00:31:00 ►
where I can just direct people to that and have all that information there,
00:31:03 ►
so I don’t have to keep answering the same questions over and over again,
00:31:07 ►
which is what I did.
00:31:09 ►
And that was, oh, God, it was something like almost 10 years ago now.
00:31:14 ►
And I’ve been building that website for the last decade
00:31:18 ►
and trying to make it as comprehensive as possible
00:31:22 ►
because after experiencing Salvinornae,
00:31:27 ►
my perception of salvia changed.
00:31:32 ►
My experiences with the chewed leaves were one thing.
00:31:36 ►
Chewing the leaves tends to produce a very gentle experience
00:31:42 ►
that can be managed fairly easily.
00:31:47 ►
There’s lots of variables here, so I don’t want to generalize too much.
00:31:51 ►
But in general, when taken in the traditional fashion of chewing the leaves,
00:31:56 ►
the effects are gentle, the onset is gradual,
00:31:59 ►
the experience is enriching and can be utilized in a very controlled, directed, conscientious manner.
00:32:08 ►
When you take salvia in a manner which gets it into your bloodstream rapidly,
00:32:15 ►
which is what happened when I first tried salvinorin A,
00:32:18 ►
I vaporized the compound and inhaled the vapors,
00:32:25 ►
and inhaled the vapors, the effects can be almost instantaneous and extremely dramatic and overwhelmingly intense sometimes
00:32:30 ►
and difficult to make sense of and difficult to really use in any directed manner.
00:32:37 ►
So it was after my experience with Salvinornae, the pure compound,
00:32:42 ►
that I decided that it’s really important that people get
00:32:45 ►
some guidance about how to use this herb in a positive, safe way.
00:32:53 ►
I think it’s important to encourage people particularly to try to use it in the traditional
00:32:59 ►
fashion of chewing the leaves because that, for most people, is the most useful way.
00:33:03 ►
leaves because that, for most people, is the most useful way.
00:33:11 ►
But this story gets a bit complex because also around that time, people started selling salvia.
00:33:12 ►
It started becoming more widely available.
00:33:14 ►
Dried leaves, people started producing various types of extracts.
00:33:18 ►
Partly because of my isolating self and RNA, people realized what a powerful compound this
00:33:24 ►
plant contained
00:33:25 ►
and by extracting it you can produce you know really powerful experiences that are easily
00:33:30 ►
accessible perhaps a little too easily accessible so anyway i i decided it’s important to have a
00:33:39 ►
certain responsibility as somebody who’s kind of put this information out to the world to begin with to try and give some people some guidance.
00:33:49 ►
So anyway, to make a long story short, that was the main reason that the website was created.
00:33:55 ►
And to get back to your question, yeah, right.
00:33:59 ►
A lot of people, I’ve had my website up for about 10 years now, and if you do a Google search for salvia,
00:34:06 ►
you’ll find that my site’s probably the first thing to come up.
00:34:10 ►
So the information’s pretty readily available.
00:34:13 ►
But nevertheless, an awful lot of people, possibly even the majority of people who try salvia,
00:34:19 ►
don’t come across my website first, and often they don’t really have much information about salvia a lot of times
00:34:27 ►
people hear about it in media stories and usually that the media sensationalizes sensationalizes
00:34:35 ►
their reports about any kind of psychedelic substance and salvia is no exception
00:34:41 ►
and they you know often compare salvia to LSD
00:34:45 ►
and whatever, legal pot
00:34:47 ►
or whatever they call it.
00:34:50 ►
And that kind of thing
00:34:52 ►
is very misleading.
00:34:53 ►
People hear a story
00:34:56 ►
that’s type of legal pot
00:34:57 ►
and think, oh, well,
00:34:59 ►
I’m interested in that. I like pot.
00:35:01 ►
And I realize that
00:35:03 ►
salvia is not like pot. I realize that Salvia does not like pot.
00:35:06 ►
Hardly.
00:35:09 ►
So anyway, people, there’s a lot of misinformation about it out there.
00:35:13 ►
People, much of the journalists who write these stories have never tried it,
00:35:16 ►
so they don’t really know what they’re writing about.
