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Underground > Temple >

Salvia vs Glue

  
 
ghadis
23:35 / 11.07.06
This spins off from the Salvia thread.

O.k. What do people feel they are doing when they take psychedelic drugs, be it, salvia, DMT, LSD etc etc ?

Poking holes in reality tunnels? Engaging with inner selves? Contacting the spirit of the drug (for want of a better word)?

My own interest in this is from having a background of heavy teenage solvent abuse (again for want of better words!) and through this having a number of very fine experiences which, years later, are replicated in a way when i take Salvia. The trip from salvia is so like sniffing glue you wouldn't believe. The way it plays with time, a strong link to enviroment, sound. Also, through sniffing, i was already chatting to machine elves, long before i had read any Terrence Mcenna or got into any sort of magic type stuff at all. I think i spent all afternoon once chatting to a little 2d friend and one time i was almost talked into waliking into the river from one.

So, often, when i read or hear people waxing lyrical about the wonders of 'getting in touch with a plant' like Salvia, and the fantastic trips it can give you, i just think 'turn around and get some Dampstart in your face mate'. (none of that on barbelith by the way )

So what do people think?

Can any intoxient, be it Salvia, Lighter Fluid, Mushrooms, Dampstart, Glue, Salvia, get you into the same position?

(obviously i recognise the dangers of some of these...)
 
 
+#'s, - names
00:25 / 12.07.06
from what I recall from my high school health classes, inhalents are extremely damaging to your liver and kidneys. Salvia isn't. But then that same class told me that if I took lsd fire would become flowers and I would wind up in a funny farm. Which I have not. Well, not yet.
 
 
grant
01:47 / 12.07.06
William James called ether a "great exciter of the Yes function in Man."

I used to get it out of starter fluid.

If you browse Erowid's trip reports, you'll see all kinds of references to people getting in touch with the spirits of various chemicals. (Spirits, after all. Mineral. Ethylated. Whatever.)

There's a word I remember being used for salvia and inhalants... dissociative, I think. That which (temporarily) takes the mind out of the body, right?
 
 
ghadis
02:28 / 12.07.06
Yes, solvents and inhalents are very, very bad for your body. DON'T DO THEM!!! They are shit. Not to be too melodramatic about it but i had a very good friend die from them a few years back and i won't go near them again.

To repeat...

THEY ARE SHIT!!! DON'T TOUCH THEM!!!

Really don't!

That said, what i'm talking about is the effect that they have. Which i find is very close to stuff like Salvia.

Grant, i'll have to have a good look on Erowid again. I do think there is something in the idea of 'getting in touch with the spirit' of a certain thing. I think that,in many ways, is what a person is doing. The problem i'm having, and i've had it for a long time, is when a 'communication' or great trip is held up to be a fantastic spiritual or ground breaking ontological experience from taking a certain substance. Which is seen as a 'natural' drug. When you can also have similar effects from dipping your head in petrol.

Yes the 'dissociative' is very true of both these things.

I'm just being a bit niggly. Trying to get to the bottom of how these two disparate things can produce such similer effects.

In a way, i kind of, maybe, know the answer.

But it bugs me a bit.
 
 
Olulabelle
07:14 / 12.07.06
Technically they may very well give you the same kind of effect, be it dissasociation or an inability to hold onto whatever method you're using to distribute the stuff into your body. However, I think the spiritual side of glue sniffing leaves a little to be desired. I might be pretty hard pressed to find the glue spirit. Or the B&Q spirit.

Does that sound like drug snobbery? Oh my God it does. I'm a drug snob.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
07:51 / 12.07.06
I dunno though - if you accept that there is such a thing as the salvia spirit, then there must also be a glue spirit, a lager spirit, a heroin spirit. I don't see any difference between the notion of solvent spirits and alcohol spirits - and I think there is definitely a recognisable lager spirit that you encounter riding people who have a heavy relationship with alcohol.
 
 
ghadis
08:29 / 12.07.06
Yes, i was definatly in touch with the lager spirit last night when i wrote those posts.

