Eclectic eye

Have any of you guys ever heard or read of Salvia Divinorum? The active ingredient is Salvinorin-A. I found out about it at this site <a href="http://www.viewzone.com/salvia.html" target="_blank">www.viewzone.com/salvia.html</a> It's legal, available in the U.S. and fairly inexpensive. There's a link on the page to the supplier.

Curious minds want to know....

Any thoughts, opinions?

(edited to correct URL)

[ December 09, 2002: Message edited by: Eclectic eye ]</p>

theyeti

Yeah, I know someone else who was once foolish enough to take jimson weed (he didn't know what he was getting into, or what he was taking for that matter). The difference you describe between hallucination and delirium sounds pretty accurate. I don't remember any lizard men, but I was constantly playing with objects that weren't really there. In English class.

At any rate, I did know I was tripping, at least some of the time, and I would occasionally snap out of it enough to realize that that cigarette I was smoking didn't exist. So I would reach for another imaginary cigarette... Anyway, the whole "experience" was over within less than 24 hours, so I doubt I had as much as your friend did. As it was wearing off, it was entertaining to see my Three Stooges poster come to life, with Moe, Larry, and Curly fighting with each other. Other friends of mine who took the stuff had similar experiences. One told me about apologizing to a poster of Bruce Lee which was about to kick his ass. But it was an all-around horrible experience, and everyone else I know who took some thought the same. The only people who seemed to benefit from it were friends of mine who got to see me act like a gibbering idiot for a day, at school no less, when at least one teacher knew I was fucked-up (the next time I'm in his class, he looks straight in my eyes and cracks a joke about my return to normal). I strongly recommend that everyone avoid jimson weed.

theyeti

ps418

I never heard of this before. But according to the abstracts available on Pubmed, the plant is used for "curing and divination by the Mazatec Indians," and the active ingredient Salvinorin-A is psychoactive when smoked at doses as low as 200 micrograms, which makes it extremely potent, comparable to the potency of LSD. Another very interesting finding is that Salvinorin-A has "no actions at the 5-HT(2A) serotonin receptor, the principal molecular target responsible for the actions of classical hallucinogens," including LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and DMT (Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2002 Sep 3;99(18):11934-9). As far as I know, this is the first hallucinogen that does not affect the 5-HT2A receptor, which plays a crucial role in mediating the effects of all other known psychedelics.

Eclectic eye

According to the article "it's an odd substance since, unlike virtually every other mind-altering drug, it is not an alkaloid"

With what you said in your previous post about it not affecting the 5-HT2A receptor, could that possibly mean that only alkaloids affect that particular receptor?

Thanks

thebeave

Don't you know that by telling us all about the "cool" stuff that happened to you under the influence (3 Stooges coming to life? It doesn't get much better than that!) and then telling us not to try it ourselves, will make us want to do it? That's why Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" and the D.A.R.E program were complete flops.

Jackalope

Talked to that buddy again last week, and he noted that he made the mistake of eating the seeds as well as half the seedpod. That actually could have been fatal, since the seeds have the highest concentration of atropine and scopolomine.

My experience with medical scopolomine was during a trip to Mexico, where I contracted tourista. By the time my boyfriend managed to get to the drugstore and back, I had thrown up so many times, I quit attempting to crawl back into bed and simply crashed out on the bathroom floor. The scopolomine stopped the vomitting and other ugly things, but it also made me talk to people who weren't there.

The only other time I've had that experience was when I was prescribed the anti-inflammmitory Trilisate (magnesium choline trisalicylate). The doctor forgot to take my body weight into account (at the time, I weighed less than 100 pounds). I got to experience salicylate intoxication, with the trippy effects of the choline added in. Not only did I talk to people who weren't there, but I thought I was walking around the appartment when I was really lying on the bed moving my legs. And I had tinnitus so bad that I couldn't hear anything else. So then I started hallucinating music...sort of. I described it as the Atonal Orchestra of Hell and the Demon Tabernacle Choir all tuning up in my head. Talk about a musicians' hell.

Neither experience was fun. If you wanna go tripping, there are better and safer drugs.