00:35:19 ►
They’re just secondhand information that they’re recycling from other sources
00:35:23 ►
and it’s, you know, misapprehended and spit out again.
00:35:28 ►
But another issue that’s happening now is salve has become very available.
00:35:34 ►
I mean, on the Internet there’s probably hundreds of mail-order companies
00:35:38 ►
that are selling salve de norme in various forms.
00:35:42 ►
It’s also being sold at head shops all over the place,
00:35:45 ►
so-called smoke shops.
00:35:48 ►
And in most cases, in fact, the vast majority of cases,
00:35:53 ►
the people selling these products have very little information,
00:35:57 ►
if anything, about salvia.
00:35:59 ►
And the product labels and packaging themselves
00:36:02 ►
don’t include any information about how to use the herb
00:36:05 ►
safely or the extract safely, whatever it may be.
00:36:10 ►
And in fact, often manufacturers of these extracts deliberately misrepresent their products.
00:36:18 ►
Yeah, I mean, a lot of these shops, they don’t, you know, they’re just not that interested.
00:36:23 ►
It’s something that they can sell and, you know, there’s some market for it, so they sell it.
00:36:28 ►
A lot of these shop owners are actually nervous, too, even if they did know.
00:36:34 ►
It seems that they’re often nervous to admit that they know much about it.
00:36:38 ►
I think that there might be some concern that in some way they might be liable for any mishaps that might result from people using their products.
00:36:49 ►
So I guess they’re afraid to say too much about it.
00:36:55 ►
I’ve also noticed an odd thing.
00:36:57 ►
A lot of salvia vendors call their salvia extracts incense, which just seems like the weirdest.
00:37:08 ►
I’ve seen that, and I definitely am not going to inhale incense.
00:37:14 ►
It’s like those, what do they call it,
00:37:18 ►
those, I guess, the butyl nitrate inhalants
00:37:22 ►
that are sold as perfumes or clones or something.
00:37:29 ►
Anyway, and presumably the same, you know, it’s because the manufacturer doesn’t want to
00:37:36 ►
or the vendor doesn’t want to admit that it’s intended for human use.
00:37:41 ►
In fact, often the labels say, you know, specifically it will say not intended for human use.
00:37:46 ►
Right.
00:37:46 ►
And presumably they’re just worried about,
00:37:48 ►
well, if some mishap happens from someone who takes this,
00:37:52 ►
they can claim, oh, I didn’t, that’s not for human use.
00:37:56 ►
You know, I’m selling that as incense.
00:37:59 ►
It’s not my responsibility, you know,
00:38:01 ►
what people do with it if they don’t, you know,
00:38:03 ►
it’s not my fault.
00:38:05 ►
I don’t think that would really hold up very well in court,
00:38:09 ►
but some people, you know, I guess are hoping it might.
00:38:13 ►
But the problem I have with that, first of all,
00:38:15 ►
it’s kind of ludicrous because Sally doesn’t really have any odor that,
00:38:18 ►
you know, maybe it’s got a very, very subtle odor,
00:38:20 ►
but nothing that you would use for any incense purpose.
00:38:24 ►
So that’s kind of silly.
00:38:26 ►
But the other thing is these people are just selling a powerful mind-altering substance
00:38:32 ►
and not taking any responsibility for educating people about how to use it safely.
00:38:38 ►
And I’ve always had a problem with that approach,
00:38:41 ►
and that’s why my focus has always been on education, more education.
00:38:48 ►
I don’t think people can be too educated about salvia.
00:38:52 ►
I mean, you don’t need to know everything about it, but a lot of information is a good thing.
00:39:00 ►
Well, I’ve seen some people’s lives change profoundly from literally a single use of salvia.
00:39:07 ►
So it really does have some tremendous powerful potential.
00:39:13 ►
And maybe you might say a little word about having a sitter there that knows what’s going on.
00:39:18 ►
Absolutely.
00:39:20 ►
Well, yes, a sitter is important.
00:39:22 ►
Salvia can be quite powerful.
00:39:24 ►
It really depends, like any drug, on dose.
00:39:26 ►
I mean, if you do a small dose, it produces subtle effects,
00:39:31 ►
and there’s really no danger of anything bad happening.