I think a lot of it is drug snobbery. I've had a few conversations IRL recently about this when friends at work have been talking about salvia and peyote and mushrooms etc. I've found that people don't like it when i mention that i've had similer experiences from using household products. It's as if i'm trying to sully their experience somehow which i'm not. The idea that there is a spirit of everything is something that i was driving at in my posts last night but when i brought this up in the conversation with my workmates i think they thought i was slightly mad and talking out of my arse. Even though they were getting all excited about time collapsing in on itself and contact with DMT alien beings etc etc.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
08:44 / 12.07.06
Mate, you ARE the lager spirit.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
09:23 / 12.07.06
There's nothing unnatural in nature, is there. If you accept that plants have spirits, then why not petrol or glue or plastics. They exist in nature, whether they have been made by humans or not. Is honey unnatural because it's made by bees?

I think the problem is partly to do with people looking at these things as psychoactive drugs, rather than spirits. I reckon a lot of people coming from the "mind expanding plant teacher" angle would also have a problem getting their head around the fact that, to me, things like cinnamon or oranges or roses all have their own spirits that I can perceive and interact with. It doesn't have to have an ingestible psychoactive effect to be a spirit. I find orchids extremely communicative and psychedelic, just by sitting with them and trying to comprehend their language. Not all plant spirits need to give you a trip in order for you to have a relationship with them and learn from them. If you get that - then it's a short step to see how everything that exists has a spirit that can be interacted with.

I guess the issue with the glue spirit, or the crack cocaine spirit, is that they fuck you up. As spirits, they are ultimately toxic to humans, and that is a part of the dialogue and relationship you can have with them. They are a part of nature, but lets not forget that a lot of nature - from wasps to glue spirits to crocodiles - would have no qualms whatsoever about fucking you up.
 
 
Quantum
09:55 / 12.07.06
a 'natural' drug. When you can also have similar effects from dipping your head in petrol.

I don't make the distinction myself, LSD or mushrooms makes little difference to me. But glue *is* like dipping your head in petrol, bad bad bad. You can have the experience without the risk of setting your head on fire. That buzzing sensation? large chunks of brain being IRREPARABLY DESTROYED, glue=bad.

Glass spirits, electricity spirits, concrete spirits, the London Underground, I don't see how we can distinguish 'natural' from 'unnatural' myself. If everything's alive and conscious in some way, that includes man made objects just as much as plants and animals and rocks and rivers. I personally don't have much experience with spirit work but I can think of some buildings that seem alive and have an aura of magic about them, even though they're 'unnatural'.

On the other hand, speaking to the spirit of Oak is going to be better than speaking to the spirit of an empty crisp packet I think.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
10:11 / 12.07.06
Well the thing about the Glue Spirit surely would be that the inevitable fuckitude associated with the psychoactive aspect would arise from having kind of a dysfunctional relationship? You're not supposed to sniff glue. You're supposed to stick things together with it.
 
 
johnny enigma
10:17 / 12.07.06
Mordant - to me it doesn't matter what we are "supposed" to do with glue. Why shouldn't dsyfunctional relationships be important learning experiences anyway? It seems that ghadis found some value in his relationship with the glue spirit, even if it was physically damaging. Who are we to argue with him? How do we know that he hasn't gained something from it that non glue sniffers don't have?
 
 
Quantum
10:32 / 12.07.06
Read the bit again where ghadis says IT'S VERY BAD DON'T DO IT perhaps?
 
 
Quantum
10:46 / 12.07.06
You're not supposed to sniff glue. You're supposed to stick things together with it.

Thinking about it, maybe that is a difference between man-made and 'natural' things, we make things for a purpose usually, they have a designed function. Trees and rocks aren't 'for' any purpose as such, they just are.

I don't think it matters though, you can use a rock as a hammer or use a hammer as a paperweight, we seem to have a symbiotic relationship with some things in nature, and some man made things are pretty purposeless. The problem I have is drawing the distinction- is a dog natural? Bred by man like a cow, basically an unnatural wolf. I know people who have a dysfunctional relationship with their dogs, maybe that's why- you're not supposed to carry them in handbags, they're for herding.
Now I have a mental image of a chihuahua trying to herd cattle.
 
