Salvia divinorum

• 1. Introduction

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  Among the Mazatec people of southern Mexico, shamans say that La Maria speaks with a quiet voice. La Maria is Salvia divinorum, a leafy member of the mint family whose Latin name means sage of the diviners. It also goes by ska maría pastora, seer's sage, yerba de la pastora, magic mint, and simply salvia. Fresh leaves from this plant are used to bring on visionary states during spiritual healing sessions. Its effects arrive quickly and fade quickly. This documentary asks a handful of questions. Why can botanists still not say where the plant came from? How does a single chemical in its leaves work so differently from other hallucinogens? And how did a herb used in quiet ritual end up in legislative chambers, newspaper headlines, and online videos?

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• 2. Cloud Forest Clones

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  Black soil along a stream bank, shaded by small trees and bushes, is where Salvia divinorum most often grows. The plant is endemic to the Sierra Mazateca in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. It lives in primary or secondary cloud forest and tropical evergreen forest, at elevations from 300 to 1830 metres. Low light and high humidity suit it. It rises well over a metre on hollow square stems, a trait shared with the rest of the mint family. Its large green leaves have a yellow undertone and no hairs on either surface. They run 10 to 30 centimetres long.

  The stems break easily and trail along the ground. Wherever they touch down, the plant roots readily at the nodes and internodes. That habit matters because the plant almost never makes seed. No seeds have ever been observed on wild plants. Pollen fertility is also reduced, for reasons nobody knows. Researchers found no active block to the pollen tube inside the style. Instead, some event after the tube reaches the ovary goes wrong. The likeliest explanations are inbreeding depression or a hybrid origin, though the hybrid idea was rejected in 2010. All the Mazatec populations appear to be clonal.

  The puzzle ran deep. As of 1993, Salvia divinorum was one of only three plants in the huge Salvia genus, with roughly 900 species, whose origins were unknown. The other two were Salvia tingitana and Salvia buchananii. The plant's partial sterility hinted at a hybrid, yet no two parent species with an obvious affinity were ever found. Long cultivation and selection might instead have produced an inbred cultigen. Botanists have never settled whether the plant is a cultigen or a hybrid.

  In 2010, researchers sequenced DNA from the plant and a number of relatives. The results suggested it is not a hybrid. Its closest relative turned out to be Salvia venulosa, a rare species native to Colombia, found in shaded, wooded gullies at 1500 to 2000 metres. The study also showed the plant does not belong to the section Dusenostachys, as once believed. A 2013 follow-up with more Salvia species reported the same result.

  Growers lean on the plant's cloning habit. Cuttings between 2 and 8 inches long, cut just below a node, usually root in plain tap water within two or three weeks. Flowers appear when day length drops below 12 hours, beginning in mid-October in some places. City growers need shade cloth to block the glow of high-pressure sodium streetlights. Hobbyists and the ethnobotanist Daniel Siebert report that viable seed can occasionally appear after hand-pollination or hummingbird pollination.

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• 3. Hunt for a Specimen

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  Jean Basset Johnson was studying Mazatec shamanism in 1939 when he became the first to record Salvia divinorum in print. He later documented its use and reported its effects through personal testimonials from users. Even so, botanists could not identify the plant for many years. The Mazatec kept its growing sites secret, and a definitive identification required flowers. In 1962, the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann and the ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson travelled throughout the Sierra Mazateca. They could not find any live plants. Eventually the Mazatec handed them some flowering specimens.

  Those specimens went to the botanists Carl Epling and Carlos D. Játiva. They described the plant and named it Salvia divinorum, a reference to its use in divination and healing. The genus name Salvia traces back to Pliny, who used it for a plant likely to have been common sage, and it comes from the Latin salvere. Hofmann, who had collected the first plants with Wasson, said he was "not very happy with the name". In his view, divinorum means Salvia of the ghosts, while the correct divinatorum would mean Salvia of the priests. Priority rules keep divinorum in the botanical literature.

  The first material Epling and Játiva received was dried. They therefore leaned on Hofmann and Wasson's description of "blue flowers, crowned with a white dome". Those were in fact violet calyces holding unopened white corollas, so early authors wrongly described the corollas as blue. By 1985, up to fifteen populations of the plant had been located.

  Two cultivated strains are known to be distinct. The ecologist and psychologist Sterling Bunnell collected one in 1962, and it is often wrongly called the Wasson-Hofmann strain. The anthropologist Bret Blosser collected the other at Huautla de Jiménez in 1991, and it is known as the Blosser or Palatable strain. A less documented Luna strain, possibly descended from the Bunnell plant, came from a Hawaiian patch of clones. Its leaves are unusually serrated and rounded rather than ovate.

  Wasson also tentatively proposed that the plant could be pipiltzintzintli, the "Noble Prince" of the Aztec codices. Ethnobotanists have debated the idea. Leander J. Valdés voiced scepticism, while Jonathan Ott offered counterpoints more supportive of Wasson. Another mysterious Aztec entheogen, poyomatli, has also been linked to the plant. For that one, another candidate is cacahuaxochitl, a tree called Quararibea funebris.