00:39:35 ►
You remain in control, and you’re aware of your environment and your behavior,
00:39:39 ►
and you don’t need a sitter if you’re doing a small dose.
00:39:42 ►
But, you know, when people are doing salvia for the first time or the first few times,
00:39:47 ►
they don’t really know how sensitive they are to salvia.
00:39:50 ►
People vary a lot in sensitivity to salvia, and that’s something true for all drugs.
00:39:55 ►
People vary in sensitivity to any drug.
00:39:57 ►
But salvia is particularly apparent, at least talking about hallucinogens in general.
00:40:06 ►
In salvia, people seem to vary more noticeably in response to salvia than many other things.
00:40:13 ►
So there’s some people who are unbelievably insensitive to salvia,
00:40:19 ►
come across people sometimes who seem practically immune
00:40:22 ►
so that they can do these concentrated, super-concentrated extracts
00:40:26 ►
and get very little effect.
00:40:29 ►
Whereas other people, there’s a small percentage,
00:40:32 ►
but some people are just remarkably sensitive to it,
00:40:35 ►
and a very small dose produces very dramatic effects,
00:40:38 ►
a dose that wouldn’t really save most people.
00:40:41 ►
And the majority of people tend to fall somewhere in the middle
00:40:44 ►
between those two extremes.
00:40:46 ►
But when you’re first doing salvia, you don’t know where you fall in that sensitivity category.
00:40:52 ►
So it’s important to use extra caution.
00:40:57 ►
It might turn out that you’re a person with unusually high sensitivity.
00:41:02 ►
So if you take a dose that your friends are comfortable with,
00:41:05 ►
it might be too much for you,
00:41:07 ►
and it might be too much for you to handle on your own,
00:41:11 ►
even if it’s what your friends would consider a low dose.
00:41:15 ►
So when you’re first doing it, it’s important to have a sitter there
00:41:18 ►
just to make sure that if it does turn out to be overwhelmingly intense,
00:41:25 ►
you have someone there who can look after your own well-being
00:41:27 ►
and make sure you don’t get up and stumble around, fall over furniture,
00:41:31 ►
or do something that might hurt yourself in some way.
00:41:35 ►
So sitters are important when you’re first experimenting with it.
00:41:38 ►
And they’re also important even if you’re very experienced.
00:41:41 ►
But if you’re experienced and you’re doing a dose that you know is going to be very intense,
00:41:47 ►
it’s good to have a sitter.
00:41:49 ►
And almost essential, I would say.
00:41:51 ►
I mean, if you’re very experienced, I’d say it sort of depends on the dosage level.
00:41:57 ►
But with salvia, there’s a point at which the intensity of the experience
00:42:01 ►
is completely overwhelming, and the person goes into an altered reality,
00:42:08 ►
an altered experience of reality.
00:42:11 ►
Similar, you know, vaguely similar to dreaming,
00:42:15 ►
when we’re sleeping at night and laying in bed
00:42:17 ►
and we’re off in some other realm having other experiences,
00:42:21 ►
we’re usually not aware that we’re laying somewhere out in bed
00:42:24 ►
under some blankets. You know, we’re usually not aware that we’re laying somewhere out in bed under
00:42:25 ►
some blankets.
00:42:26 ►
You know, we’re just immersed in this scene.
00:42:29 ►
This kind of thing happens with, you know, the supernatural doses of salvia propel people
00:42:35 ►
completely into these alternative visionary realms.
00:42:39 ►
And that in itself is, you know, one of the more fascinating aspects of Sally.
00:42:46 ►
The reason for concern here and the reason for advising a sitter
00:42:49 ►
is that often when people are, their mind is somewhere else,
00:42:54 ►
their body will move around.
00:42:57 ►
This doesn’t happen with everybody, but many people do react that way.
00:43:01 ►
They’ll just get up and walk in a straight line into a wall
00:43:07 ►
or fall over a chair or, you know,
00:43:09 ►
God forbid, walk out the door.
00:43:13 ►
And they don’t seem to be aware of what they’re doing.
00:43:16 ►
Their mind is totally engaged in the visionary experience.
00:43:19 ►
It’s as if they’re sleepwalking.
