DOSE:

1 bowl

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract)

BODY WEIGHT:

118 lb

I had always been curious about trying salvia after reading about it a few years ago, but I also knew that the indigenous people of southern Mexico who discovered the plant strongly discouraged smoking it, and would chew the leaves or make a tea out of the salvia instead. Unfortunately, I chose the expediency and ease of smoking it, and it was a very bad decision.

A friend of mine who had been out of my state for a few years came to visit me and in stark contrast to how she had been before she left the state, now she really only cared about getting high all the time, anything to not be sober. She didn't really care about what drug she was doing as long as she didn't have to deal with reality. So a few days after she arrived in town, her and I went to my other friend's house. Naturally, she was talking to us about drugs, and I mentioned salvia briefly. All of a sudden, my other friend's eyes widened and he had a sly grin on his face. He told us he had salvia in his pocket, right there, and just pulled out a small plastic bag of salvia. I picked it up and examined it. It looked exactly like oregano, and not only did it look exactly like oregano, but I gave it a whiff and it smelled just like it too! I let them know about this and they smelled it and concurred with me.

I used a hookah to smoke it, and took as big a hit as I could. Not much happened, and I explained my disappointment to them. This resulted in no one else partaking of the herb. But, I did notice a few effects. It seemed like the left side of my head experienced an extreme amount of pressure building up, and my field of vision narrowed. Like, if you used the aspect ratio setting on your computer monitor and changed it from wide screen to a smaller resolution where everything is cramped in. In fact, my whole head felt strangely pressurized , and the best way I can describe it is if somebody cut a horizontal strip out of the center of my head and then placed the bottom and top halves together again. That was what it felt like. But other than those things, I felt nothing and we went on as normal. I did notice a slight disassociative effect though, and I found it more difficult to talk to my friends and zoned out a bit.

A few days later, mine and my friend's curiosities got the best of us and we went to a smoke shop and purchased a 40 X extract of salvia for ourselves for thirty bucks. It came in a tiny plastic container, and it said something along the lines of 'Purple Slime Salvia' in metallic lettering. We didn't smoke any of it that same day, because we had other stuff to do. But that night, she facetimed me and explained her experience with smoking it alone on her back porch at night. She was still kind of high and her words didn't make much sense, but she saw 'grass creatures' that rose out of the soil and whispered unintelligible things to her, but that telepathically she could understand that they wanted her to sit down and not move from the porch. She simply sat there and watched them until the drug wore off.

The next day, she invited me to a forest nearby that we like to hang out at sometimes. Unfortunately, this was not a good setting because she had one of her friends come over too, and they were both extremely stoned. For some background info, I don't do a lot of drugs, and I don't like weed. Her friend was major stoner, who also coincidentally had just received brain damage from an accident prior to the event, plus she was stoned out of her gourd, so I simply had bad company to be with. They were just brain dead and not any fun to be around whilst sober. Nonetheless, I watched them smoke bowls half filled with weed and half filled with the salvia. In retrospect, the experience one receives when they smoke weed with the salvia is clearly much different from smoking solely salvia on it own. Not to mention, they were only smoking half as much as I would later on. Anyway, the way her stoner friend reacted to the salvia was... Uninspiring. He laughed uncontrollably and kept placing items from his pockets into her purse or into other pockets over and over, laughing. Then he just rambled on and on, slurring his words, making weird hand gestures, trying to explain something about alternate dimensions and my other friend BEING a banana. Then, my other friend smoked the same thing as him.

Her trip started out seemingly well, but then descended into something terrible. Not as terrible as mine, mind you, but still bad. So she exhaled the smoke, and then immediately fell backwards onto the ground and laid on her back, but tried to get up and failed to. She said, 'What's going on? I can't lift my head! Why is my back stuck on the ground...?' And asked where she was, and what she was doing. She also laughed a lot, which interfered with her talking. Eventually she sat up and told us she 'remembered everything... That's going on,' then tremored and struggled to control her breathing.Then she started to fall back again and held onto the stoner guy's hand and leaned back like she was preventing herself from falling backwards again, and told us, 'I'm gonna roll! I don't wanna roll! Please hold my hand! Ah!' And she just kept groaning in pain. After a while, she recovered and told us, 'Bro! That was so fucking terrifying! I rolled... And then I became a part of the ground...' and then she cried. Then they rushed me and pressured me into smoking some salvia shortly after by saying that they need to smoke more weed out of the same bong we were using salvia for, and because I didn't like weed they didn't want to contaminate it with some before I used salvia, and if I was smoking some, I needed to do it right then and there. This might have been another contributing factor for my bad trip.

