This next article/report comes from a site I often go to called erowid.org. Its a report written by a man who took a legal drug (in America, in australia its illegal) called salvia divinorum, which is a plant. I wouldn't normally post something like this but I found this particular one interesting, funny and a good read. Enjoy.

(Warning: Get comfortable. It is possible that the Bible is shorter than this report, though I’ve not actually done a word count.)

The evening started great: my package came in the mail, and I was delighted. I ordered a bunch of stuff… wormwood, yohimbe bark, morning glory seeds, baby Hawaiian woodrose seeds, the Blend, and with it all came a small sample of salvia 5x leaves.

Normally, my wife and I go to a friend’s house on Wednesday to watch TV and eat dinner, but I had a phone call to make at 9:30, and didn’t feel especially social anyway, so I’d decided to stay home and do some accounting work on my computer. Getting the package was a bonus in this respect; I figured while she was away and I had the flat to myself, I might as well play with all these new toys.

Sitting at my computer, I figured it couldn’t hurt to smoke a bowl of Diviner’s Three to see if this herbal shit was for real or not. I honestly didn’t expect anything to happen, given my rather regular use of that OTHER herb, but I was actually pleasantly surprised: I did indeed get a buzz, and it was a very pleasant (if strong/harsh) smoke! It was mostly a body buzz – the physical sensations of being on a light (one-three tokes) grass buzz, but none of the mental side effects: physically stoned, mentally sober. It was a nice, enjoyable feeling, and I recall a swell of relief – in time, I betcha this would very adequately replace pot as my relaxation-drug-of-choice. I began to wonder at the possibilities… maybe I should get some raw dagga flowers, maybe I should immediately order more of this shit… it was cool and I was happy. It wasn’t exactly the same as grass – if grass were coke, this was a root beer; different flavors, one a bit more potent than the other, but both brownish carbonated liquids that will quench the thirst for such.

I finished my work faster than expected… surprisingly so, considering that I was kinda stoned here. I figured that since I had a few minutes (it was 9:18 when I closed Quicken) and some actual cannabis, I should take a hit to celebrate. I did so, and didn’t get any higher. Hm. Suddenly, my memory knocked on the back of my brain and whispered, “Hey, dude. Why don’t you smoke a bowl of this new blend with a little Salvia 5x sprinkled in it? You are done with your work, after all…”

And this struck me as a very good idea. I did just that, putting the Salvia in the bottom of the bowl and the blend at the top. Most of the bowl got me only a little higher – the last hit, which was almost pure Salvia 5x, did… something else. I dunno what it was – it wasn’t stoned, it wasn’t drunk, it was somewhere in the middle and also something foreign, and I was left just looking at the ashes in my pipe and marveling at the fact that this was A) cheap, and B) delivered to my house through the mail without any fear that The Law would have anything to say about it. This was all new and different, and naturally, wondering how far this herbal shit can go, I decided that it would be an even better idea to really “open her up” and see what it could show me.

I packed about two hits worth of pure Salvia 5x into the pipe…

(We interrupt this story for an important message from our sponsor.)

Kids: Do NOT do this. Like, EVER.

(We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.)

…and took the first hit. I was somehow able to hold it in for a bit, and I can distinctly remember thinking, “Whoa. WHOA!” to myself. I began to sweat. I felt like I was floating. I had roomspin, not nauseating like with alcohol, but not nearly as slow either - in order to look at something specific, my eyes had to re-center on the object about ten times every single second, whereas with alcohol they would have to readjust about once a second. But I was still fully in control of my mental faculties. I was elated. This shit was FOR REAL, man.

A few minutes later, I took the second hit. This was a great big massive hit, as most of the Salvia was singed and warm now, and much more conducive to burning. When I let off the carb on my glass pipe, I got a lungful of smoke that was far beyond my expectations. Under normal circumstances (i.e., with grass) I would have coughed up 1.48 lungs at this point, but somehow, SOMEhow, I managed to hold this in. It was a struggle, and I was going to win. In fact, my last memory before the shit completely destroyed the fan was of resting my arms on the desk, staring into the pipe’s bowl, and fighting to keep this hit in.

And then, life as I had come to know and understand it over the last 28 years shattered utterly and completely, with no warning whatsoever.

In less time than it takes to comprehend, my consciousness – my sense of self, my personality, my five senses and the things those senses perceive to make the cohesive whole that I understood as reality (including my desk, my body, my computer screen) all of it - instantly shattered into approximately 1000 pieces.

