Salvia is tempting young, drug-users across North America.

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VICTORIA (CUP) — For years, the Mazatec shamans of southern Mexico have used a legal and largely unregulated psychoactive plant called Salvia Divinorum as a means of inducing mystical, visionary states of transcendental meditation during religious ceremonies and healing sessions.

The leafy compound, whether smoked, chewed or eaten straight off the stem, produces profound effects that have long been coveted by these tribal seers. Over time, the plant came to be revered as a gift from the gods—a gateway to the other side or a secret vessel for spiritual enlightenment.

Luckily for the modern west, a good thing never remains secret for long.

Somewhere along the line, stories of Salvia’s divine abilities to alter the mind reached the ears of North American youth. And now, this once-mysterious plant has fallen out of the hands of our sagely medicine men brothers, straight into the resin-caked bongs of every bored suburban teenager on the continent.

This transition has, of course, brought up several important questions.

Could this be the beginning of a second psychedelic revolution? Will the substance’s recent surge in popularity survive this culture of booze, weed and protein shakes? Why are all of the cool kids doing Salvia? And, of course, what’s the big deal?

There was only one way to find out.

The transaction

In an effort to understand the complexities of this sacred herb, curious of its sudden burst upon the recreational drug scene in a flurry of five-minute YouTube trip clips, I bought a gram of 10x concentrated extract for $20 from an entrepreneur named Fat Roy who met me in his big, red Chevy behind the local Home Depot.

The man’s advice was brief: Do your research before sparking up. Coming from a guy who looked as if he would have had a hard time spelling ‘research,’ let alone lecturing others on its importance, I shrugged him off and decided to compromise by reading a Wikipedia article or two before setting out later that evening.

A half-hour of lazy browsing on the Internet provided the fundamentals. It had to be smoked quickly and deeply, with each inhalation held for as long as possible. Due to the short duration of salvia trips — effects are felt within 60 seconds of consumption, disappearing completely within an hour — and potential intensity of what I hoped to be a 20-minute excursion into the void, a sober sitter was recommended.

A quick phone call secured my chaperone for the evening.

In the interest of science and accurate journalism, I armed myself to the teeth. A voice recorder, notepad, pen, bottle of water, the Salvia and a single Fruit Explosion muffin from Tim Hortons were gathered together inconspicuously, packed into a grey backpack and taken to an empty baseball field.

The trip

Reconstructed through personal memory, an audio device and the written accounts of an anonymous trip sitter who acted as an observer.

Introspection? Sudden understanding? Would I be taken away on a nightmarish journey through time and gravity and distant, forgotten memories? I wasn’t sure what to expect. Maybe nothing. The extract wasn’t strong in comparison to some horror stories I had read about on the Internet.

Salvia cuts can vary in concentration between 5x and 30x, going upwards of 50x and scaling respectively in potency. A worst-case scenario would have had me sitting out there in left field with an empty bag at my feet, stone-cold sober and cursing the jackass who sold me a $20-bag of curry powder.

I hoped for the best, casting a last furtive glance at my surroundings before diving in with a flick of the lighter.

The first thing I noticed was the strange taste. A chalky, campfire smoke that was hard to suck down and even harder to focus on as the grassy field around me almost immediately began to fold and rotate gently.

It was coming on quickly; I could tell by the way my sitter’s eyes transitioned rapidly from a keen, glowing anticipation to a look of intensified concern. Or was there pity in those eyes?

Through a spot of chain-link fence, a few feet away from where we were sitting, the tree line seemed to sway. The darkening sky beyond looked as if an inexperienced Photoshop user had layered it clumsily. The subtle vibrations along the edges of those quivering evergreens momentarily captivated me.

Cross-legged and glassy-eyed, I started to feel off-kilter, toppling over several times as the earth shifted and rocked unsteadily below.

I tried to communicate this weirdness to my companion who was now perched on his knees, leaning forward and analyzing me like some sort of writhing specimen, but was only able to produce a string of breathless, incoherent murmurings. Speech was impossible.

His voice was audible, though the questions seemed hugely unimportant — “Is it working? How do you feel?”

A blank stare was the only answer I could give him. Did he realize that the innocent patch of grass we had been previously lounging on was in the middle of some horrible geographic transformation? The gentle rotating had become violent and the ground began to slant downwards in any direction I leaned.

I reached out for my notepad, which, due to the sudden change in gravity, lay thousands of kilometres away, next to my backpack and lonely-looking muffin wrapper. It would take me years to go get that thing, I reasoned. Better leave it where it is.

Then came the dizziness. Falling backward into the grass and stretching out my limbs to maintain balance. I remember becoming suddenly aware of the ridiculous position I had landed myself in, spread eagle in an open field — da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man on drugs.

The audio recording later revealed that, at this point, no more than a minute and a half had elapsed since the initial hit. The bark of a dog came reverberating across the field, a harsh booming cough that, almost on cue, triggered a bout of hysterical laughter.

Lying on my back to ease the confusion of trying to steady myself on the impossible, mutating terrain, I snapped my arms and legs against my body and began to roll like a log, still guffawing maniacally.

The act of rolling produced vivid and almost unexplainable bodily sensations. At first, I rolled fast and hard, gathering speed and covering what seemed to be great, unfathomable distances. Then my rolling slowed to a smooth, peaceful tumble, changing directions whenever I felt it necessary.

I experimented with different types of rolling, sometimes curling into a tight ball and other times stretching out my arms to become a weird, fleshy pole. Uncontrollable laugher came with each new position. I eventually noticed the figure standing somewhere far above my head, watching me silently. The excitement of rolling died down and I was suddenly embarrassed.

When I came to halt, at the edge of the right field foul line, I felt the effects of the Salvia lifting. According to my sitter, the whole ordeal had lasted about 10 minutes, six of which were spent rolling around like an escaped lunatic.

It took another five minutes before I was able to stand. Though there was certain awkwardness about supporting my own body, I was able to do so without falling over.

Another bark.

There was an elderly lady with a large, white dog yelling at us from across the field, something about an ambulance. We hoped that she was too old to operate a cell phone and trotted quickly back to the car where I collapsed into the passenger seat and we sped off, leaving the old woman alone in her confusion.

The aftermath

Looking back, I feel as if I had only scraped the surface of a substance with infinite potential. A feeling of walking to the edge of a cliff and looking down, knowing that a stronger dose would kick you over the side, into the unknown.

There were no life-altering images or hallucinations, none of the anticipated psychological horrors of shattered reality and chronic madness. My mind was intact, slightly scattered maybe, but able to function in the basic sense. The cosmic, supernatural joys of simple, physical movement far outweighed the mental inebriation.

With a little bit of caution and common sense, Salvia Divinorum should be, as the Mazatecs intended it, an enlightening experience.

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