00:43:21 ►
There’s just like some kind of automatic pilot, and their body just sort
00:43:26 ►
of goes about some habitual pattern of motion with no real awareness or conscious engagement
00:43:34 ►
in what they’re doing.
00:43:36 ►
And obviously the danger there is that, you know, if you’re not aware of where you’re
00:43:40 ►
walking, you can stumble and hurt yourself. People, when they smoke salvia, they’re dealing with flames, lighters,
00:43:49 ►
sometimes you’ve got candles lit or incense burning.
00:43:52 ►
And if you wander around and knock something over, it’s a fire danger.
00:43:57 ►
Anyway, potential dangers are obvious.
00:44:00 ►
Going out of your skin into some other reality,
00:44:03 ►
and you need someone to keep an eye on your body.
00:44:08 ►
And you’re not asking a lot of somebody,
00:44:10 ►
because you’re not talking like a two-hour experience.
00:44:12 ►
It’s a relatively short…
00:44:14 ►
Yeah, that’s an important point.
00:44:15 ►
Well, I could talk all day,
00:44:19 ►
because this all gets very complicated.
00:44:21 ►
There’s so many different ways to take salvia
00:44:24 ►
and different dosage levels, and we’re kind ways to take salvia in different dosage levels
00:44:25 ►
and kind of talking about different things at different dosage levels.
00:44:30 ►
But when people smoke salvia or inhale vaporized salvinorin A,
00:44:36 ►
the effects are very brief.
00:44:38 ►
They come on in 10 or 20 seconds very quickly,
00:44:42 ►
and they come on rapidly and suddenly.
00:44:48 ►
It takes only 10 or 20 seconds,
00:44:50 ►
but then the effects hit you almost all at once.
00:44:54 ►
It’s not like there’s a gradual easing into it.
00:44:57 ►
It’s just sort of like one minute you’re here
00:44:58 ►
and within seconds you find yourself someplace else.
00:45:03 ►
And then that experience is intense for maybe five or six minutes.
00:45:07 ►
And then after five or six minutes, it starts subsiding.
00:45:10 ►
And usually within 20 or 30 minutes after the person smokes salvia, they feel pretty
00:45:15 ►
much completely back to normal with maybe some subtle lingering effects for another
00:45:20 ►
half an hour or so.
00:45:21 ►
But yeah, that experience is very brief.
00:45:21 ►
for another half an hour or so.
00:45:23 ►
But yeah, that experience is very brief.
00:45:25 ►
When the leaves are taken orally,
00:45:30 ►
the salvinornae is absorbed from the leaf material or from a tincture or whatever form it’s being taken as.
00:45:33 ►
When it’s taken orally,
00:45:35 ►
salvinornae is absorbed gradually into the body.
00:45:40 ►
It seems to be absorbed primarily
00:45:42 ►
through the mucous membranes in the mouth cavity.
00:45:45 ►
And so it’s kind of like those tissues are a time-release buffer.
00:45:50 ►
The salvinorinase is migrating through those tissues
00:45:53 ►
and gradually being released into the bloodstream.
00:45:56 ►
And as a consequence, you have a more extended experience.
00:45:59 ►
And when taken orally, typically the effects begin in 15 or 20 minutes
00:46:04 ►
and then develop over several minutes.
00:46:09 ►
So there’s a bit of a more gradual onset than with smoking.
00:46:11 ►
And then the experience, the plateau lasts for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour on average,
00:46:20 ►
depending on the dose.
00:46:21 ►
And then that fades away over another 30 minutes to an hour.
00:46:25 ►
So when taken orally, you can actually have an experience.
00:46:28 ►
The overall experience can be more like two hours,
00:46:31 ►
sometimes a little longer with higher doses compared with smoking
00:46:34 ►
where you’re talking about like 20 or 30 minutes for a significant phase of the experience.
00:46:42 ►
But still, even then, even with the oral method, you know, a two-hour experience
00:46:46 ►
is not a
00:46:48 ►
real long time compared to
00:46:50 ►
most other hallucinogens.