 
Unconditional Love
10:47 / 12.07.06
I know some people arent fond of the term energy, but you can replace the word spirit with energy, and to some extent it can take away the dichotomy attached to natural and unnatural spirits. So interactions are taking place with the energetic structure of glue and energetic structure of a human being, at some point this may become toxic, just as salvia may become toxic in a more subtle way or any substance or infact magick itself, as a crutch to achieving any form of result without altered states.

Theres a common idea that floats about that magic requires an altered state to be effective, its actually not true, the idea of an altered state is a comparison to whats considered ordinary, alot of magicians dont consider the ordinary enough or inspect it enough to see the magic of the ordinary. What for example can be more ordinary, yet at least magical to my mind than a women carrying a child for 9 months and then giving birth, its ordinary in the sense that most mammals are capable of this , but it has an inherant magic, as does going for a walk.

So why is magic more magical because we have an idea of escaping the ordinary, distorting perception to make the ordinary more acceptable to us, i am beginning to think that magicians are a bunch of escapist unhappy fuckers.

'Only time i am happy is when i am off my head mate' is an expression that comes to mind, do i really have to dress up my trips and drug abuse as magical practice, unless that takes place in a traditional ritualistic setting you are kidding your self that its anything more than drug use.

There is no difference, wether you buy your trip from woolworths or from some online headshop. Just dont try and pass yourself off as a shaman, because you take drugs.
 
 
johnny enigma
11:02 / 12.07.06
I wasn't reccomending the use of glue.
I was just questioning this "dysfunctional relationship" buisness.
Let's take another substance I would never, ever reccomend anyone taking - heroin. William Burroughs was an addict for most of his life, yet managed to produce a great body of work, stuff that was undoubtedly informed by his use of the drug. I think that the only functional use for opiates is for pain killing in extreme circumstances.However, for Burroughs, something obviously worked, and I don't think that the fact he wrote most of his books whilst skagged up to the eyeballs makes his work any less valid.
To address Ghadis' original point, I don't think that the visions one gets from sniffing glue are any less valid than the ones you can get from taking shrooms or salvia, it's just shrooms and salvia are safe enough, whereas glue sniffing is obviously physically dangerous.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
11:17 / 12.07.06
Well, I didn't say it wasn't valid. I just said dysfunctional. A dysfunctional relationship--with a plant, a drug, or a person, can still be meaningful. If you had a human partner who taught you loads and gave you a lot of positive experiences, but was prone to knocking you over the head with something heavy now and again--well, I'd have no qualms about calling that a dysfunctional relationship, without invalidating the knowledge you'd gained from having that relationship.
 
 
Olulabelle
11:22 / 12.07.06
The dysfunctionality of the glue being the 'potential deadness' part.

Perhaps it has more to do with the validity of man-made versus natural, but then as Qunatum says I equally don't havbe a problem with LSD. It's the fact that glue is not for that I suppose.
 
 
Ticker
12:02 / 12.07.06
So why is magic more magical because we have an idea of escaping the ordinary, distorting perception to make the ordinary more acceptable to us, i am beginning to think that magicians are a bunch of escapist unhappy fuckers.

there are a lot of tools, dance, fasting, drugs, pain, and a bunch more that all serve to help the person achieve a different perspective. Often some information is excluded by our lense of perception and we need an agent, whether action or substance, to alter our vantage point.

One of my teachers can't fast, or dance, or ingest drugs so he uses other techniques to enter the space in which supplemental information becomes accessible to him.

I have personally done very cathartic work in the past with nitrous. I wouldn't trot it out as high level magic but there was a period of time when I could only access a certain range of emotions after hitting the empty schmancy whip cream canister. The price in brain cells was a bit too high so I found other means but it did give me an indication of where I needed to do work.

While I was fasting last month I was strongly reminded that everything we ingest has this capacity to teach/influence us. The spirit of the animal in the food you eat, the plants, the human-made esters and friends, all of it. Many people abuse the spirit of caffeine or maybe it would be more fair to say have a dysfunctional relationship with it.

I often have moments of strange darshan with plastic eating utensils and disposable packaging. Items which were created for a moment of use and may not even ever get used.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
14:30 / 12.07.06
The dysfunctionality of the glue being the 'potential deadness' part.

There's also a "potential deadness" factor with, say, fly agaric, but I guess that's on the other side of the man-made/natural divide (though as you've mentioned, LSD's a tricky one...)

