On 18 May 2013, at 19:08, Johnathan Corgan wrote:
On Sat, May 18, 2013 at 4:23 AM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
On 17 May 2013, at 22:52, Johnathan Corgan wrote:
A common occurrence reported by users of Salvia Divinorum is that
of having lived an entire alternate life in the few minutes of
intoxication, and even being surprised and confused for a moment
while the drug wears off that this is their real life and the one
they remember was the drug induced one.
Yes, that's quite a Maury effect, indeed. Utterly amazing and
sometimes extremely confusing.
This reminds me of the the Star Trek TNG episode "The Inner Light",
where Picard lives a third of a lifetime in 25 minutes under the
control of a space artifact they encounter. The artifact was
created by a doomed race as a way of preserving/propagating their
culture, and implants the memory of having lived as a resident of
their planet into Picard. (One of the few ST episodes to get away
from the technobabble and explore some real science fiction themes.)
Star Strek is cool.
Salvia might be the Hubble of introspection.
Just reading through the written experience reports on Erowid, it's
amazing how completely different the subjective effects of Salvia
are vs. more "traditional" psychedelic drugs. It's no wonder many of
them end with "I will never do this again."
I tend to agree with you. My feeling is also that Salvia is rather
quite different from the others, but I can't pretend to know so well
all products. Salvia seems to me a *quite* amazing thing, with respect
to, let us say, theological studies.
I wonder what could be learned about how the mind works by studying
these in a scientific, experimental setting.
Dissociative in general are quite interesting. And salvia is highly
selective in the dissociation, and seems to be very healthy and
helpful, so such studies are needed, that's for sure.
Unfortunately, at least in the United States, the legal standards
for public scientific studies of drugs require them to be conducted
in the context of assessing their efficacy as therapeutic agents.
It is already clear that salvia has some efficacy as therapeutic
agent, notably for diarrhea, nasal congestion, some type of migraine,
addiction, obsession, depression, compulsive behavior, etc.
It's unlikely that any protocol would be approved that was simply
designed to study the effects described above.
Yes, but it should not be difficult to make both studies at once,
perhaps without saying. Especially that we can argue that therapeutic
and spiritual might be related.
It's also pretty unlikely to ever be able to do a double-blind
experiment with Salvia. :)
I can imagine some difficulties :)
(That's a technical problem only, though).
The world of pharmacologists try hard to not repeat the cannabis
mistake. They will not present you this in this way, but there is
apparently a real resistance by the pharmaceutical world to the
illegality of salvia at the federal level in the US. There is a will
of research based on an understanding of its importance due to its
quite different and very selective biochemical action in the brain.
That gives a bit of hope.
It is also a nonsense to make it illegal, as most young people want no
more hear about drugs after a salvia experience! I heard that some
parents have put strong salvia in "cannabis bag", in their home, to
fail their children and disgust them of all drugs! (added: to make
any drug illegal is a nonsense, actually, especially the most
dangerous one).
The cosmic joke asks for a small but non null amount of spiritual
maturity, to put it in that way. Well, that something the plant taught
me apparently.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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