00:46:53 ►
And
00:46:53 ►
there’s also the difference
00:46:56 ►
with taking it orally, the effects tend to be
00:46:58 ►
more subtle, and so
00:47:00 ►
you know, it’s not
00:47:02 ►
such a
00:47:03 ►
it’s not so disorientating,
00:47:07 ►
and it’s still important to have a sitter if you’re doing any significant amount orally,
00:47:11 ►
but it’s particularly important with smoking, especially smoking extracts of salvia,
00:47:16 ►
because it really does tend to, there’s a much more high percentage of cases
00:47:20 ►
where people just suddenly find there’s this break with ordinary reality
00:47:25 ►
that people just have no handle on it, and they just, you know, they’re someplace else,
00:47:31 ►
and they’ll get up and suddenly move around.
00:47:34 ►
And, you know, I’ve seen that happen, and one of the things that’s kind of surprising
00:47:39 ►
is they present fairly well sometimes.
00:47:42 ►
It’s not, you know, they’re a little wide-eyed and all, but it’s not like they’re just totally bizarre.
00:47:48 ►
I’ve seen them try to convince people,
00:47:51 ►
I’m all right, I’m ready to go, and you know they’re not.
00:47:54 ►
Right, that can happen.
00:47:55 ►
Yeah, and the sitter has to be aware of that phenomenon.
00:48:01 ►
Yeah, it seems that people have,
00:48:03 ►
there’s a lot of habitual behavior
00:48:05 ►
that just seems so
00:48:07 ►
ingrained that it can happen even
00:48:09 ►
when our mind is someplace
00:48:11 ►
else. And like you say, I’ve seen this with
00:48:13 ►
people as well,
00:48:16 ►
where sometimes people just get up
00:48:17 ►
and look at their watch
00:48:20 ►
and calmly walk towards
00:48:22 ►
the door as if they
00:48:23 ►
just remembered an important appointment or something.
00:48:27 ►
Sometimes it looks completely normal and in control.
00:48:31 ►
And I think, well, wait a minute, you just let the penis go.
00:48:34 ►
There’s no way that you could be like,
00:48:36 ►
and why would you be wanting to go to your appointment now or whatever?
00:48:41 ►
It’s just an example of one case.
00:48:44 ►
So, yeah, the sitter has to be
00:48:46 ►
mindful of…
00:48:47 ►
It’s best to agree beforehand, like
00:48:49 ►
we agree that
00:48:51 ►
we know this is going to last a certain period of time
00:48:54 ►
and you’re not supposed to leave
00:48:56 ►
this certain space that you’ve
00:48:58 ►
decided is the safest space.
00:49:01 ►
And the sitter’s
00:49:02 ►
job is to…
00:49:03 ►
It’s only one job, it’s just to sort of look after the person’s safety and try to remain unobtrusive.
00:49:09 ►
Unfortunately, a lot of people have some kind of crazy notion
00:49:15 ►
that they should interact with the person while they’re tripping.
00:49:19 ►
And in most cases, it’s not a good idea unless the interaction is really called for
00:49:23 ►
in order to, like, you know, hold the person to prevent the person to prevent them from going out the door or something like that or moving around in some unsafe way.
00:49:32 ►
But usually, if a person is tripping on Sylvia strongly enough that they’re really in a visionary space,
00:49:39 ►
usually they’re not very able to communicate and often not able to really understand what’s being said to them,
00:49:45 ►
or they’ll misinterpret what’s being said to them,
00:49:48 ►
or they might hear what’s being said in the context of the visionary experience they’re having,
00:49:53 ►
and so it will have a whole different meaning.
00:49:55 ►
So usually it’s best for the sitter to just remain quiet and unobtrusive
00:49:59 ►
and only act if really needed.
00:50:03 ►
In most cases, a sitter doesn’t need to do anything
00:50:06 ►
because most cases a person just, you know, sits in one place
00:50:09 ►
and they just lean back and their eyes are closed
00:50:13 ►
and, you know, it looks like from the outside
00:50:14 ►
it looks like not much is happening to them,
00:50:16 ►
but, you know, in their own mind
00:50:18 ►
they’re having an extraordinary involvement
00:50:22 ►
with some internal visionary scene
00:50:24 ►
that feels completely real to them at the time.
00:50:29 ►
We’re getting to the end of the time for our podcast here,
00:50:32 ►
but I would like to just maybe briefly touch on the legal status,
00:50:36 ►
and then I’d like to hear an update on the book you’re working on before we go.