Similarly I've found there to be definite parallels between my salvia experiences and ketamine, and I've often wondered if it was a similar neural effect playing out or if the experiences themselves, rather than the process creating them, were what was related.
 
 
grant
18:08 / 12.07.06
You're not supposed to sniff glue. You're supposed to stick things together with it.

Hmmm.

I have a friend who's a chemical engineer for 3M, and I'm not *positive* this is the process he'd use when dealing with a new substance. Like, I know he's done things where he's been assigned to find something that will execute some kind of specific pharmaceutical function in a particular way. But... well, maybe it's easier to talk about Listerine.

Listerine started its life, as far as I can tell, as a spot remover. I've got some old magazines with ads for Listerine as a stain remover, and more recent ones for Listerine as a dandruff rinse. I think it only became used as a mouthwash sometime after 1960 (but could be mistaken). As far as I can tell, this is the same stuff -- a non-toxic, pungent mixture of volatile oils, solvents and some kinds of plant extracts (camphor? menthol? heck if I know).

If you've read PIKHAL (Phenylethlamines I Have Known And Loved), you get the sense that Alexander Shulgin approaches the chemicals he creates not expecting them to act in a certain way, but wondering how it is they'll behave. There's something shamanic about his approach. The chemical knows what it can do, you just have to figure it out.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
18:25 / 12.07.06
I don't really agree with the idea that your relationship with glue is disfunctional because you're supposed to stick things together with it rather than sniff it. I don't think intended usuage really matters in any sense. I think the dysfunctionality comes from glue being a toxic substance that can kill you and fuck you up if you interface with it in that way. Salvia may have similar effects but its a bit more agreeable and you can have a more positive relationship with it than something like solvents.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
06:59 / 13.07.06
That's kind of what I meant, except that I'd also think of a glue spirit as being, well, gluey, as well as toxic. Two parts of its nature.

I suppose I was thinking about how over the years I've developed a comparable relationship with lead solder. Although I might not have conceptualised it as a relationship with a spirit until relatively recently, a lot of those elements are present.

I know how to get the best out of lead solder, how to get her to give herself to the making of a good solid junction, how much heat to apply, how long to hold the soldering iron in place, how to manager her without needing three hands, and so forth. And I know that I have to treat her with considerable respect because she is very very hot in the short term and hugely toxic in the long. I was sort of imagining "What if you could get high from sniffing lead solder?" and extrapolating.
 
 
Olulabelle
08:03 / 13.07.06
I think there are issues surrounding things that can kill you suddenly and suprisingly. I don't know about glue but I would presume that it is a bit like sniffing lighter fuel or aerosols or whatever it was that the hard lads were doing behind the bike sheds at school. As far as I understand it, it is technically possible that one sniff can kill you and you just don't know. Like Russian roulette... Is that correct?

With things like Fly Agaric, the trip can be unpleasant if your dose is wrong, but if you do it correctly you are not running a very big risk. As far as I'm aware and according to Erowid there are conflicting reports of death due to Fly Agaric, probably because some effects can be similar to symptoms of other illnesses.

So yes, a glue spirit or an aerosol one is going to be a pretty scary one I would have thought. However much you might learn from it, wouldn't your over-riding thought tend to be 'Holy Christing Fuck I might be about to die'?
 
 
ghadis
09:23 / 13.07.06
Hm, i can see what you're getting at Olulabelle but the whole Russian roulette thing was not my experience of it at all. It was just something some teenagers did during the early to mid 80s in a rather depressed working class small town in Wales. The other intoxicants were cheap alcohol and mushrooms. Some people tried it a few times and left it there whilst others went onto to heavy use and dependency. The idea that kids took it in turns to use it with an idea that 'one go might kill' is not something i've come across and i'm pretty certain it doesn't happen. Even among the 'hard lads' or 'hard girls'
 
 
Olulabelle
11:13 / 13.07.06
Was there not even a vague fear?
 
 
ghadis
11:55 / 13.07.06
A vague fear of death? No not really. I guess there is a vague fear or uneasiness whenever you take any drug whether its glue or exctasy or coke or LSD etc. More a vague fear of what is going to happen, of the effects of the drugs. This is perhaps heightened when the drug in question has been the focus of a strong media campaign, such as glue, exctasy or heroin, which tells you that if you take said drug you may either die or turn into a socially inept imbecile.