--Lee

theyeti

You're certainly right about "Just Say No" and DARE. But I didn't want to go into the whole story about what all happened. But there were tons of negatives. Perhaps the worst was that I lost the ability to salivate for some reason. This meant that my mouth was constantly dry, which meant that I couldn't really talk. The solution was to drink water, which I did, which meant I had to pee a lot. It also meant that I kept imagining that there was a glass of water on my desk which I kept taking imaginary drinks from. It just gets worse from there. The worst part of it is that you feel shitty, even when the Three Stooges are going at it. Your stomach is all in knots, and it's like you're about to die, and I was never entirely sure that I wouldn't. I was going to add to my last post that if you're really inclined to use a hallucinogen, just stick with LSD or 'shrooms, but I don't want to advocate anyone using anything. But for IPU's sake, don't ever do jimson weed. That shit's just poison.

theyeti

P.S. I've heard of a story whereby hungry Confederate soldiers during the Civil War ate a bunch of jimson weed in desperation and tripped for days. This is in fact where the guy who indirectly gave some to me got the idea from. Anyone know about this?

ps418

I guess I'll tell my jimsonweed seed story. I had a friend who collected some and suggested we eat it. I asked him if he had ever eaten them before. He said no. I called a friend with more knowledge in these matters, and asked him. He also said no. I decided to eat a small amount, about a third of what my friend ate. I didn't trip at all. I just got a bad case of cottonmouth-of-the-eyes. But my friend, who eighed about 130 lbs, tripped out big time. We were sitting in his living room when his mother came home from work. She came in, said hello, and sat down to watch TV with us. About ten minutes later, a car pulled up outside the apartment. My friend jumped up, looked out the window, and shouted "Oh fuck! My mom's home!" And his mother was sitting next right next to him.

Within about 30 minutes of that, he was hallucinating badly, and talking to a friend who had left an hour earlier. His pupils were fully dilated, his face was beet red, and his heartbeat was really, really irregular. He went to the hospital. They gave him charcoal, and I dont know what else they did for him. I saw him 3 days later, and his eyes and skin color still didnt look right. I second Theyeti's advice: don't ever eat these demon seeds!

The Lone Ranger

Trivia for today:

"Jimson Weed" is thought to be derived from "Jamestown Weed," as it grows wild on the east coast, in the vicinity of Jamestown, Virginia.

Rumour has it that on at least one occasion during the Revolutionary War, starving and desperate British troops cooked and ate some jimsonweed, not knowing what the effects would be. Because of what the jimsonweed did to the British troops, the Colonials were able to gain an easy victory.

One such event occurred when British soldiers were sent to stop the Rebellion of Bacon in Jamestown, Virginia.  The results were described by Robert Beverly in The History and Present State of Virginia (1705):


Jimsonweed (Datura, sp.) is in the nightshade family (Solanaceae), and like most species in the family, all parts of the plant are poisonous.

Interestingly, the nightshade family also includes tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum). Potatoes (Solanum tuberosum) are in the same family, and the potato itself is the only part of the plant that is safe to eat -- but green potatoes can be deadly. Tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum) are in the same family, and the fruit of a tomato plant is the only part that's safe to eat.

Cheers,

Michael

[ December 10, 2002: Message edited by: The Lone Ranger ]</p>

Stephen T-B

My guess is that although they may seem to last many minutes, NDEs occur in seconds, if not fractions of seconds when the brain is in acute near-death stress.
Even in sleep, the brain doesn’t have any sense of “Real” time. I first realised this when my uncle, who’d lived in London through the Second World War, told me about a dream he’d had in which he was being chased by a doodle-bug (the V1flying bomb.) It began when the doodle-bug’s engine cut out and he heard, in his sleep, the whine as it plummeted to Earth. Its explosion, a few streets away, woke him abruptly, and he afterwards marvelled that the dream had been so filled with incident that it had seemed to last the whole night.
My own experiences have been less dramatic, but more than once a sound which has awakened me (an alarm going off, or a chiming clock) has been the cause of a long and complex dream which seemed to have begun before the sound began. Clearly, I heard it in my sleep and my brain instantly created a prelude which seemingly lasted as long as, if not longer, than the part of the dream in which the sound was incorporated.
Those who experience NDEs do insist, so I am told by a PhD student who is studying them, that they are qualitatively different from dreams, but like dreams, they are produced in the brain where time is elastic.