Sold online and in Venice Beach, and the subject of many a video on YouTube, salvia divinorum has recently grown in popularity.
There are still a lot of unknowns surrounding the hallucinogen salvia. Rei Estrada, a prime contributor, spoke with Dr. Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry and biobehaviorial sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine, chief of child psychiatry at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, and past researcher of psychedelic drugs to shed some light on the substance.
Daily Bruin: Can you give us a basic rundown of salvia and its effects?
Dr. Charles Grob: Salvia is a plant in the mint family that grows throughout Southern California and in Mexico. It is used by the native people in Oaxaca, Mexico as a psychoactive sacrament. They take upwards to 15 to 20 of the leaves, wad them up and put them in their mouths and allow them to gradually dissolve over time.
The active alkaloids are absorbed through buccal mucosa in the mouth and the people utilizing it in such a manner have a gradual onset of a fairly … strong psychedelic effect.
However, that’s not how North Americans have been taking it in the last several years. Here, what’s done is it is smoked. The leaves are often subjected to a chemical process to potentize to several times the psychoactive intensity.
Alternatively, some people have isolated the active compound, which is a diterpine, and smoked it. Smoking it induces a very rapid onset, brief duration, that’s described as a very bizarre, dissociative experience.
DB: What’s going on in the body, medically, during these “psychedelic experiences”?
CG: Generally, other psychedelics induce receptors in the serotonin system. The receptor action induces the sought-after state.
Otherwise … there can be mild elevation of blood pressure, mild elevation of heart rate, mild elevation of secretion of various neurohormones. Salvia seems to have an effect on the kappa opiate receptor.
DB: What is your stance on the recreational use of salvia?
CG: I think that … people need to be aware that there’s potential risk of inadvertently taking too high a dose.
I know of some cases where people had too strong an experience and afterwards had a great deal of difficulty reestablishing a sense of psychological stability.
There’s a story about the man who discovered there did indeed exist psychedelic mushrooms … named R. Gordon Watson. He went down to Mexico in the mid-’50s and discovered the native peoples were using psychedelic mushrooms in healing ceremonies.
What’s curious is that in the same area people also used salvia. The native peoples were far more reluctant to share the secret of the salvia plant as opposed to the mushrooms.
They used it as a healing plant, but they would not divulge its existence to the inquisitive North American.
DB: Do you know if there is anything behind these supposed healing qualities?
CG: There have been no studies that I’m aware of. … It’s a compound which has really not been subjected too much in the way of research at this point.
DB: Do you know why salvia is legal in most places, as opposed to other hallucinogenic drugs?
CG: In part, it’s because it’s only recently started to be used.
DB: What concerns should people have if using salvia recreationally?
CG: What people have got to be careful about is if they’re taking it, especially the potentized form, especially the active diterpine, they need to keep it within a very low dosage range or it could … induce a confusional state … and perhaps a psychosis.
So there is some risk of inducing some degree of psychological instability if someone takes too high a dose.
E-mail Estrada at restrada@media.ucla.edu.