Vertical pieces, at that.

There were now 1000 me’s, each only able to perceive and interact with 1/1000th of my life and reality in and of themselves, each having individual thoughts and ideas… and this was simply too much for my mind to handle, I think. In response to this abrupt overload, “I” – my “internal” person, the guy who is constantly making a running commentary inside my head of everything that is going on, the person talking to you now – settled into only one of the 1000 different me’s that I had become. I was aware of the other 999 as separate entities… it was a little like being one member of a team. If my eyesight could be compared to a monitor display, then I could only see a vertical sliver one pixel wide (for lack of a better way to phrase it) of my reality. I could only feel 1/1000th of my body – one of the wafer-thin slices in the middle. I was only able to hear, touch, or otherwise experience 1/1000th of life, and it was only a little sliver so thin that light could easily pass through it.

I could not hear – everything was as quiet as I’d imagine outer space to be. Time stopped. Everything was black except for that one vertical sliver of different shades of brown (I must have been facing my desk). This was all that remained of my world, and I remember thinking that I was dead.

But I couldn’t be dead if I could at least think this. There was hope. So, being a very physical person, I decided to take a deep breath – this is usually the first step used to ground someone. But I couldn’t breathe… more importantly, I didn’t breathe, just like I don’t fly or I don’t have six arms. I tried to turn my head to my right, just face a different direction… something, anything physical just to prove that I was still alive. And then things got even stranger.

I realized, at this point, that we issue commands from our brain in order to do nifty things, like moving our bodies. I do not consciously recognize these commands as separate activities, and I doubt many of us do - when I want to move my arm, I just Do It. But they are there, these commands, and I understood that I had issued that command to turn around, but the response to this command was strange indeed. I was dimly aware that the 1/1000th of myself all the way to the right did “his” part by turning just a little bit. The part next to him followed suit.

The horrifying reality of this began to set in: If I wanted to turn around, we ALL had to turn around. Oh, hell.

I was relieved that the my particular sliver was at least partially in control of the rest - the Drill Sergent of this platoon, so to speak. I had just given the order to turn my head, and all of the slivers were obeying… but they were obeying in sequence, instead of all at once. It was like a line of dominoes falling. I could hear a low rumbling sound, getting louder and higher, as those on my right complied and my “turn” to do my part in moving my head was coming up fast. That sound was some kind of Doppler effect in my brain – it was as if someone had taped my apartment’s ambient sounds and was playing them far too slowly, but the playing speed would increase just a notch every time one of my slivers did his part. The fraction of a second when it WAS my turn, I did my part, and everything for at least an instant sounded like it should… and then, to my left, I could hear the sounds of my apartment speeding up as the slivers of myself on that side also contributed in the moving action.

After about five, maybe ten minutes, we were all done and it was silent again. My sliver of life was just a touch different. We had all moved my head just a little bit to the right. Go ME (or ME’S, as it were)! Another low rumble to my right told me that phase two (of about one million) was underway, and we were all going to move a little bit more. This second “wave” took about as long as the first – roughly ten minutes. Hell, this wasn’t so bad. I figured at this rate, we’d be done moving my head in about two days.

…which is right about when I panicked.

All I could see, hear, or otherwise experience was this one little sliver of life. A line on a screen, a split second for every ten minutes where sound made sense. Nothing else existed for me, outside of a dim awareness that there were a lot more of me, and we were all in the same predicament. I remember thinking - as wave after wave of my tiny slivers of motion and sound washed over and around me from right to left - that I had well and truly screwed the entire pooch here. I somehow had managed to completely and irrevocably destroy my brain on my first voyage out. I did the mental equivalent of shooting a gall-bladder sized hole in my thought meats, and I would never be the same. I would never learn how to program in C, or understand music as it played, or walk, or talk, or have a conversation with my wife, or have sex, or anything else, ever again. This Was It© - all I had were memories of how I once was.

I let out a scream. Except that I didn’t: My mind issued the command to let out a scream, and it was now in the queue… to be executed after the rest of us finished turning our collective head.

This is already long-winded, so I’ll spare the mortifying fucking eternity that transpired after that. Unable to move unless it was my turn, unable to interrupt this action, feeling the absolute dread that is being utterly trapped in this sliver-of-a-consciousness and out of time and synch with the rest of existence. Wondering if this was permanent; and if so, feeling the terrible, terrible guilt of leaving my wife with a vegetable wearing a wedding ring. I could feel emotion, but couldn’t express it at all… all I could do was think, and I seemed to have about six eternities worth of thought as my sole possession.