So, I took the hit of just salvia, and smoked about 2.5 times as much as either of them did. It was... fucking agonizing, and like nothing I've ever experienced before with any other drug. The most annoying thing about this, is that I have a really good memory in general, but this drug induced immediate amnesia in all three of us, so it's far easier for me to describe what happened to the two of them than myself. I'll try my best to recollect what happened, but the memory is hazy. So I had never experienced such an immediate onset of the effects of a drug like this before. The high hit me like a train. Literally the moment I exhaled, it hit me. The first thing that happened was my throat hurt really bad (salvia is harsh on the lungs) so I asked for water. My friends gave me some and I noticed that I was struggling to move my hands to twist off the lid of the thermos and take a drink. I took a drink and then looked down at the thermos, and then my field of vision disappeared in an arc. I went blind temporarily in my peripheral vision. An arc of blackness swept over the sides of my vision, and I could see it happening! I also got extremely light headed. Keep in mind all of this happened within like four seconds. All I could see was the bottle (in the middle of my vision) and I was too fucked up to even screw the lid back on. Then that was when I lost control of my own consciousness. That was the last thing I remember doing of my own accord.

My memory of the middle of the high is really hard to recall, but I'll try my best. It was like the black blindness on the sides of my vision turned into a grey intense blur, and it was like the entire world in my vision was shifted in the same way that Moses split the red sea. Everything that I was looking at was split into two halves that turned into blur, and all I could see was a diamond-shaped opening in the middle of my vision. The blur on the sides had strange colorful patterns that moved, and I could still see reality and my actual surrounding in the middle of my vision, but I physically couldn't look at what was on the sides. The image in the center also zoomed out, like when you turn a pair of binoculars around and look at it backwards. My heart was pounding heavily and I felt extreme anxiety. I also couldn't move my body or speak to my friends without considerable effort. I felt like I was trapped in this strange visual and physical impairment and I couldn't escape this uncomfortable and overwhelming feeling. I managed to yell out things 'Help me, please!' and 'What's going on? Oh god.' etc. A couple of times, and I could see my friend's face in the center of my vision, but I couldn't hear what she was saying to me, or maybe I just couldn't understand her. I was in this strange paralyzed hell for what felt like thirty minutes before all of a sudden I was sitting up and looking at the ground in front of me. The blindness in the sides of my vision subsided a bit, and then it felt like I was locked onto staring at the water bottle. It was exactly like when you lock onto an enemy in dark souls. I couldn't look away or move away from the water bottle no matter how hard I tried, and when I leaned back or to the side from it, it was like a magnet was pulling me back towards it. I was slowly regaining my ability to speak to my friends, but I couldn't look at them and I was still in this hell.

All I know after that is that I sat there for a long time until the effects gradually wore off. The aftermath of it felt like my body was numb and my emotions were dulled. It felt like I was disconnected from the world. The weird thing is, when I first came down from the salvia, I remembered nothing. I could not, for the life of me, remember what happened five minutes earlier, and I couldn't remember anything that happened while I was on the salvia. My friends told me what I was doing and it was only through that, that I was able to recall some of the memories. It induces amnesia, and that's terrifying.

I wasn't aware of doing any of this, or having any of this happen to me when I was on the salvia, but my friends told me what they saw me do when I was high. I sat there criss cross applesauce with my arms sticking out at my sides, and I held them out indefinitely, with a blank stare and expression on my face. Eventually, I fell backwards and started freaking out and telling them that it hurt and I was scared. Then my friend picked me up and held my head in her lap and tried to calm me down. I vaguely remembered seeing her face in the center of my vision, but had no idea of anything else. Then they picked me back up and I sat in the same position, but this time looking at the water bottle.

TLDR: Salvia is an unpredictable and potent drug that I can only describe as indescribable. Smoking it is not the way it should be ingested as it induces a too intense of an experience, and I would not recommend doing so, ever. 0/10

Exp Year: 2018	ExpID: 112421
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 19
Published: Nov 5, 2018	Views: 1,776
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Salvia divinorum (44) : General (1), Difficult Experiences (5), Small Group (2-9) (17)