00:50:40 ►
The legal status is in flex.
00:50:44 ►
It’s probably always going to be in flux.
00:50:48 ►
Salvia is no denying that it is a powerful vision-inducing compound,
00:50:53 ►
and in most people’s minds, it is the equivalent of drugs that are already illegal in most countries,
00:51:02 ►
like LSD and psilocybin and mescaline. So from the
00:51:08 ►
lawmaker’s perspective and from many people in general’s perspective,
00:51:12 ►
well, the thought is, well, of course this should be illegal because
00:51:15 ►
LSD is illegal and we make these other things illegal and
00:51:19 ►
it sounds like this does the same kind of thing, so it should be illegal.
00:51:24 ►
So unfortunately that seems to be the prevalent mindset in the society we live in.
00:51:31 ►
And so as a consequence, several countries have made salvia illegal within the last few years.
00:51:38 ►
This is all fairly recent because until fairly recently, salvia was not well known and still fairly low on the radar,
00:51:48 ►
but it is getting an awful lot of media attention,
00:51:51 ►
and as a consequence, it’s getting the attention of lawmakers and they’re making laws.
00:51:57 ►
Australia was the first country to ban Salvia,
00:52:00 ►
followed by Denmark and now Spain and Italy and Belgium and Estonia
00:52:03 ►
and probably a few others that aren’t popping in my head right now have made it illegal.
00:52:08 ►
I think five U.S. states have some kind of legislation prohibiting salvia,
00:52:14 ►
some of it severely and some not so severely.
00:52:18 ►
And then there’s several bills pending right now in U.S. states that also are seeking to ban salvia.
00:52:28 ►
So it seems inevitable that eventually the federal government in this country will probably ban it as well.
00:52:36 ►
There’s currently a lot of several.
00:52:38 ►
I don’t remember all of them offhand.
00:52:40 ►
New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Rhode Island, Oregon, California.
00:52:50 ►
I’ll have bills pending right now.
00:52:52 ►
It would damn salve us this past.
00:52:55 ►
So that’s certainly something to be concerned about.
00:52:59 ►
I don’t want to get too much into…
00:53:02 ►
Right, I just kind of wanted our listeners to be aware that it’s in flux
00:53:09 ►
and they should be paying attention to their local ordinances.
00:53:13 ►
Yeah, exactly.
00:53:14 ►
I have a page on my website that is titled Legal Status,
00:53:18 ►
and that’s a good place to go.
00:53:20 ►
I try and keep it up to date every time I hear about any changes in the legal status of Salvia.
00:53:26 ►
But anyone in any state
00:53:28 ►
can, in the U.S.,
00:53:29 ►
can easily do a web search
00:53:31 ►
for the state legislature
00:53:34 ►
in their state, and they’ll
00:53:35 ►
have websites. We’ll be linking
00:53:37 ►
to your sagewisdom.org
00:53:40 ►
site, and that’s
00:53:42 ►
the first place people will be going anyhow,
00:53:44 ►
I’m sure. I hope so.
00:53:46 ►
Before we go,
00:53:47 ►
I know you’ve been working on a book
00:53:49 ►
for a while, right? Right.
00:53:51 ►
I’ve been working on a book for almost 10 years
00:53:53 ►
now.
00:53:55 ►
I understand that feeling.
00:53:58 ►
Yeah.
00:53:59 ►
It’s been a long road
00:54:01 ►
and a fascinating journey.
00:54:04 ►
Yeah, I started working on this book right about 10 years ago now.
00:54:08 ►
It’s very close to completion.
00:54:11 ►
The manuscript is complete and edited,
00:54:13 ►
and I’m working on page layout and design and deciding what photos to include.
00:54:17 ►
Just the text part of the book is about 550 pages on an 8.5 by 11 page.
00:54:24 ►
It’s a lot of material.
00:54:26 ►
It covers all aspects of the plant, the botany, chemistry, horticulture, the effects, practical
00:54:32 ►
applications, methods of use, just about every aspect in it.
00:54:38 ►
So it’s something that’s captivated me.
00:54:42 ►
Sally has fascinated me intensely,
00:54:52 ►
and the process of writing the book has forced me to research pretty much every aspect of it.
