Pubdate: Thu, 30 Oct 2003
Source: Houston Press (TX)
Copyright: 2003 New Times, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.houston-press.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/199
Author: Margaret Downing
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Salvia+divinorum

STONER SCIENCE

Our Staff Risks All To Determine If A Plant Will Get Them High Or If
It's Just Another Internet Lie

It all started at the Houston 420 on Washington Avenue. Mind you, I
went to college, so I'm no stranger to head shops. But I'd never tried
salvia before, so I asked the red-eyed counter jockey for some advice.
He recommended a small wooden pipe and a high-powered torch lighter
(apparently the run-of-the-mill Bic-variety doesn't generate enough
heat). Then we got down to the nitty-gritty. Salvia can be potent
stuff, he said, so I probably only needed a couple of grams for my
gathering. He gave me directions to an herb shop down the street.

Twelve blocks of muggy heat later, I rolled into Mazatec Garden on
Yale. The proprietor was indeed a cool guy, although he pontificated
upon stoner science a little too much for my tastes. Salvia is a very
fickle herb, he explained, and belongs in a class by itself. In other
words, no matter what degree of experimentation you have under your
belt (or in your lungs), you never know what's going to happen with
salvia. Then his stoner drawl voiced a version of the classic druggie
cliche: "I've seen 300-pound men get floored off of one hit and I've
seen 90-pound girls smoke a whole bowl without feeling a thing."

Most people can expect five to ten minutes of an immediate
hallucinogenic high, he said, followed by 30 minutes to an hour of
relaxation. He recommended that it be used only in groups of two or
three in order to avoid too much chitchat and distraction from the
buzz at hand. And of course soft music and low lighting would add to
the ambience. No word on black lights and Deadhead posters, but I got
the feeling they wouldn't hurt. So I thanked him and headed for the
door, giddy about the prospect of living up to the high journalistic
standards of Hunter S. Thompson. -- Keith Plocek, Houston Press writer

Actually, it all started with a group message I received on the
Education Writers of America list-serve from a reporter at the
Janesville Gazette in Wisconsin.

"Anyone heard of problems with an herb from south of the border called
salvia? It's in the mint family and is not illegal in the states I
hear, but it's supposed to have hallucinogenic properties."

Salvia, salvia. A memory stirred. Wasn't that the low-maintenance,
high-tolerance plant that garden centers were pushing a few years back
in Mississippi? Hadn't I seen it at nurseries in Houston? That
semi-interesting factoid drifted in and out of my head under the
weight of the day's business until Saturday, where in no less than the
esteemed Kathy Huber's gardening column, she too said salvia was a
good plant for Houston. Ha, ha. Pretty funny. The Houston Chronicle is
promoting a drug plant. This was too good.

I brought it up at our staff news meeting Monday. A few knew about the
plant -- one even correctly identified it as a member of the sage
family -- but no one had heard of it as a drug. Was this just another
urban legend, nothing more than this year's version of smoking banana
peels? Any volunteers?

Got one. Then decided that this would be better approached on a more
scientific basis as a group project. For those prepared to toke, the
commitment was sincere and heartfelt. As one writer put it: "I
consider this pure, unadulterated service journalism. We're letting
the public know about the possible dangers -- or virtues -- of this
obscure drug. This may very well have been the most important thing
I've ever done."

I Googled salvia, verifying that it's perfectly legal in the United
States, although banned in Australia, and there's been talk of putting
the kibosh on it here.

Ticktock. It was scientific frontier time now before Congress meets
again. The literature on salvia was profuse, tending a bit to the
didactic. One guide listed as a must-read was 23 pages long. Tracking
through it was enough to reach a glazed state. Along the way I did
pick up that there are six levels to indulging in salvia and you could
expect a spirit guide to show up somewhere in the journey, just like
on an American Indian personal quest.

So with a high sense of mission and history, I went to a garden center
in the suburbs (no less) where I bought two salvia plants for only
five bucks each (it being close-out time at nurseries), while staffer
Keith Plocek went to a head shop for the extract, priced at $15 for 5X
and and $25 for the presumably more potent 15X. We could have also
ordered the extract off the Internet, but we didn't have time to wait
for delivery.

The salvia plants I bought were pretty and bushy with blue flowers at
the top. The leaves gave off a faint smell of mint if crushed. I
stripped off leaves at home and placed them in a 350-degree oven for
six minutes. The dried leaves now looked something like marijuana and
smelled like nothing much to me, but they must have sent out some
secret signal to my cat, who pounced on the kitchen counter and ate
some before I could get to him. I hung around for half an hour to see
if we were going to have an out-of-body-and-emergency-trip-to-the-vet
experience. All Bam did was go to sleep, so I loaded up the plants and
the dried leaves and drove into work.

And on Wednesday at 3 p.m. a small group of us gathered in our
newsroom lounge, put Salvia divinorum in our newly purchased pipe,
used our newly purchased lighter and inhaled.

The gray smoke surrounded us. Now it smelled like pot. It wasn't. But
it wasn't exactly a nothing, either.

Intense, somewhat intense, rush that didn't last long but a rush all
the same -- our research scientists reached consensus that they felt
something. Some got it right away; others said they needed three or
four hits before anything kicked in. Several also got an almost
instantaneous mild headache that would nag them for hours.

One volunteer said she felt glued to her chair; she couldn't move.
Several others said they felt leaden, suddenly uncoordinated. Legs and
arms didn't work right. Lethargy reigned. The presence of our
"watchdog baby-sitters" (there in case something went wrong) seemed
superfluous, a paranoid level of overprotectiveness. No one was going
to dance around and fall down. No one wanted to get up. Still, someone
might catch the couches on fire, and since we were sitting on these
couches and couldn't seem to get up, that could be trouble.

