Salvia

What it feels like

A trip measured in minutes, stage by stage.

Salvia divinorum is a sage whose active compound, salvinorin A, is usually smoked as an extract. What follows is fast and strange: recreational users describe intense derealisation, and a reduced ability to interact with themselves or anything around them.

As it builds

• Under a minute, Arriving: Almost instant.
• Threshold, Pressure and tilt: Pressure on the body, and a shift in which way is up.
• Pulled, Gravity goes wrong: Gravity seems to pull the wrong way, and you seem to fall or move through space; objects distort.
• Elsewhere, The room goes: Outside sights and sounds are shut out and replaced by another place, often with cartoon-like imagery.
• No body, The body goes: Contact with your own body is lost. Bodies, including your own, can seem like geometric objects.
• Within 30 minutes, Back: It drops away quickly; users often say it lasted 15 minutes or less.

What people report

• Detached: Depersonalisation and derealisation — you and the world both feel unreal.
• Somewhere else: More often than with LSD, the surroundings become another place.
• Body: Lower doses heighten body sensations; the highest remove them.
• Distortion: Visual and auditory hallucinations, with objects bent out of shape.
• Unsteady: Dizziness and poor coordination.
• Gaps: High doses impair memory of what happened.

What's happening in the brain

A different receptor, a familiar network. The model lights each one as you read.

Salvinorin A acts selectively on the kappa-opioid receptor and not at all on the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor that mushrooms and LSD depend on — which is part of why the experience is so different from theirs.

The self network loosens

In the first brain-imaging study of salvinorin A, its biggest effect was weakening the default mode network at the peak — strikingly like other hallucinogens, despite the different receptor.

Shutting out the world

One proposal is that salvia acts on the claustrum, a thin sheet of grey matter deep beside the insula that's dense with kappa receptors and thought to help bind experience together — which would fit the world being replaced and the body coming apart. It's a hypothesis, not yet tested directly.

Memory

High doses impair memory of the experience.

Risks and staying safe

Short, but completely out of reach while it lasts.

In a lab study with careful monitoring, there was no lasting harm at one month. The risk is the few minutes themselves: cut off from your surroundings, dizzy and uncoordinated, sometimes unable to respond.

Keeping it safe

• Have a sober sitter — you may not be able to respond.
• Sit or lie down somewhere safe first, away from stairs, roads, water and anything hot.
• If you're the sitter: don't restrain them — keep them from harm and wait; the peak passes in minutes.
• Get help if someone is injured or doesn't come round as expected, and say what was taken.

Check what you know

Four questions about what salvia does.

• Someone who's taken mushrooms says salvia will be "basically the same, just shorter". Is it? No — it acts on a different receptor, and people describe it as unlike anything else. Salvinorin A works on the kappa-opioid receptor, not the serotonin receptor mushrooms use, and users describe it as unique.
• A friend describes their salvia trip: "The room just wasn't there. I was somewhere else completely." Is that typical? Yes — the surroundings being replaced by another place is characteristic of salvia. Outside sights and sounds are shut out, and salvia replaces the surroundings with other places more often than LSD does.
• Imaging studies have found mushrooms, LSD and salvia all affect one brain network in a similar way. Which one? The default mode network, which weakens at the peak. Salvinorin A's most prominent effect was weakening the default mode network — strikingly similar to other hallucinogens.
• Ten minutes after a strong hit, someone says they can't remember much of what happened. Why? High doses impair memory of the experience. At high doses salvinorin A brings strong dissociation and impaired memory.