Lamiaceae
Salvia divinorum
Salvia · Ska Maria Pastora · Diviner’s sage
- Part used
- leaf
- Native range
- A small area of the Sierra Mazateca in Oaxaca, Mexico. Not known in the wild; possibly a cultigen
- Morphology
- A large square-stemmed sage to a metre or more, with soft green leaves and white flowers in purple calyces. Sets seed rarely and is propagated from cuttings.
What is in it
Evidence
No clinical evidence. Salvinorin A is of genuine pharmacological interest as a selective kappa-opioid receptor agonist and is studied as a research tool.
Safety
Produces intense, brief and profoundly disorienting dissociative states. Injuries from disorientation are the commonest reported harm. Unsuited to any unsupervised setting. Long-term effects are essentially unstudied.
Regulatory: Controlled in Australia and in many jurisdictions, though the legal position varies widely and it was unregulated in many places until recently.
Historical use
Used by Mazatec curanderos in Oaxaca in healing and divinatory practice, in a Catholic-syncretic context in which the plant is identified with the Virgin. Brought to outside attention by R. Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann in the 1960s.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Salvinorin A is pharmacologically remarkable for a reason unrelated to its use: it is the most potent naturally occurring hallucinogen known, and it is not an alkaloid. It contains no nitrogen, which was assumed to be a requirement for this kind of activity, and it acts on the kappa-opioid receptor rather than the serotonin receptors that psychedelics use. It is a genuinely novel pharmacology found in a garden sage.
Its recent history is also the clearest single case of what outside attention does to a closed tradition. Wasson's involvement with the Mazateca made the region's practices internationally famous and brought a wave of visitors. María Sabina, the Mazatec curandera who admitted him to a mushroom ceremony, was afterwards ostracised, her house was burned, and she said in later life that the practice had lost its power because outsiders had come.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.