Entheogenic Interludes 2

As I stated in the first part of this interview, Jason Lubyk had made me wonder two things. First, what was Salvia, and secondly what else was out there online that was legally available. Fortunately, I know someone

who’s tried a good deal of these substances himself and survived, and I thought he’d be perfect to interview. I find it telling that even though he consented to be

interviewed, and even though all of these are apparently legal plants, that the stigma of prohibition has so affected the dialog about inducing non-ordinary states of

consciousness in general and him in particular that he was unwilling to do this interview unless I was willing to interview him anonymously. The

href="http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=654" target="_new">first part of this interview covered Kava, Kanna, Blue Lotus, Kratom, and Datura. What follows is the next

installment of this interview, covering Wild Dagga, Hawaiian Baby Woodrose, and of course Salvia among others. Bear in mind that what follows is advice from an anonymous dude on the net, so none of this is in any way supposed to be taken as medical

advice. Do your own research. This series of articles is only intended to raise your awareness of the culture of entheogenic hobbyists who’ve helped sustain a somewhat sketchy online cottage

industry.

Wes Unruh:

Sinicuichi (Heimia

Salicifolia) is on your list, and honestly I’ve never heard of this plant. What is it?

Mr. X:

Sinicuichi is a Mexican/Texan herb called the “Sun-Opener.” I never did it as a tea though because I’m fairly lazy when it comes to these things. But traditionally they take

the plant and they make a tea like you’d make a sun tea, let it ferment in the hot sunlight and everything. It gets yellow, like yellow water. And if you drink enough of

this apparently you have a yellow cast to your vision for a while. And apparently the Native Americans used it to improve their memory and allegedly sometimes even remember

things that happened before they were alive, perhaps a genetic memory. I experienced it as a resin that I smoked. A lot of these herbs you can buy as an extract at ten times

the strength or so, and I got a gram of it and smoked the whole gram. I found it very euphoric but I didn’t have any of the memory enhancing effect to it.

WU:

Do you think if you’d drank that in an alcohol solution or boiled water you would have had a different experience?

X:

Oh yeah, definitely. In general I think any of these things if you drink them, make tea out of them, I think it’s better. Next we’ve got Lion’s Tale, or

href="http://www.erowid.org/plants/leonotis_leonurus/" target="_new">Wild Dagga (Leonotis

Leonurus) and it’s another South African plant. I believe its nickname is ‘little cannabis’ and it’s a euphoria plant. It’s very mild, basically there’s no mental

effects whatsoever. You just smoke it and it feels pleasant. A mild physical euphoria like cannabis in a way but without the cool mental effects like ‘I’m thinking cool

thoughts now’ or ‘I’m thinking more lucidly’ or, you know, none of that. And I really like mental things, but it’s kind of hard to find with these internet-available

entheogenic herbs. You know, legal ones that make you think real differently.

WU:

Well, one of them that I know of is legal to buy and legal to grow, but not to eat, which seems really strange. When I first discovered this area of study of uh.. entheology if you will, I know at one point I realized that the flowers growing wild along a river near my old house in Kansas were all chock full of psychoactive chemicals that are technically illegal to possess, and it seemed then to me to be unbelievably futile to try to enforce this prohibition. Anyway, from what I understand Morning Glory (

href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipomoea_tricolor" target="_new">Ipomoea Tricolor) seeds can be purchased online, and a hundred or so is enough to trigger a psychedelic experience, but eating the seeds or preparing them for consumption is a felony?

X:

That’s right, it’s considered manufacturing basically.

WU:

Is part of that because there’s cyanide in the outer casing, and you’re supposed to shave off the outside layer if you’re going to use them?

X:

Well, that’s not Morning Glory seeds, that’s their tougher cousin from Hawaii, the Hawaiian Baby Woodrose (

href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_baby_woodrose" target="_new">Argyreia Nervosa) have cyanogen. The Morning Glory seeds don’t have that, but both plants have a

natural toxin that makes you nauseous. Woodrose have a lot more of it, and that cyanogen.. I know a guy who’s ate some of those without shaving them and he said he’s never

been so sick in his life. He said it was something like ten or twelve hours of being sick.

WU:

Yeah, it would make you extremely sick for a while, and fuck up your digestive tract.

X:

And of course it’s technically illegal to eat, because there’s a drug called LSA, which is similar to LDS, which under the analog act of the 80′s, any molecule which is

similar to any illegal molecule is, by definition, illegal as well. Since LSA is similar to LDS but it’s in this plant, then as an ornamental plant it’s okay and you can use

it as a power or whatever, use it in a ritual space for it’s power, but you can’t use it to eat because then you’re trying to ingest an illegal substance.

WU:

Might this still be legal because it’s impossible to get rid of Morning Glory because they’re everywhere? It’s like saying that dandelion seeds were illegal to eat. I mean

it’s everywhere, it’s on different continents, you can’t stop it. You can’t make that illegal, it’s impossible to stamp out. It’s just confusing, this attitude of making

specific parts of a plant illegal that’s growing everywhere.

X:

I’ve never actually heard of anybody getting busted for Morning Glory, but there might have been though. I suspect if you had enough and you invited tons of people to all do

a publicly announced Morning Glory party and everybody was coming in to ingest Morning Glory seeds then you might get arrested.

WU:

Okay, so Morning Glories contain LSA and Wild Dagga is a physical euphoriant. What do you have next?

