In a popular article this week, The New York Times reported on the rash of online videos showing teenagers smoking the hallucinogenic drug derived from leaves of the plant Salvia divinorum. In this video (warning: it has a fair amount of profanity), a girl named Shannon takes one hit from a bong and appears overwhelmed; she’s unable to talk and extremely disoriented. Minutes later, as the effects wear off, she says she feels scared and would not do it again.
Clips like that are hardly an advertisement for the drug, which can be legally bought online. Some states, however, have passed laws ranging from limits on possession to making Salvia illegal. But the video accompanying the Times’s article also shows another kind of user. On camera, a 29-year-old father from Waco, Texas, identified only as Nathan, smokes a pipe of Salvia, then appears to enter a state of meditation while reclining peacefully in a chair. The drug, he says, “awakens something inside you that is greater than yourself.”
It is this potential for good that seems to have caught the attention of researchers, and Salvia, whose toxic side effects (if any) are unknown, is only one of several hallucinogenic drugs some scientists believe may have healing properties that overlap with the religious or spiritual experiences users report.
In a 2006 study conducted at Johns Hopkins University, for example, volunteers were given controlled doses of psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms.” Some volunteers experienced anxiety at the time, but two months after taking the drug, most said the experience had “substantial personal meaning and spiritual significance and attributed to the experience sustained positive changes in attitudes and behavior consistent with changes rated by community observers.”
Psychiatric researchers in South Carolina received the go-ahead from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to use ecstasy (MDMA) to treat patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and found that many patients were able to approach and diffuse fears that had left them almost disabled, according to the Washington Post Magazine. And a recent Baltimore Sun editorial called for further research into the drug’s medicinal value.
Is there a connection, then, between drugs that can induce religious-type experiences and drugs that have the potential to heal? I’m not the first to ask that question. The San Francisco-based Council on Spiritual Experiences, a collaborative project of scientists and religious figures, has supported research—including the 2006 study on psilocybin—on how some drugs may provide a valid shortcut to religious healing experiences.
“Profound experiences of unity with the cosmos…sometimes lead to lasting, and lastingly beneficial, changes in consciousness and behavior,” the council’s website states, adding that the use of certain plants and chemicals may represent a legitimate and potentially safe way to reach such states.
A quick survey of Salvia’s history—some of which is presented in this documentary by the late Oxford historian and archeologist Andrew Sherratt—shows that the drug was originally used by Mazatec shamans in Oaxaca, Mexico. In his film, Sherratt says that although Western culture associates hallucinogenic plants with illegal drugs, “there are many cultures for whom these plants are seen as sacred and are regarded as the key to another mystical world.”
But sacred experiences and mystical worlds seem like a far cry from the sometimes disturbing online videos of Salvia use, as does the story—detailed in the Times article—about a New Yorker who apparently shot himself in the face shortly after using the drug. When it comes to the potential therapeutic uses of hallucinogens, and the fact that some health-care professionals are afraid to even speak on the record about them for fear of legal repercussions, it seems that such drugs may remain the province of the young and foolish for the time being.