00:54:54 ►
So it’s been great.
00:54:56 ►
If nothing else, it’s been a great education for myself,
00:55:00 ►
and hopefully the information will be useful to other people as well. Well, I’m hoping that we can get you back here in the psychedelic salon for another interview
00:55:04 ►
once your book is in print and we can talk about that some. Yeah, I’d hoping that we can get you back here in the Psychedelic Salon for another interview once your book is in print, and we can talk about that some.
00:55:08 ►
Yeah, I’d be happy to.
00:55:10 ►
Good.
00:55:10 ►
Well, it’s really been great catching up with you again, and I hope we get to have some meeting in Adam’s space here before long again.
00:55:19 ►
Yeah, I’d say.
00:55:20 ►
I appreciate your time, and look forward to our next conversation.
00:55:26 ►
Okay.
00:55:27 ►
Nice talking to you.
00:55:28 ►
Hey, the same here.
00:55:31 ►
So, am I just using poetic license here when I say that the salvia plant actually sought out and found Daniel?
00:55:50 ►
In my world, it isn’t beyond the realm of reason for a plant to suggest to its owner that he or she should carry it to a lecture that they were about to attend.
00:56:02 ►
Now, maybe that plant didn’t know that Daniel would be there, but a Terrence McKenna lecture would certainly be a place where the odds were highly in favor of someone being there who would take an interest in such a plant. I didn’t think to ask Daniel if he knew the name of the person who gave him that salvia plant at the McKenna lecture,
00:56:09 ►
but isn’t it fascinating how a person whose simple action of giving away a few cuttings of his salvia plant has,
00:56:16 ►
well, maybe without his even knowing it, has had a profound effect on,
00:56:20 ►
well, ultimately on the entire whole lot of human consciousness due to the large numbers
00:56:25 ►
of people who are now actively using salvia in sacred ceremonies.
00:56:30 ►
So if you are that person, I thank you for following your instincts or the plant’s request
00:56:37 ►
by bringing your salvia plant to Terrence’s lecture.
00:56:40 ►
In fact, we are all in your debt.
00:56:47 ►
lecture. In fact, we are all in your debt. Another thing that stuck out when I was re-listening to this conversation I had with Daniel was when he was talking about people under the
00:56:53 ►
influence of salvia becoming objects. And that reminded me of a Terrence McKenna rap
00:56:58 ►
I once heard where he was talking about how psychedelics remove boundaries. And he said
00:57:04 ►
you’d better be careful because they could remove the boundary between you and your refrigerator.
00:57:09 ►
While I’ve never had the experience of becoming an object under the influence of salvia,
00:57:14 ►
it did happen to me one time in an ayahuasca circle.
00:57:18 ►
And there’s really no way to put words to an experience like that.
00:57:22 ►
All I can say is that for a while I actually was a computer network.
00:57:28 ►
It was very strange.
00:57:30 ►
That’s about all I can say about it,
00:57:32 ►
other than that I’ve never been so cold in all my life
00:57:35 ►
as during that little ayahuasca interlude.
00:57:38 ►
Getting back to Salvia,
00:57:39 ►
I think that I mentioned before that the website Daniel has been maintaining
00:57:44 ►
for over a decade now
00:57:45 ►
may be found at www.sagewisdom.org.
00:57:53 ►
That’s all one word, sagewisdom.org.
00:57:56 ►
And it’s one of the very few websites that I’m willing to put my name behind 100%.
00:58:01 ►
Two of the others, of course, are arrowid, E-R-O-W-I-D.org,
00:58:07 ►
which can be trusted to provide good, solid information
00:58:11 ►
about a wide range of psychoactive substances.
00:58:14 ►
And another one is cognitiveliberty.org,
00:58:17 ►
which is the place to go for information about the legal status
00:58:20 ►
of various phases of the war on consciousness.
00:58:24 ►
But Daniel’s site, sagewisdom.org,
00:58:27 ►
is really the best place to go for all kinds of information about salvia.
00:58:32 ►
For starters, you’ll find a user’s guide there
00:58:35 ►
that I believe is really must-reading
00:58:37 ►
before you ever try this powerful substance for the first time.