I would have gladly shat myself in public if I thought I could have even a chance of getting out of this.

…but then, a ray of hope.

I began to notice my sliver of existence widening. With each pass, the sliver either to the right or left of me would join with my own – there were less me’s, and mine was absorbing the others’ thought processes and perceptions, making theirs my own. About five or six passes went by before I realized this, but realize it I did: my sliver was now five or six pixels wide, instead of one. I could see flesh tone, and green and yellow amongst the brown… what was that? Something’s coming together, here….

Things began to quicken. Each wave took less and less time – from ten minutes to five per wave, and gradually decreasing. When I was about 30% “put back together,” I heard something… something that sounded as I remembered sound used to be so long ago. Sounded a bit like… “aaaaAAAAAAHhh…”

Then I realized it was me. That scream that was in the queue? It finally made it out, if only as a retarded whimper.

Things were really starting to come into focus now. I was far from all right, but my field of perception (all senses) was wide enough for me to recognize things. Years, I repeat, YEARS, had quite literally passed since that time, long ago, when I decided to smoke some Salvia, and I felt every second of them. But in all that time, I seem to only have turned my head a little bit, so much so that I was still staring at the pipe in my hand. I issued the command to look up at the screen of my computer… this happened, albeit in slow motion (it took roughly a minute, but this was more than acceptable to me at the time – in fact, I thought I was the Flash). I tried to put the pipe down – eventual success was mine. I sat there until I was about halfway back together, still aware that there were five hundred more slivers of myself, but that they were all falling into place at what seemed to be record time.

That’s when I realized that I was still alive, that I was actually one person being re-assembled, and that I had things to do… namely, I had to pick my wife up from our friend’s house. Oh, crap, I had to pick my wife up from my friend’s house!! She wasn’t there! How late was it? I thought she would get a ride at about eleven o’clock, when she found herself unable to contact me (because I was damned SURE I was unreachable for quite some time!). Dear god, where was she? How many weeks have I been here? I peered at the monitor, and was shocked – SHOCKED to see my reflection in the glare shield: I had not aged. My beard hadn’t even gotten longer. I looked at the time in my system tray.

It read 9:22pm.

I double clicked on the clock… it still said 9:22pm, and it was still November 19th, 2003. I squinted in disbelief (this took a minute). I picked up my cell phone (eventually) and managed to remember how to check the time and date on it. It confirmed everything: in all this time, all these days, hours, or years that I’d been trapped within a piece of myself, terrified but unable to do anything about that - I had been gone a grand total of about four minutes. Probably less, now that I think about it.

I (or, more appropriately, “Me and the Gang”) were suddenly aware of being soaked in sweat, and burning up. I decided that we should take a walk in the cool night air, smoke a cigar… the things we normally do, just to prove to ourselves that things were at least marginally okay and that we were still alive and somewhat functional. If it was difficult going down the stairs, then pulling the cigar out of my pocketed tin and lighting it was the equivalent to a monkey trying to solve a calculus derivative. Somehow, we prevailed, though. I made it about a block when the majority of myself was reassembled, and I noticed that most everything I saw was tilted about forty five degrees. I stopped walking when I noticed that, and then realized that the problem was that my head was tilted to the right. Everything else was fine. After correcting this, I really started to feel like I was sobering up, and headed back to my apartment to lay down. I was exhausted. That lying bastard of a clock may have suggested that I was only sitting at my desk for two minutes, but I had been there for goddamned years, without rest.

For the next hour or so, I was kind of stoned. This actually felt really, really nice. Come to think of it, EVERYTHING felt nice. Everything was actually great. I did eventually pick my wife up, and never have I so richly enjoyed driving on a cool night with the wind in my hair and the music playing. I was able to tell her a little bit about it, but nothing like the detail that’s involved here.

I slept like a baby.

It’s about lunchtime here, and I’m going to grab some eats, but I have thought about little else this entire day. I am not, as my story might suggest, completely wigged out or turned off by this event. In fact, I am – oddly – thankful for the experience, and happy/upbeat about the whole thing. I got my ass handed to me, sure, but that was my fault completely… it seems that the relative weakness of the smoking blend (and, hell, actual cannabis itself) threw me off, and I oh-so-completely underestimated how much business even a little Salvia 5x means as a result. But it has, at least for the moment, changed the hell out of me. What I experienced was as utterly remarkable as it was horrifying, and at least for the moment, I’m convinced that my timeline will forever be separated into two parts – before this trip, and after. I’m not quite “back” yet – I seem to have most of my faculties back, but I’m not as instinctually comfortable with them as I recall being – I get the impression that I’m driving a car or a mech, instead of just moving my body around.

