I wrote the following on October 24th, 2006, and posted it on another forum I visited then: "This is about my experience yesterday with the drug Salvia divinorum. I wanted to tell someone this, anyone, but I did not want to post this on my blog. After much thought and reviewing the other posts in this forum, I felt that this would be the best atmosphere to share my experience. First off, Salvia is a plant that when smoked produces hallucinations. It is completely legal and can be purchased online or at many head shops (I know of at least two places here in my town that sell it). Yesterday afternoon my girlfriend and I smoked half a bowl of marijuana because we were bored and had the whole beautiful afternoon ahead of us. She is 18 and I am 20; both of us are in college. We then had ice cream and went perusing through the shops downtown for fun. We ended up at a store called "Herbs." Soon after arriving, I learned that they sold Salvia of varying concentrations. They offered 5x, 10x, 15x, and 20x. I had smoked Salvia a few times last semester with little or no effects. My understanding of it was that it produced a mild, shorter version of the marijuana high. So I bought the 20x. We drove home and planned to smoke in my bedroom and just chill out. At this point neither of us had done any research on the drug, and we both thought it would just get us high. She said she was not really high from the marijuana anymore and I felt only a little stoned. We loaded a bowl, she sat down in my computer chair, and I stood next to it. She took a long, deep, slow hit and held it in. She passed the bowl to me and I did the same. She breathed out and said, "I think it's already hitting me." I looked at her, set the bowl down, and blew out. Immediately my head felt heavy. Thus began the trip. The entire trip is completely and utterly unexplainable. What happened immediately after I set the bowl down was a complete and utter breakdown of all reality and existence as I knew it. It started with my girlfriend just laughing. I stared at her as she laughed, and it seemed like a completely artificial laugh. Then I noticed that I was unable to move or think any thoughts. All I was aware of was the laughing and her voice saying, "You can't do that," as I tried to move my hands. I was filled with the most intense feeling that I have felt in my entire life. It was pure, unadulterated fear. All of a sudden I became aware that everything I had ever known, my life, this world, the existence of the universe, was not real. The entirety of existence had been fabricated as a cruel joke just so that at this moment I could face the truth. I was not a person anymore, just an awareness that existed in nothing. I had no body, no mind, and all I could see and hear was my girlfriend laughing and telling me I "can't do that." I interpreted "that" as anything and everything. The only certainty of my consciousness was that I could never do anything again because I had never done anything in the first place. I was not aware that I smoked Salvia, just that reality didn't exist. It was as if I were in an entirely different plane of existence, a new world that was there just for the purpose of me being there. There is no way to think of this in terms of anything you can imagine without having been on a trip yourself. I was filled with utter despair and loneliness at the thought of spending all of eternity frozen in time. Then gradually I became aware of my body. I realized that if I tried as hard as I could to believe in reality again, I was able to move my arm. My arm moved slowly away from my girlfriend. Being that she was the source of this existential crisis, I resolved to get as far away from her as possible. With fierce determination and bewilderment and suspiciousness of everything I was perceiving, I left the bedroom and ran downstairs. I started looking for something, though I can't remember what. It was at this moment, frantically searching the downstairs, that I became aware that I just smoked a drug that may or may not be making me feel this way. I shouted my girlfriend's name to see if she would respond. I ran back upstairs and into the bedroom. She was on the bed now, looking at me like she had just lost her mind too. I asked her, "Did you feel as if nothing existed?" even though I was not entirely trusting the fact that she existed yet. She replied, "Yeah..." Determined to find out if reality had indeed been stripped away from this universe, and not altogether off of the trip, I called a friend who introduced me to the Salvia that had no effect on me earlier this year. "Jon," I started, "I just smoked Salvia and I don't know if anything exists anymore. Is this supposed to happen? I am wholeheartedly unsure about anything and everything." He said something along the lines of, "Yeah, you're tripping man. Don't you feel insignificant? Like you are suddenly aware of how small you are in this universe?" I confirmed this and told him I did not want to feel this way anymore and hung up. I ran to my computer to log on AIM to see if there was anyone I could talk to who had ever experienced this while on Salvia before. I ended up describing to one of my friends what it feels like to have all reality stripped away, leaving an awareness that you have just been a fool to believe the fabricated and false existence that you thought comprised everything. My internet connection went dead (not uncommon) so I went to my bed to lay down. I asked my girlfriend if she felt as frantic, messed up, and confused as I did. She started describing her trip. If my trip was hell (as I felt it was), her trip was purgatory. Hers was neither bad nor good. She said that she didn't exist anymore but that she was merely a consciousness traveling through a space. This space had closed windows, but then she saw an open window. She felt as if there were an incomplete person and that she was supposed to complete that person. She had no recollection of laughing or saying anything to me. Just as there is no way of anyone understanding my trip, there was no way I could comprehend what she experienced in even the most remote way. I looked at my watch. An hour and a half had passed by since we smoked. We were both in disbelief. It only felt like 10 minutes to us. About three hours after I took that single hit of Salvia divinorum twenty extract, I was confident once again that I was living in the existence that I was living in before the trip. I had had no intentions of tripping and have passed previous opportunities to take hallucinogens. Having only tried alcohol and pot, I was completely and utterly taken aback at the powerfulness of a truly mind-altering drug. Today I became curious to see if my experience was unique, so I googled "salvia trip." The first result was from the Erowid Experience Vault. It included several stories people had written about their experiences while on various drugs. I went to the "Bad Trips" section of Salvia divinorum and discovered that many others had as traumatic an experience as I did - even with less potent Salvia. This is NOT a drug to be taken lightly. The absence of laws prohibiting its use should not be an indication of potentness. As I was sitting at my computer during the trip, shaken at the emptiness I felt when I confronted the sense of annihilation of all that I had known and was aware of, I said that I would not wish this drug upon my worst enemy. While coming down from the trip, I was legitimately concerned that I would forever be stuck in a state of insecurity between rationality and irrationality. I can think of no feeling more powerful than that which gripped me in that melancholy state of everything, nothing, and eternity. Thank you for reading this, and if there is one thing I hope you have learned from this, it is to research extensively the effects of any drug you choose to use and make sure you have someone sober to prevent you from doing anything to harm yourself or others."
always research drugs before use, my god you don't need a story to teach you that. and a sober trip sitter is not required. you could fall in a toilet, but you still shit by your self.