00:58:41 ►
And even if you’re experienced in using salvia,
00:58:44 ►
I think you might want to pick up a copy of that guide.
00:58:47 ►
It’s free, just download it from sagewisdom.org.
00:58:50 ►
And you might pick up a tip or two also.
00:58:53 ►
Also, his Frequently Asked Questions section
00:58:56 ►
answers almost every question I can think of about Salvia.
00:59:01 ►
And just this morning, I was listening to the latest Dopecast from thedopefiend.co.uk,
00:59:08 ►
and he read an email from a listener who said he’d not had great results from some salvia extract that he bought online.
00:59:16 ►
And he went on to say that he bought it from someone whose prices were a bit lower than he found on sagewisdom.org.
00:59:22 ►
were a bit lower than he found on sagewisdom.org.
00:59:28 ►
Now, while I’m sure that there are many reputable sources of salvia and salvinorin A that you can find out there, and some of them may be a bit lower in price than Daniel’s site,
00:59:34 ►
but I know for a fact that you’ll get only the highest quality product from sagewisdom.org.
00:59:40 ►
And, you know, there are times when it pays to get the very best,
00:59:43 ►
and I think this may be one of those times.
00:59:46 ►
And that goes for any substance that you’re going to put into your body, including food.
00:59:52 ►
Before I launch into a rap about the value of organic food, I guess I’d better finish my thoughts about salvia and get out of here for today.
01:00:00 ►
I guess the only other thing that you might want to think about is the fact that it looks like salvia will soon become illegal to sell and purchase in many places.
01:00:09 ►
So if you’re in a jurisdiction where salvia is now legal, it may be worthwhile to stock up on some of the extract, just in case.
01:00:19 ►
Well, it was good being with you again today, and I’m really glad you got to hear a little part of Daniel’s story about how Salvia and he became intertwined.
01:00:28 ►
And speaking of becoming intertwined, something Daniel and I have in common is that we both had the great good fortune to meet our wives at one of the Entheobotany seminars in Planque, Mexico.
01:00:42 ►
In fact, that’s where Daniel and I also met. Thank you. He was there the year before I first made it, and that was the year they held the conference in Ushma.
01:01:06 ►
And by happy coincidence, that’s the year that Matt Palomary attended his first Entheobotany conference as well.
01:01:14 ►
And if you’re new to the Psychedelic Salon with this podcast, well, Matt Palomary is the person interviewed in last week’s program.
01:01:22 ►
Well, a lot’s changed since those great times down in the Lock and Don’t jungle.
01:01:27 ►
For one thing, it seems like I’m not the only one who’s become a grandparent since attending
01:01:32 ►
one of those conferences.
01:01:34 ►
It appears that Robert also has entered that category because he sent me a picture of him
01:01:38 ►
and his newborn baby granddaughter.
01:01:41 ►
And having just had the experience a couple years ago of holding a baby that’s only a few hours old,
01:01:48 ►
it’s perhaps the most psychedelic experience I’ve ever had.
01:01:52 ►
And from the look on Robert’s face and the photo he sent,
01:01:55 ►
well, you can tell he’s in a state of perfect bliss himself.
01:02:00 ►
So congratulations on the new grandchild, Robert, and thanks for sending the photo.
01:02:05 ►
It’s one of a handful of pictures that I’ve received from a few of our listeners,
01:02:09 ►
and they really help me keep you in mind when we get together in the salon.
01:02:13 ►
So, I’m really glad you’re here, and whether you’re driving to work right now,
01:02:17 ►
or relaxing at home, or at work for that matter,
01:02:21 ►
it’s good to know that you’re here with us in the Psychedelic Salon each week.
01:02:24 ►
For that matter, it’s good to know that you’re here with us in the Psychedelic Salon each week.
01:02:31 ►
I guess before I go, I should mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 2.5 license.
01:02:37 ►
But if you have any questions about that, you can click on the link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
01:02:42 ►
which may be found at matrixmasters.com slash podcasts.
01:02:47 ►
And if you still have questions,
01:02:49 ►
you can send them in an email to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.
01:02:54 ►
Thanks again to Chateau Hayuk for the use of your music here in the salon.
01:02:59 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:03:04 ►
Be well, my friends.