Do you think that for the thousands of people who take exctasy each week a large part of the kick is that they may die after swallowing the pill?

There is a lot of bravado attatched to teenage drugtaking as a teenager you're right. And i think you just brush off such death thoughts easily with the 'it'll never happen to me or anyone i know' mentality.

As it happened i did turn out to know someone who would die from it but that was a year or 2 after i'd stopped taking it. If he'd died whilst i was still using it i'm pretty damn sure it would have made me stop.

Some figures on the death rates from solvent abuse in the UK may be helpful. As i suspected there is a huge rise in deaths in the mid 80s from 82 in 1983 peaking with 152 in 1990 then dropping drastically back during the 90s (thank god for Acid house and Rave!) to 60 odd.

Horrible figures, sure, but not the death epidemic that some people might imagine. Certainly not so much that kids who did sniff in the UK would all know someone who had died and would hence feel that they were running some sort of Death Gauntlet everytime they took a bag to their mouths.
 
 
grant
16:02 / 13.07.06
As far as I understand it, it is technically possible that one sniff can kill you and you just don't know. Like Russian roulette... Is that correct?

Not exactly. The short term risks are nearly identical to those of anaethesia (ether was the first anaesthetic, after all, as well as being a handy general solvent) -- you can lose consciousness and accidentally asphyxiate yourself, or ingest enough to stop your heart from beating. With most inhalants, this isn't that much of a risk -- as long as you're not strapping a bag to your face or doing it in a small, airtight area, if you start losing consciousness, you tend to drop the bottle/rag/bag/whatever and the stuff pretty quickly leaves the system. Although after a few hits, using that dust mask as an impromptu ether cone might seem much more reasonable than it would while sober....

Over the mid- to long-term, you run into much nastier things based on the fact that these chemicals are organic solvents and that our bodies are organic. Liver damage is just part of the joy. Any cells affected by the stuff -- mucous membranes, lungs, blood, brain -- are, well, soluble.
 
 
trouser the trouserian
04:39 / 14.07.06
The idea that kids took it in turns to use it with an idea that 'one go might kill' is not something i've come across and i'm pretty certain it doesn't happen. Even among the 'hard lads' or 'hard girls'.

That was pretty much my experience of solvent abuse - I did glue on a daily basis for I think a couple of years in my teens (before moving on to barbituates & speed) - and I think if someone'd pointed out to me that I was dicing with death I'd probably have said "good". Having said that though, I 'think' (it's all a bit hazy) that I stopped doing glue because of the headaches & nausea that came with it.

a glue spirit or an aerosol one is going to be a pretty scary one I would have thought. However much you might learn from it, wouldn't your over-riding thought tend to be 'Holy Christing Fuck I might be about to die'?

It's a matter of perception. Do you think of water spirits as scary? They can be, if you're just about to drown.
 
 
eye landed
11:19 / 04.12.07
my salvia experiences so far have involved a vague fear that i might be about to die. so is that a difference? does glue have a euphoric effect, or is it the same stark confrontation (that salvia shows me). i doubt the chemical patterns are similar, since salvinorin A is a huge pseudo-opiate and most solvents are among the simplest of organic molecules.

(erm...salvinorin A is a kappa-opioid agonist, affecting spinal regions dealing with pain as well as some cognitive regions. pharmacological info on inhalants is hard to find, but i found a source suggesting similarity to dopaminergic drugs like the better-known opiates, affecting brain regions dealing with sensation, movement, and reward.)

ive never huffed anything (but resisting temptation now, thanks folks!) so my opinions may be worthless here...how are inhalants similar to salvia? just that they get you really high? and could it be that part of the high you get when you smoke salvia extract comes from the solvents used in the extraction? because i know ive never been high from smoking raw leaf.
 
 
LykeX
19:23 / 05.12.07
I haven't myself tried any solvents and such, and see no reason to, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility that it could bring you to the same places as psychedelics.
Many different substances can brings you different weird experiences. The reason I'm such a fan of the traditional psychedelics is that they are entirely safe and they can reliably bring you a certain type of experience which I am interested in.
Fly Agaric can indeed bring you "mystical" experiences, as can alcohol and, probably, glue, but it's at the cost of feeling like complete shit the following day and possibly acquiring some permanent damage to brain, liver or other essential systems. Psychedelics are generally much more forgiving of mistakes, such as accidental overdoses.