Giggles. More giggles. A wave of giggles around the room as we
pondered the immensity of this. Despite all the literature stressing
that salvia was "not a party drug" and was "not marijuana," the
biggest general effect was to give us a massive case of the giggles.
Salvia was supposed to make people withdraw into their own rooms, into
their own heads, with lights down and no intrusions. Introspection
time. Talking would divert people from seeing visions.

That's probably why the Indian guide didn't show. We kept interrupting
the full experience. In an effort to ramp up, some of the scientists
took to chewing the raw and then the dried leaves of the plant --
another method of ingestion mentioned in salvia guides.

Stoner music was added. "I didn't notice the music at first, and when
I did, it felt strangely ubiquitous, as if it were coming from all
corners of the room. I spent a while wondering if this was thanks to
the excellent acoustics of the staff lounge or, perhaps more
plausibly, the salvia," one explorer noted.

Another adventurer was cramming more and more leaves into his mouth.
We consulted the instructions again. He should chew and then wait ten
seconds before chewing again. Told he was supposed to keep the juice
and the leaves in his mouth for a full 30 minutes before any effect
could be guaranteed, he began to look desperate and a little green.
Nothing was happening. He even dropped some of the leaves into his cup
of chamomile tea, which now looked really nasty.

Then the closest thing to an Indian guide we were to encounter
happened by. Actually it was an employee from the business side who
did know something about salvia. He looked us over, smiling, then with
a puzzled look asked: "You're not chewing the leaves off that plant
are you? That's the wrong kind. That's Indigo spires salvia, not
Salvia divinorum. That won't do anything." The leaf chewing came to a
swift throat- and mouth-clearing end.

Afterward, the scientist reported that "The baked leaves tasted bitter
and dry, yielding a dirty aftertaste. The uncooked leaves were more
palatable and you could almost convince yourself that it was just part
of some really healthy salad dish."

From time to time people from other departments came by to laugh at
us. We laughed and they laughed. Everyone was in a good mood, with the
exception of one of our "baby-sitters," who kept carping about the
"secondhand smoke" and could she "please get some air."

Again, although it smelled like marijuana, salvia didn't share a lot
of the same effects. There was no call for munchies, although we did
discuss whether salvia could be baked in brownies. While salvia
affected motor control, it didn't seem to affect thought processes.
People did get high; there was a certain dreamlike quality, but the
effects were fleeting. The literature warned strongly against mixing
this stuff with alcohol, and no one seemed inclined to do so. We were
too tired, although after about half an hour the most dedicated of our
cigarette smokers made their way outside for a break and to laugh at
drivers parking their cars.

We watched TV along with the music and, this being a newsroom, of
course we had it tuned to CNN. Asked to rate the experience on a scale
of one to ten, another staffer wrote: "About a nine for an at-work
experience. About a five for a party."

In every scientific endeavor there are those for whom a 100 percent
effort isn't enough. Keith Plocek agreed to go home that night and try
again, away from the chattering newsroom.

I turned off the lights, lit some candles and incense, put on a hippie
jam band and popped a borrowed copy of Baraka -- the trippy art film
now passe among psychedelic types -- into the VCR, all in the grand
spirit of Cheech and Chong.

My neighbor came over and we proceeded to pound a few hits of salvia.
The moment I took my first hit, I was overcome with the immediate
sense of wanting more. My whole body suddenly felt flush.

I hit it again, but the bowl was empty. This failure lessened my buzz,
as if I was being punished for being greedy.

My neighbor began to complain about Baraka, saying he wanted to watch
baseball instead. I couldn't really blame him. After all, it was the
ninth inning of a World Series game.

I was quickly losing my buzz. I packed another bowl for my neighbor
and then announced that I was going to lie down in my darkened bedroom
to smoke my last bowl without distraction. As I got up, I joked that
maybe I should sit down in the closet instead. We giggled. He
suggested that I stand on my head in the closet, or spin around, and
we giggled again.

I entered my room, smoked the last bowl, closed my eyes and sprawled
on the floor. I instantly became bored. I recall wondering how I slept
in such a warm room every night. I stood back up and fled to the
air-conditioned living room, where I hung out with my neighbor and
watched the rest of the ball game, feeling slightly more relaxed than
usual.

All in all, the experience was very light. It seems to be a capricious
substance, one that requires the user to keep working to maintain a
buzz. It always had a fleeting sense to it, as if it couldn't be
enjoyed fully because the feeling was always moments away from
leaving. Though its moments were occasionally powerful, I was nowhere
near having any sort of religious experience, pseudo or otherwise. --
Keith Plocek

After all this, I called the local office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration. The guy who was handling calls on Friday hadn't heard
of Salvia divinorum. I spelled it for him and he said they were going
to have to do some research. I felt really edgy. Were we ahead of the
DEA on this one? Maybe just in Houston. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
reported last December that the DEA "considers salvia one of its
'drugs and chemicals of concern.' "

Nearly everyone at the Press said the scientific testing was fun but
they probably wouldn't try salvia again. Its most definite plus is
that it is legal. But that headache thing was hard to get around. And
the next day several people said their sleep had been disturbed by
nightmares. One pointed out that not enough testing has been done on
salvia, unlike marijuana, which has been tested for decades and never
killed anyone. Overall, salvia seemed like a lot of work for a
fleeting return.

But as lab-rat work goes, this wasn't bad.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin