To begin with, I wasn’t suicidal at the time. It was Spring, and I was probably a Sophomore or Junior in college at the time, and was fully invested in flexing my mind and stretching my young, spry neurons to their limit. There’s something about youth that begets experimentation, and I certainly wasn’t shy to try any fun or enlightening thing that was presented to me. Since my 20th birthday, when some of my fellow honors college students decided to throw a party for me and introduce me to the wide, wild world of recreational drugs, I had developed a keen interest in two substances in particular — cannabis and salvia. I speak about cannabis extensively elsewhere in this book, but this story is about Salvia Divinorum, the plant that nearly killed me, the plant that unveiled parts of myself that I wouldn’t fully appreciate for another fifteen years or so, the plant that introduced me to the boundless kaleidoscope of experiences our minds are able to process — with just a little help.
The active component in salvia is salvinorin-A, a highly potent and selective kappa opioid receptor agonist. Its chemical formula is C23H28O8. If you want to synthesize it yourself, do really well in organic chemistry class. It’s eliminated from urine in a couple of hours, is rarely tested for in the first place, and as of this writing its somehow still legal to possess and distribute in most of the Western United States. It quickly became my drug of choice in those early years, as it was a powerful dissociative which could also produce vivid hallucinations and had a tendency to confront the parts of your mind that you’d rather forget. While these effects sound like — and actually are — extremely disturbing, they also can teach us about ourselves and reveal things that can’t be unveiled any other way.
Going back a bit further for a moment, the first time I broke through (achieved a disembodied state of total ego death) on salvia was quite the experience. It was the middle of Winter, and I owned a particularly awful car. It was an old 1980s Mercury Cougar that Oma and Papa had bought me as my first ever vehicle with four wheels. They got it from Uncle Johnny (whom I don’t believe you ever met) for $500. It was not worth the money. I’ll tell you more about why in another chapter, but for now, just know that it sucked, and I used it to do drugs in the first couple of years I was in college. I strolled out to the car in two feet of snow, wearing my long, black, felt coat. I had my pipe in my pocket, along with a butane lighter. I hopped into the passenger seat through the window (see the chapter on the Cougar), closed the window behind me, and lit up.
Immediately, I felt like I had been sucked out of my body, and placed inside of a black void. I didn’t feel like myself. I had no body. I had no memories. I… didn’t exist. Yet I was still experiencing things. It was a dialectical experience in that I was able to hold these two contradictory beliefs simultaneously — that I both had experiences, but did not exist as a subject to experience them. After a lingering moment, there was an indescribable rush of energy, and I started to see other versions of myself flipping before me like a rolodex of alternatives. Some male, some female. Some in kitchens, some at desks, others playing games on a computer. Eventually, I reached the end of the rolodex and things settled on an older man wearing a brown coat with a nice paisley tie. He had a full beard, squared-jaw, and gentle-but-piercing eyes. His hair was going grey. Behind him were bookshelves, and a red wooden chair, upholstered with tantalizing, crimson-red leather, dotted with brass studs. He had a curved wooden pipe in his mouth, and there was the warm, fickle, flickering glow of a fireplace in the corner of the room. I had been introduced to a person I would later come to know as Charles, and as it would turn out, he had been influencing my life for a good while.
Just as quickly, I was sucked back down into the frigid cold of my car, sweating profusely, and tried to get my bearings. Maybe it was the icy air that made my skin prickle under the layers of clothing I wore, or maybe it was a cosmic shiver from whatever dimension I had just returned from. I longed for the warmth of the fire, and resolved to sit by one when I returned to my dormitory. Just as I was coming to, I saw lights flashing out the rearview mirror. “Oh shit, it’s the fuzz!” I thought to myself. The officer came up to the passenger side, and I rolled down the window.
“Good evening, officer. How may I help you this fine Winter eve?”
“Yeah, uh, I’m just patrolling, and saw you sitting in this car. Does it belong to you?”
“Why, yes, officer. The car is mine. I haven’t been driving it this evening, though,” I said with the confidence of at college kid who thought themselves smarter than the law.
“May I see your license and registration?”
“Surely,” I replied, and handed him my license, along with the registration documents from the glove compartment in front of me. He walked back to his patrol car to process my documents, and returned a couple of minutes later.
“I see there’s a pipe sitting on the dash,” he said in a stern tone. “Mind if I take a sniff of that?”
“Certainly, you may,” I responded with some gusto whilst handing him the implement.
“What is this you’re smoking; I don’t recognize the smell. Is it flavored tobacco?,” he asked.
I launched into a full-blown explanation of Salvia Divinorum and the legal status of the substance, almost certainly giving him more than he could reasonably chew. This pig was looking for cheap quota points rounding up kids smoking pot on campus, and wasn’t interested in a chemistry lesson, let alone a polemic on the moral virtues of psychedelia.
“Ok, yeah — I can’t keep up with this stuff anymore. I’m old. But this definitely isn’t weed; just try to get out of the cold. It’s freezing out here,” he dryly concluded.
“Yes, sir. Have a fine evening.”
