In a follow up to our recent article about Mephedrone, I thought I should write about another "legal high", this time from the opposite end of the spectrum: the hallucinogens.

Salvia Divinorum or just simply Salvia is a psychoactive plant that has been used for as long as anyone can remember by Shamans and seers as a means of divination and healing - the name literally translates to "Diviner's Sage" and can induce anything from a fit of giggles to a complete other-wordly experience (you can read more about the plant itself on Wikipedia).

You can buy it from most headshops and it comes in standardised, lab-extracted concentrations, usually ranging from 5x strength to about 60x, but upwards of 100x is not unheard of. My first experience was at the lowest end of the scale and didn't really do much other than make me laugh and stare at a lampshade; after that, I moved onto 10, then 20, and finally I got my hands on some 30x - that was enough for me.

It started out as a normal Friday night at a mates house, about a year ago; it got to about 1 in the morning and as the pissed people slowly began to make their way home, leaving the smokers with free run of the house and a kitchen full of food, I decided it would be a good time to break out the Salvia and get everyone royally headfucked. The problem with the stuff is that you should always really have at least one person on-hand and sober(ish) so that they can restrain you if you go a bit weird off it, but having never experienced anyone "going a bit weird off it" we threw caution to the wind and started the rounds...

The biggest mistake that people make with Salvia is how they get it into their system. The amount of people who complain about how shit it is without even knowing what they're doing is stupendous. Rolling it into a joint will not work!! It needs to be lit for around 30 seconds in a pipe or bong with a decent turbo lighter (your average Poppell or even a Clipper just won't cut the mustard here), you need to take a decent toke, and most importantly you need to hold it in.

You'll know it's starting to work because you'll start to get a weird cold/fuzzy feeling round your body as soon as you exhale, like pins and needles but on the outside. If you're smoking it out of a bong, make sure you put the piece down as soon as you clear it or you'll probably end up dropping it, and whatever you do don't keep your mouth over the hole because you may well start dribbling and forget to shut it -

And this is where the fun starts.

Everyone's trip will be slightly different, and if you get the full visual effect it'll probably be an experience that you'll never forget. On this particular night, one guy said he felt like he was melting into his chair, shortly before getting up and dancing with the ironing board. Me and my friend Tom, who were sat on opposite sides of the room, both thoroughly believed that the TV was some sort of window and that it would be perfectly feasible to try and climb into it. Still, these are pretty mild experiences and at that point I had no idea what was in store later on.

Following the TV shenanigans, we decided it would probably be safer for all concerned if we moved into the kitchen, away from the confusing world of televisions and armchairs (in hindsight we would've been better staying put). I walked in, sat down, someone passed me a salvia-packed pipe, which I smoked - then proceeded almost immediately to fall off my chair, knock the bong over and enter a world of trippiness the likes of which I've yet to recreate.

It really is hard to put into words exactly what happened. Everything and nothing seemed to be going on at the same time, but I distinctly remember being shit scared because I was utterly convinced that I either was the universe, or was watching the universe from some higher plane, and that I and/or it had just come to some cataclysmic endpoint and everything I'd ever known was over, just like that. I was trapped in limbo, and it seemed like an eternity until things started to move again. I remember seeing this "universe" - though it didn't really have a shape as such, it was just "there" - as it was moving past a load of other universes which I can only assume were in some kind of cosmic queue waiting for their turn to implode or whatever had just happened.

Everything began to fall sideways, to the left (interesting as a lot of people I've spoken to about salvia told me they had similar "falling left" experiences). I had a feeling of not being able to get up, as if the whole house was being tipped on its side but everything except me was staying in place. I remember thinking I'd sunk through the floor and reappeared in the garden, and at one point opened the back door just to check I hadn't just been outside, though I must have been crawling round on all fours because when I snapped out I had kitchen floor dirt on my hands and knees.

At this point I was trying to communicate what the fuck was going on to the other people in the room but I'm told I was either not making any noise at all or just speaking jibberish. After checking behind a few more doors for one reason or another, things started to calm down a bit. The brick-like lines that had obscured my vision a few seconds earlier began to fade and I slowly stopped feeling the "left effect".

The most interesting and arguably the most funny aspect of salvia - especially for those observing - is the state between hallucination and reality when the trip is fading but you're still not quite with it. Evidently one of my friends already knew this and so proceeded to tell me that the song he was playing (The Beatles I am the Walrus) was being sung in German. I thought this sounded perfectly reasonable at the time and I was none the wiser as I definitely couldn't understand what was being said.

Then all of a sudden it was over. Just as quickly as it had begun, and I was left feeling fucking exhausted. I don't know how long I'd been gone for, to me it seemed like forever but I'm told it was just a few minutes. They didn't see the universes though, they just saw me kick the bong over and start playing with a bag of pegs hanging off the dishwasher door. They didn't experience the sinking, they just saw me desperately checking myself for soil and trying (and failing) to open the locked back door to see outside. And they didn't hear the stream of random words which may or may not have come out of my mouth - it certainly felt like I was speaking but for all I knew I could've been barking.

I'd smoked it before this happened, and I've smoked it again since, and I've never been as affected by it as I was that night. All the other times have simply reduced me to a hysterical, laughing mess or induced some deep philisophical state like being able to see the outline of a farmyard in the carpet fibre.

Salvia then, like Mephedrone, is a legal high with effects than can far outdo many of the illegal drugs you can get your hands on today. This might say something about the purity of the drugs on our streets, or it might just be sheer chance that you can still walk into a shop and buy it. It's probably a combination of both, but when all's said and done, if you're looking for a cheap trippy experience (£20 will get you about 8-10 'doses' of 20 strength) that you know you can't get booked for, then look no further.

I would however advise anyone who wants to take it to proceed with caution! Don't jump in at the deep end - start off with 5x and see how you handle it. The whole ordeal can be a profoundly unnerving experience if you've never done it before and there's nothing gradual about it - the trip hits you like a steam train. If you don't like full-visual hallucinations then stay well away.

If you put too much in, it'll scare you. If you don't burn it or hold it in long enough, it won't affect you at all. Get it right though and you'll be laughing your arse off in your own little world for a good 5-10 minutes.

One last thing though - don't bother doing it on your own, it'll just freak you out. I made that mistake once in a tent in my back yard and subsequently thought my mum was trying to kill me.