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• 4. The Ritual of La Maria

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  Mazatec shamans use only freshly harvested leaves in their rituals. They see the plant as an incarnation of the Virgin Mary. Each ritual opens with an invocation to Mary, Saint Peter, the Holy Trinity, and other saints. Afterward, the person stays in a quiet place while the visions unfold. The plant is one of several hallucinogenic species the Mazatec use in ritual, and its main purpose is to bring on shamanic visions in the context of curing or divination.

  The traditional preparation is demanding. Shamans crush the leaves of about 20 to 80 or more fresh leaves to squeeze out the juice. They mix it with water into an infusion, a kind of tea, and drink it during healing ceremonies. The other Mazatec method is chewing and swallowing a large number of fresh leaves. Taken orally, the effects come on slowly, over 10 to 20 minutes. From the first onset, the experience lasts from about 30 minutes to an hour and a half.

  The numbers behind chewing are large. One calculation uses an average concentration of 2.45 milligrams per gram of leaf and about 2.5 grams per leaf. The standard chewing dose is about 8 to 28 leaves, so the total ranges from roughly 50 to 172 milligrams. That vastly exceeds the doses used for smoking.

  The Mazatec also use the plant in smaller amounts as a diuretic. They apply it to ailments including diarrhea, anemia, headaches, and rheumatism. One is a semi-magical disease called panzón de borrego, which literally means lamb belly, a swollen belly. Some advocates point to this cultural context. In Mazatec life, they say, salvia is not really tied to ideas of drug taking at all. It is a spiritual sacrament, and they argue it is better understood as an entheogen than as a hallucinogen.

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• 5. One Unusual Molecule

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  The leaf's power rests on one compound, salvinorin A, which makes up about 0.18 percent of the dried plant. Its chemical formula is C23H28O8. It is a trans-neoclerodane diterpenoid and the first documented diterpene hallucinogen. Unlike most known opioid receptor ligands, it is not an alkaloid, meaning it has no basic nitrogen. The plant makes the compound and releases it through glandular hairs called trichomes, which sit just beneath the cuticle layer of the leaf.

  It was not until 2002 that Bryan Roth and his team identified the psychoactive mechanism. Salvinorin A is a potent and selective agonist of the κ-opioid receptor, and in mice its effects are blocked by drugs that block that receptor. It is an even more potent partial agonist at the D2 receptor, and that action likely plays a significant role. Strikingly, it does nothing at the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor. That receptor is the principal target of classic hallucinogens such as mescaline and LSD. No other site of affinity is known to date.

  By mass, salvinorin A is described as the most potent naturally occurring hallucinogen. It is active at doses as low as 200 micrograms. Synthetic chemicals can be more potent, since LSD is active at 20-30 micrograms. The plant makes other terpenoids too, including other salvinorins and compounds called divinatorins and salvinicins. None showed significant sub-micromolar affinity at the κ-opioid receptor, and nothing suggests they add to the plant's psychoactivity.

  Safety data are thin. The plant has not been well studied in high-quality clinical research, so little is known about its toxicology or long-term effects. Preliminary work suggests low toxicity. Rodents chronically exposed to levels many times greater than human exposure show no signs of organ damage.

  The molecule also acts on the gut. Salvinorin A can reduce excess intestinal motility, such as diarrhea, through κ-opioid and cannabinoid CB1 receptors. It works only in inflamed tissue, not normal tissue, which may reduce side effects. A study at the University of Iowa suggests it might also have potential as an analgesic and as a tool for treating drug addictions.

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• 6. Smoke, Quid, Tincture

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  Smoking dry leaves in a pipe, or through a water pipe to cool the smoke, requires heat. Salvinorin needs about 240 degrees Celsius to leave the plant material, so users often prefer the intense flame of a torch lighter. Untreated dry leaf produces unnoticeable or only light effects for some people. That led to fortified leaf, labelled with a number and an x, such as 5x or 10x. There is no accepted standard for these claims. Other sellers use color codes such as green, yellow, and red. Real potency depends on the natural strength of the starting leaf and the efficiency of the extraction.

  When salvia is smoked, the effects come quickly. The most intense peak arrives within a minute or so and lasts 1-5 minutes. Less intense but noticeable effects persist from 5 to 10 minutes. The sense of the familiar then returns, and the user is back to baseline after about 15 to 20 minutes.

  Chewing is the traditional method, but the modern version differs. Swallowed salvinorin A is generally considered inactive, because the gastrointestinal system deactivates it. Users therefore hold a quid of leaves in the mouth as long as possible, so the compound absorbs through the oral mucosa. At the end they spit out the leaves, since swallowing them has no known effect. This chewing uses more of the plant than smoking and gives a longer-lasting experience. Tinctures are less common. They are placed under the tongue, often with a glass dropper, and may be diluted to ease a stinging sensation caused by the alcohol. Daniel Siebert cautions that inhaling hot vapor from a heat gun can irritate and potentially damage the lungs.