And that was that. I returned to my dorm, lit the fireplace in the upstairs recreation room, and cuddled up in a cozy chair with a cup of cocoa to process my experience in the peace and restful tranquility of the safest place I had ever been in my life.
Now, getting back to where we were… It was Spring, and my friends and I had resolved to waterfall some Salvia out of a makeshift gravity bong made with a Sobé bottle and some aluminum foil. Sobe doesn’t exist anymore, but there was an old stoner trick that relied on a design defect in those bottles. There was a place near the edge of the base of these things where the air was blown in during manufacturing. The glass covering that spot was thinner than the surrounding glass, and quite brittle. We’d take a hammer and nail and carefully tap that place until the glass broke out in a round hole, just the size to cover with the pad of a thumb. We’d then flip the lid upside down, secure it with some masking tape, drive some small holes through the bottom, and then wrap up some aluminum foil inside of it. We’d poke holes in that, as well, and then we would effectively have a disposable tray or whatever we were smoking, and a reusable gravity bong. The gravity comes in when you fill the bottle with water, while holding a thumb over the drainage hole. After securing the bowl at the top and putting in the aluminum tray with whatever one wanted to inhale, one just had to light the bowl at the top and let their thumb off the drainage hole. Gravity would carry the water out of the bottle, leaving a negative pressure space inside the bottle. Smoke would rush in from above, and within a few seconds, the bottle would be filled with the sweet sweet vapors of psychedelic wonder.
This is the point at which the story gets weird, and where your parent nearly died — long before you were born. Now, wouldn’t that have been a shame? Luckily, I survived. But you already know that. We loaded up some 40x extraction strength salvia into the bowl, and let it waterfall into the sink below. It was my turn to trip, and trip I surely would. The room we were in was an open layout. It was a beautiful afternoon, and the sun hung low in the sky and shone through a crescent of glass set in old, red bricks on the West end of the room. The space was filled with the haze of drugs inhaled antecedent to my own venture. Sunbeams wafted through the smoke and ash, and the light scattered against the far wall, making shadow puppets of our daze. Gentle music played from an old speaker sitting in the corner. The Beatles were a staple stoner soundtrack, and had been for the past half century. So, I slumped down on the old brown couch sitting again the window, and watched the shadows play whilst inhaling 24oz of the strongest stuff there was.
My world retreated, my heartbeat proceeded, and all of a sudden I was filled with a familiar energy. My body felt light as a feather resting on the scales of Anubis. My heart, however, was heavy, laden with a solemn purpose which never since has been divined to me. Time slowed to a crawl. Seconds became hours, and hours days. The world seemed to turn around me ever so subtly that I could close my eyes forever and only lose a moment. In this environment, the lyrics of the song playing in the background stretched out in odd ways. “Hey Jude” was the track of the moment, and upon the beginning of the chorus, the words got muddled in a serendipitous way.
“Heyyyyyyy Juuuuuuuuuuuuuuu……..,” the tone carried on into the atmosphere, evaporating and turning to the lazy slurred speech of John Lennon on too many drugs at once.
“I have to get to Jerusalem!,” I screamed, hopping off the couch and turning my face toward the setting sun. I saw the Dome of the Rock in the distance, sunbeams glinting off its gilded face, shining over fields of grapes and a river of wine flowing from far in the distance. The sky was blue and clear. Birds chirped in the air. I knew I had to get to that shining city in the distance — lingering longingly for me to find it at arm’s reach.
I leapt onto the couch toward an opening in the crescent glass, reaching outward to carry myself over the back of the couch and out of that window left ajar. I want to take but a moment of your time to mention that this exact scenario is why you should always have a sober sitter when you’re doing drugs. Mind-altering substances may show us incredible, indelible things, but they can also warp our perceptions of reality, and indeed ourselves, and invite a measure of chaos into our lives which we may not have accounted for beforehand. Two of my friends lunged forward to grab me, but a second from my own demise, and held me safe and close for another few minutes while my mind and body reunited in the material plane, having been caged once again and deprived of continued revelry in the divine.
Nevermind the fact that I nearly won myself a rapid, unplanned delivery into that same divine place from whence I came. This experience taught me nothing, except that I had mined the depths of what salvia may teach. I don’t regret my experiences on salvia at all, but I also don’t regret stopping after this final trip. I’ve found that most drugs, especially psychedelics, are like that. You mine them for what wisdom you can, and then you simply have no further use for them. I still trip on LSD every so often, as it becomes available, during the liminal periods of life. It can still provide me with guidance during those moments, and the effects are completely different, but I’ll save my praise of acid for another chapter.
There are two morals in this story. First, always have a sober sitter whenever you’re using psychedelics. Set and setting matter, and ensuring it’s a safe environment by having someone sober to babysit you is always a good idea. There’s no shame in this, and is widely practiced and accepted as a normal part of the experience within the community of psychonauts. Second, always make sure to sit in the passenger seat of your car with your keys in your bag any time you’re doing drugs in your car. Possession is a misdemeanor that’ll net you a small fine and a stern talking to by a judge. A DUI is a very different matter. In truth, this whole story is about how to do inherently unsafe things safely. If you want to have an interesting life, make sure you’re prepped to survive it.