The Secret Life of Salvia: How this Bizarre Psychedelic Could Revolutionize Gut Health
The Secret Life of Salvia: How this Bizarre Psychedelic Could Revolutionize Gut Health
The diviner’s sage contains one of the most extraordinary psychedelic substances on the planet. In other circles, it's making waves as a revolutionary treatment for gut motility disorders.
Salvia divinorum is an unassuming plant — you might not even notice it growing alongside other plants in your garden.
It’s a type of sage — a group that contains more than 900 individual species. The sages are part of the even larger mint family — which contains a whopping 7000 species.
The leaves of diviner’s sage are unremarkable; they’re easily mistaken for plants like coleus, mint, basil, or stinging nettle. The flowers form stalks filled with tiny white and purple flowers that look a lot like lavender (another member of the mint family). Overall, this unassuming plant is easily overlooked among more vibrant blooms. Nothing about the plant sticks out that would stop the average explorer as they walked past. It doesn't have a particularly strong aroma and blends seamlessly with the surrounding flora.
Despite its humble appearance, Salvia divinorum is one of the strongest naturally occurring hallucinogens on Earth — many times more powerful even than ayahuasca.
With that said, salvia is much more than just psychedelic. It’s a plant with a long history of spiritual and medicinal uses — some tied to its psychedelic nature, others completely unrelated.
Raw salvia leaf and its extracts have shown promise as a novel treatment for chronic pain and inflammation, anxiety and depression, and as a digestive tonic with a particular affinity for motility issues like irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease.
Some of these medicinal qualities leverage the same tricks as cannabis — targeting the endocannabinoid system to curb inflammation at its source.
Salvia is a fascinating and misunderstood plant that deserves much more attention.
The Psychedelic Effects of Salvia
The psychedelic effects of salvia are unlike any other psychedelic on Earth — inducing profound visual hallucinations. It’s just as strong, but completely dissimilar, to tryptamines like DMT (dimethyltryptamine) or LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) and dissociative effects reminiscent of DXM (dextromethorphan) or ketamine.
Modern preparations of salvia use a concentrated extract. It’s a dark black resinous substance standardized to 5X, 20X, or 40X strengths.
Within seconds of smoking salvia, the effects start to manifest around the edges of the vision. Momentum grows rapidly — approaching peak effects in just 3 minutes.
Visions begin to morph and take on a cartoonish quality, which then develops into a soup of vivid colors and chaotic shape-shifting forms.
Low doses remain in this hallucinogenic realm for about 10 minutes before gradually wearing off.
High doses are much more profound. While the experience rarely exceeds about 30 minutes, all sense of time is lost. The experience feels much longer than it really is. Users often describe entering "other dimensions" or engaging with "alien entities." Often, the user completely loses touch with their identity and becomes someone or something else.
It’s common for users to feel like they’ve temporarily converted into inanimate objects. This makes no sense to explain, but in the moment, it feels perfectly real and vivid.
Other times, it feels like the world is ending or that you’re being probed or analyzed by aliens. Some people experience death and rebirth thousands of times over.
Most of the time, the salvia experience is nonsensical and disjointed — unlike the mystical experiences induced by drugs like 5-MeO-DMT or psilocybin, which tend to have a clear focus or message that can be conveyed after the experience. Salvia visions are almost always chaotic, random, and fragmented.
With that said, salvia can be a powerful spiritual experience, too. Reports of people merging with the universe, meeting deities, or receiving some form of life-changing insight are common.
The most common reaction as salvia starts to kick in is intense, uncontrollable laughter — the only reasonable response to the absolute insanity of salvia visions. The mind can’t make sense of what it’s experiencing, so it defaults to laughter. This is quickly followed by a radical shift in reality.
High-dose salvia also has a dissociative quality — decoupling users from their sense of identity and injecting them into something completely different.
Everybody's experience is different, but every story is just as nonsensical as the next. You'll hear accounts of people being converted into a deck of cards, sinking into a puddle on the floor, or being abducted by alien entities. Sometimes, the experience is whimsical and humorous; other times, it's dark and terrifying.
In almost all cases, the trip is completely ineffable.
The salvia experience is deeply strange and incomprehensible. Most people who have had strong salvia trips still struggle to understand or fully explain what happened even years later.
Here's a snippet of a salvia trip report on Reddit that illustrates this point:
“What happened after this is impossible to describe, and I only really have a very shaky mental picture of it because my ego simply cannot even formulate or begin to formulate any kind of description that would fit the experience or uncover even the surface layers of just how unbelievably alien it felt."
The sky is the limit with salvia; there’s no real logic or pattern to the events it can produce.
Common Themes With the Salvia Experience:
Visual distortions, vivid colors, unusual shapes and patterns, objects merging together
Uncontrollable laughter
Feelings that you’re being twisted, stretched, or pulled in one or more directions
Changes in the perception of time (time moves faster or slower)
Out-of-body experiences
Contact with other “entities”
Dissociative thoughts (disconnection with reality)
Heightened mood
Intense fear or anxiety
Salvia, Ego Death, & Psychological Harm
Some people report ego death experiences on salvia, but it’s not very common compared to classical psychedelics. Salvia doesn’t appear to inhibit the default mode network (DMN), which is considered a core component of achieving ego death through psychedelics. Its dissociative qualities also hinder ego death as it tends to separate the consciousness from the rest of the body.
With that said, the intense shift in reality that comes from salvia is sometimes enough to reframe one's life and understanding of the nature of reality in a way that resembles other psychedelic-induced ego-dissolution.
For all the same reasons, salvia can carry the risk of psychological harm, too. It can trigger lingering feelings of derealization and depersonalization and is NOT a substance that should be taken lightly or used without setting up proper psychedelic safeguards.