  The reported effects vary. In a survey of salvia users, 38 percent described the effects as unique compared with other ways of altering consciousness. Another 23 percent said they were like yoga, meditation, or trance. Some users describe their visions in drawings, which have produced salvia-inspired visionary art. Others claim musical inspiration. A 2019 large-scale study linked ketamine, Salvia divinorum, and DMT, along with other classical psychedelic substances, to near-death experiences.

  Use in the United States grew quickly. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health estimated for 2006 that about 1.8 million people aged 12 or older had used the plant in their lifetime. Roughly 750,000 had done so that year. In 2007, the annual figure rose to 1 million.

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• 7. Headlines and Hearings

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  News stories in the late 2000s, especially in the United States, treated salvia as a crisis. Headlines compared it to LSD or called it the new pot. Others used danger words, such as "Dangerous Herb is Legal..." and "Deadly Dangers Of A Street Legal High". Parents were alarmed above all by use among younger teens. On the 11th of July 2007, the anchors of an ABC affiliate in Washington, DC, traded looks of incredulity while introducing an investigation of a drug that had "begun to sweep the nation". In March 2008, a Texas station reported that a legal drug used by teenagers could soon be banned in San Antonio.

  The LSD comparison does not hold up well. The two share only the trait of acting at low doses. Salvinorin A is found naturally in a single plant, while LSD is semisynthesized from lysergamides like ergotamine. Smoked salvia lasts a few minutes. LSD effects can persist for 8 to 12 hours.

  A central case was Brett Chidester, a 17-year-old Delaware student who died by suicide in January 2006. His mother, Kathleen Chidester, had learned of his salvia use some months earlier and questioned him. He said he had stopped, but his parents did not believe him. They argued that salvia-induced depression was largely to blame. Some of his earlier writing about salvia experiences was used to suggest he thought "existence in general is pointless", and some media stories called it part of his suicide note. Delaware soon classified the herb as a Schedule I substance under Senate bill 259, nicknamed Brett's law. The role of the drug in his death remains unclear.

  No other reported case anywhere, before or since, alleges salvia as a serious factor in a suicide, overdose, or other death. San Francisco attorney Alex Coolman called it remarkable that only Chidester's parents are cited over and over by mainstream media. Kathleen Chidester kept campaigning. Three years after Brett died, she told the Maryland legislature in support of a bill, "It's my son's legacy and I will not end my fight until this happens."

  In 2007, YouTube videos appeared of alleged users laughing uncontrollably and apparently unable to perform simple tasks. Siebert told the San Francisco Chronicle that they made salvia look like a drug that makes people dangerous. Lawmakers cited the clips. Texas Representative Charles Anderson described a video of a user behind the wheel of a car. Michigan Representative Michael Sak told doubters to go on YouTube. Nebraska Senator Vickie McDonald proposed a Class IV felony for possession, up to five years, and a Class III felony for trafficking, up to 20 years. In Massachusetts, a retired police officer showed the videos to public health and judiciary committees.

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• 8. Patchwork of Laws

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  Representative Joe Baca of California proposed a federal ban in 2002, placing salvinorin A and Salvia divinorum in Schedule I. Siebert wrote to Congress against it, and the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics sent key members of Congress a report and letters from scientists. They feared scheduling would hurt research on the plant. House bill HR 5607 did not pass. Salvia is still not regulated under the Controlled Substances Act, yet by 2009 it was illegal in 13 states, and the count has since passed half. Alabama, Delaware, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, and Texas are among them. Many proposals elsewhere failed, stalled, or died in committee.

  A Nebraska case showed another route. Store owner Christian Firoz was charged with selling salvia under a general statute against selling a product to induce an intoxicated condition, not any salvia law. He was found not guilty. Various branches of the US military have banned salvia, as have some bases. Some internet vendors refuse to ship it to restricted states, and eBay does not permit its sale.

  Other countries differ widely. As of 2015, salvia was illegal in Australia, Belgium, parts of Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, the Republic of Ireland, Romania, South Korea, Sweden, and Switzerland. In Chile, France, and Spain it is legal to possess and grow, but not to sell. Russia allows possession but not growing or selling. Estonia, Finland, Iceland, and Norway treat it as a medicinal herb needing a prescription. Australia placed it in schedule 9, the strictest category and the equivalent of US Schedule I. Italy did the same with its Table I.

  In the United Kingdom, a local newspaper story in October 2005 prompted a parliamentary Early Day Motion to ban it. It drew only 11 signatures. A second motion in October 2008 attracted 18, and the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs was asked to investigate. The Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 passed on the 28th of January 2016 and took effect on the 26th of May 2016 across the whole United Kingdom. It made the plant illegal to possess with intent to supply, to import for human consumption, or to produce for human consumption.

  Opponents of tougher laws say the reactions reflect cultural bias rather than evidence, noting that alcohol and nicotine are more toxic and addictive. Most accept some controls, particularly on sales to minors or sales of high-strength extracts. Enforcement is hard. The leaves are nondescript, with no detectable odour, and the plant can be grown as an ordinary houseplant without hydroponics or high-power lights.

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