X:

We got Dream Herb (Calea

zacatechichi), and I like Dream Herb a lot. It’s another African herb, and it comes from the same family of Salvia and Sinicuichi I think, but Dream Herb is used

traditionally as a dream intensifier for shamanism involving dreams, like you want to find out information in a dream or something like that. It tends to increase REM time so you’re dreaming more. When you’re on this substance dreams tend to be more vivid and your recall of dreams tends to be stronger. And it helps some people have lucid dreams. I’ve had one lucid dream using it.

WU:

How did you use it, and how can it be used?

X:

I would make like a couple of teas out of it, and I would pour stevia which is a natural plant that you can get an extract of and it’s like 50 times sweeter than sugar and doesn’t have calories or anything like that and I’d use that to kind of counteract the bitterness of the Dream Herb. This stuff is really a challenge. If you’re going to drink this stuff, it’s horrible. I mean to me it’s the most horrible plant tea I’ve ever tried. And I’d smoke it, you know. Smoke a bowl or two or three or whatever, basically the more the merrier because the natives would use a lot of this stuff apparently. I’ve never really had the endurance to use like a half ounce or anything. But I have had an audio hallucination while I was smoking it. And it seems to increase dream time. Not always, it’s not consistent, but overall I’ve had more dream recall and more vivid dreams on it. It’s kind of like dreaming on melatonin, because dreams are more colorful.

WU:

You’ve mentioned Salvia, which sort of precipitated this interview. I’d watched Jason’s entry on Salvia, in which he talks about it’s use at parties, and how people are filming it and posting it on youtube. I’m curious as to what Salvia is, what family it is, and a friend of mine asked me if it was sage or if it was related to sage, and it kind of is.. isn’t it? Could you tell me about Salvia?

X:

Salvia (Salvia Divinorum) is a kind of or variety of sage, and apparently some other varieties of sage are psychoactive as well, but none nearly as powerful as Salvia. Salvia’s like the king god-daddy of them all. For the most part, it’s very extremely rare in nature to find this plant where it can reproduce naturally. And this goes on for all of our history of this plant. The Native Americans were cloning this plant, the shamans and such would keep the plant alive. And that’s basically the only reason why this plant, as far as we know, exists to this day, is because it’s being cloned all the time. What the people were using on the videos was probably 20 times extract being burned with lighters. Traditionally the Native Americans didn’t smoke this plant at all, which I don’t know why because they had pipes. But all over North and South America they’d chew it or make a plug, put it like tobacco under the tongue. It’d be like a real mild, mushroom-like trip.

They usually used Salvia when they couldn’t find Psilocybe Mexicana, when that mushroom wasn’t available they’d replace it with Salvia. But now, and I don’t know who discovered this, but someone discovered that if you smoked this plant it’s like a rocket. It just shoots you out just like a fucking rocket. To me it’s just a totally different dimension. A lot of friends describe it as real dream-like but to me it’s not even that, it’s far weirder. You can black out and stuff and I think the black outs are.. you can’t remember. You’re experiencing some stuff that you’ve seen before, meaning there’s nothing to relate what you’re experiencing to anything you’ve experienced before. And it’s just so mind-blowingly different that you come back without words and you have to form new language, new way of understanding where you’ve been and that’s what causes the black outs.

WU:

I’d say it’s a post-verbal experience, and when it hits you it’s like a switch, there’s literally a switching point between your ability to cognate and your understanding of where you’re at. Like a reset button for the linguistic portion of your brain in a sense.

X:

Yeah, it’s a really bad idea to do it at a party. I’d dread doing something like that. And I bet a lot of people don’t really get high. For one thing ‘getting high’ isn’t really the right term for Salvia because it’s not really a buzz. But it’s hard to ‘go anywhere’ with Salvia because you gotta.. well, they’re using 20x extract and I’ve never fucked with that, I just need the leaf, that’s all I need. I don’t even need the extract. But I’ve heard of people like that in town doing it, and there’s people that keep on tapping them on the shoulder going ‘Boo, Boo’ or ‘Let’s do the lighter trick close to your face’ all those stupid LSD party games that idiots play, and as a result a lot of these people are probably not going to the other side because of all the distraction. I’ve had times where I’d been in a completely scary, fucking terrifying, and horribly painful hallucinations and I fought it off and I was instantly back and not feeling anything different than I’d be feeling right now. But on 20x extract, you know, that’s like complete disorientation, I’d be surprised if you could even get up, or talk, or react.

WU:

But it’s pretty short. It’s like fifteen minute experience at the most?

X:

Yeah, at the most, usually, for the real crazy part, and that’s off the extract. As far as the plant, five minutes would be a long term experience but it feels like forty-five. I always found it a very frightening drug, very disorientating. For one thing, I don’t know which way is up or down, and I feel like I’m falling and there’s this treadmill going through me and I’m being ripped to pieces, sometimes they take my organs out and stuff like that. You know, it’s like a lot of hellish.. it reminds me more than anything else I’ve ever done of what I’ve read about shamans going through that death-rebirth experience where you take a hallucinogen and then they experience themselves dying and then being born again in a new form, that’s very Salvia-like.

In the final part of this interview, X and I will cover Amanita Muscaria and a few other entheogens, discuss again the important difference between deliriants and hallucinogens, and talk about the additives in those stimulating energy drinks. If you haven’t checked out the post Jackass For Stoners: Salvia Divinorum and User Driven Media that Jason Lubyk wrote earlier this month, then be sure to check it out before I get back and wrap this up.