On the question of spirits, I feel slightly ill-equipped to comment, not having had a whole lot of success with my attempts to contact and communicate with discarnate entities.
However, I'll raise the question (possibly out of place in this thread, you judge), if many different drugs can allow you to contact spirits doesn't that suggest that the spirits are in fact not in the drugs at all?
Unless we can get a consensus that certain definite, recognizable spirits, or types of spirits, are connected to through certain drugs and other spirits through other drugs, I'd say it's more reasonable to assume that the spirits either A) are essentially unconnected with the drugs, living a seperate life, or B) don't exist, but instead our experiences represent a kind of fragmenting of our own consciousness.
 
 
LykeX
19:27 / 05.12.07
Of course, that comment on spirits doesn't deal at all with the question of non-drug spirits, so add salt according to taste.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
21:52 / 05.12.07
There's something about expectation here, maybe? People take salvia, fly agaric and usually acid expecting to open the doors to perception, meet magical elves, see the motivating spirit of the Earth and all that. People take glue expecting to get off their faces, generally, more inexpensively and more impressively than using alcohol. At the end of the intoxicated period, wouldn't that affect how you view the experience of having bits of your brain futzed by ingesting chemicals that affect brain function?
 
 
mixmage
13:40 / 07.12.07
I think the "one hit kill" is specifically attached to inhaling butane (lighter gas) directly from the can by holding the nozzle with your front teeth and pushing the can toward your face. The extra danger being that there's a chance of spilling liquid gas directly into your mouth and respiratory system.

I don't know if there are any real-world cases of death by lung-freeze, but a kid dies by this method at the start of the Hellblazer story “Haunted”.

(Incidentally, this is the same story that introduces Darren and "Crack Magic". I won't post any spoilers.)

For me, solvents and Salvia are two distinctly different experiences sharing only the rapid onset. Butane and aerosol propellants/solvents tend to trap me in recursive time-loops of a second or so, which fascinated me as a kid and led to a period of intense experimentation. I gained insights that I wouldn't have had otherwise, developed my own teenage theories on the structure of reality, sought out authors in the pre-internet world. It was my gateway into altered states, exploration of consciousness and the path that eventually led me to ritual magick.

Even though the timeloops were intriguing, they were ultimately frustrating and that group of chemicals was dropped.

Being a rampant animist, I tend to stand with one foot in rational science but the other way past the knee in the "spirit" pond. I refer to all of the molecules with which I have commerce as "allies" and I recognise their "personalities" as the traits they bestow and the debt they exact in return. MDMA has proven incredibly effective when used with the intent of resolving deep, painful emotional issues... but push too deeply into the snuggly spangles of its bliss and you'll be spat right out the other side into chronic, jaded depression a few days later.

In my opinion, it's all about knowing what you want to achieve, "who" is best suited to help you in that intent and making sure that you are physically / mentally prepared for any inherent adverse effects: such as adapting your diet to deal with serotonin depletion in the case of MDMA.

As for dysfunctional relationships, I would have to admit that Nicotine is a cruel and fickle mistress. Best left alone, then every time is like the first: skin goes cold all over, onset rush to rival most contenders, amplifying the onset of anything else you might have mixed with it... ahh, her sweet aroma!

A few days later, she's a bad smell, a kick in the guts, a loveless dependence with all the passion squeezed out. A messy break-up. Hollow promises of "never again".

It's the difference between holding something as a sacrament and banging it until it squeaks. The attitude of the user, rather than the nature of the substance.
 
 
mohfario
09:49 / 22.12.07
I find that salvia is a give and take drug; a user may experience varying degrees of intensity bases the energy of their own being at that point in time, and their overall belief in the drug. In addition, other external (material) contacts also factor in to the potency of the experience. Sometimes I've done salvia and felt extremely stoned, other times the experiences transcended consciousness. It's difficult to say weather it's comparable to any other drug. At a high intensity, I don't think there are very many drugs that compare.
 
  
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