Aromatic Alchemy: Salvia’s Active Ingredient
Salvia is a type of sage, and like all sages, it’s rich in essential oils.
Essential oils are a collection of small, volatile compounds light enough to evaporate into the air under minimal heat. They provide the characteristic aromas for many plants. The smell of lavender, rosemary, thyme, and peppermint all rely on essential oils. As they evaporate into the air and drift into the nose, they trigger the olfactory receptors to produce their characteristic aromas.
Many essential oils offer medicinal qualities. Some are even toxic (eucalyptus or camphor).
These tiny chemicals often mimic hormones or neurotransmitters. They bind to receptors, altering the function of various brain systems — sometimes those associated with relaxation (GABA) or stimulation (norepinephrine or dopamine); sometimes mood (serotonin, dopamine, endorphins); other times inflammatory responses (TNF, NF-κB, endocannabinoids), hormone regulation, or adaptive stress responses.
Salvia’s powerful psychedelic (and medicinal) effects rely on compounds found in its essential oils. One compound in particular, Salvinorin A, acts as the plant's primary active ingredient. By weight, it’s one of the most potent psychedelic compounds in existence.
Salvinorin A is psychoactive in doses of around 200 micrograms — which puts it in a similar range to powerful synthetic psychedelics like LSD.
For reference, 5-MeO-DMT and psilocybin don’t produce any noticeable psychedelic effects until doses of around 5 mg and 10 mg, respectively (25–50X the dose of salvinorin A).
Most conventional psychedelics (ayahuasca, magic mushrooms, LSD, mescaline) work by mimicking serotonin. These substances look a lot like serotonin, which allows them to bind to the 5HT2A and other serotonergic receptor subtypes. They alter the chemical balance of the brain to produce their characteristic psychedelic effects.
Salvinorin A is completely different. This compound takes a unique approach — focusing instead on the kappa-opioid system.
The exact mechanism of kappa-opioid-induced psychedelia remains a bit of an enigma, but it’s believed to work through a modulation of dopamine in different parts of the brain associated with sensory interpretation.
The kappa-opioid receptors are most concentrated in regions implicated in the modulation of reward, mood, cognition, and perception (ventral tegmental area, nucleus accumbens, prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, striatum, amygdala, and hypothalamus).
Medical Applications of Salvia (Past & Future)
Salvia divinorum was used by the Mazatec Indians for centuries as a shamanic tool for divination. It was thought to provide a bridge between the real world and the spirit world.
For this purpose, salvia was typically smoked.
Beyond its role in divination, this sacred plant had many other medicinal applications.
When applied to the skin as a poultice, salvia was used for treating insect bites, eczema, and candidiasis. Chewed or brewed as a tea, herbalists used it to treat cystitis, menstrual cramps, and depression.
Perhaps its greatest medicinal benefit was its propensity for treating digestive disorders — namely diarrhea, intestinal spasms, or other conditions corresponding with chronic inflammation. The Mazatapecs believed salvia could treat a semi-magical disease known as panzón de Borrego (swollen belly) — which was caused by the casting of a curse from an evil sorcerer.
Salvia’s distinct affinity for digestive health has been studied in detail. In animal studies, researchers found that salvinorin A significantly reduced inflammatory-induced gut motility issues — which is a key factor in chronic digestive disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
Other studies focusing on an analog of salvinorin A called PR-38 inhibited gut motility and reduced abdominal pain in mice with IBS and colitis.
Researchers were surprised to find that salvinorin A works, in part, through a complex interaction between the kappa-opioid and CB1 endocannabinoid receptors. The results of which trigger a marked reduction in both pain and inflammation.
Other studies have highlighted salvia’s ability to reduce key inflammatory mediators, including TNF-α and IL-10.
As an antidepressant, salvias interaction with the kappa-opioid receptors may offer a novel mechanism for mood regulation distinct from traditional antidepressants, potentially offering relief for those resistant to other treatments.
Salvinorin A is Inspiring New Drugs That Target The Kappa-Opioid System
There aren't many drugs that leverage the kappa-opioid receptors — most focus on the mu-opioid and/or delta-opioid receptors to manage pain — such as morphine, oxycodone, and fentanyl.
There are a few, though. Drugs like butorphanol, nalbuphine, levorphanol, levallorphan, pentazocine, phenazocine, and eptazocine all target this system — either directly or as a side-effect of other target receptors. None of these drugs are very common in medicine today.
Currently, there are about 600 semisynthetic salvinorin A analogs being explored as potential therapeutics for treating pain, inflammation, gut motility disorders, and psychiatric conditions. Researchers believe more research on salvinorin A and its analogs could provide new, effective treatments for these conditions without the risk of addictive side effects — a problem inherent to the majority of opioid-based medications.
Some of the most promising candidates include PR-37, PR-38, Herkinorin, and 6-Ethynyl salvinorin A.
Overcoming The Stigma: A Call to Redefine Salvia
Despite salvia’s impressive potency and promising therapeutic potential — some of which could revolutionize aspects of mental health treatment, pain management, and gut health — salvia is often overshadowed by more widely known substances like magic mushrooms, cannabis, and ketamine.
A lot of this overlook stems from the plant's reputation as a “legal high” and misconceptions surrounding its use and effects.
This stigma is limiting our understanding of this sacred plant’s unique abilities and therapeutic utility.
To unlock the full spectrum of salvia’s secrets, both its psychedelic and medicinal qualities deserve a more prominent place in scientific research. The unconventional pathway through the kappa-opioid receptors is unique in the psychedelic world, and the curious relationship between this system and the endocannabinoid system on human health warrants further exploration.
Further Reading: Herbal Hallucinogens
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