But I’m here, and I’m enjoying everything in my life in a way I never did before. All the little things… the morning cup of coffee, conversations with co-workers, the ride in to work, hell, even the work itself are fulfilling in ways they never were. Guess you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till its gone.

Thus endeth the longest trip report in history. If you’ve made it this far, you are a trooper indeed, and you should request… nay, DEMAND, a sucker from the receptionist on the way out. ;-)
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CANADIANS TO BUSH: HOPE YOU LOSE, EH

According To A New Poll, Only 15 Per Cent Of Us Would Vote For The President

Maybe it's that smug little smile.

His penchant for fantastically expensive military photo-ops. Or the swaggering, belt-hitching walk that cries out for a pair of swinging saloon doors. And though, God knows, we have too many of our own syntactically challenged politicians to be casting stones, shouldn't the leader of the free world know that "misunderestimate" isn't a word?

Yes, we're cavilling, but clearly there is something about George W. Bush that gets under the skin of Canadians. After all, vehemently disagreeing with the policies of American presidents is almost a national pastime.

There has to be another explanation for our extreme reaction, the desire afoot in the land to see him turfed from office. That and the unprintable sentiment about him and the horse he rode in on. Even before we know whom he will be running against this fall, Canadians have made their decision.

Only 15 per cent, according to an exclusive new Maclean's poll, would definitely cast a ballot for Bush if they had the opportunity. And if Americans remain almost evenly divided -- some 50 per cent approve of his performance in the White House and he's running neck and neck with his likely Democratic challengers -- there is no such dithering on this side of the border.

Just 12 per cent of us feel Canada is better off since he took office, and only a third of respondents will admit to liking the world's most powerful man, even just a little bit.

It's an antipathy that appears to extend far beyond our traditional coolness towards Republicans, says Michael Marzolini, chairman of Pollara Inc., the Toronto-based opinion research firm that conducted the national survey.

With a political spectrum that skews to the left of America's -- legalized same-sex marriage and the promise of looser marijuana laws being the most recent, and in some quarters, celebrated examples -- we've generally perceived Democratic presidents as being more in tune with our values.

But where Ronald Reagan and Bush the elder were at least grudgingly respected, Dubya is decidedly not.

Despite a spate of polls showing a broad desire for improved relations with the United States after the often rocky Chretien years, there is a sense that this administration isn't one we want to do business with. "These numbers really show the difficulty for Paul Martin," says Marzolini, the long-time pollster for the federal Liberal party. "He has to get closer to the Americans, but he can't get too close to George Bush. It's a fine balance." The intense sympathy Canadians felt following the attacks of 9/11 - -- something that manifested itself not just in acts of mourning and charity, but in a willingness to support whatever actions the U.S. deemed necessary -- has dissipated. In its place is a deep dislike of the bellicose new global reality, and a lingering distrust of Bush's motives.

It's evident even within sight of the frontier.

Stopping to take a picture of icy Niagara Falls on a recent frigid day, Mike Mitreveski tried to explain why he's uneasy about Bush. "I get a sense that he's in it for himself first and then the country," said the Windsor, Ont., graduate student. "And I worry that he's doing all of this stuff in Iraq for the oil industry.

He used to be part of it and has lots of high-ranking friends." David Kowalewski, an engineering consultant from Niagara Falls, Ont., says he initially supported Bush's foreign policy, but now has grave doubts. "I thought it was noble at first, but now they've gone security crazy." Life has changed for the worse in his community, said Kowalewski, citing long delays at the border, and the fallout for local businesses that depend on tourism.

A trio of physicians taking in the sights on a day off were no kinder to Bush. On sober reflection, all asked that their names not be used. "Please, someone, teach him how to pronounce nuclear," said one, a Toronto pediatrician. Another, an American who has lived on this side of the border for the past 14 years, said she understands why Canadians dislike so many of Bush's stances, even though she is troubled by the tone of the debate.

A doctor friend from the Netherlands provided a reminder that opinions of the President are often even harsher abroad. "In Amsterdam," she said, "we think he is kind of stupid."

On the humid night in August 2000 when George W. Bush officially became the Republican nominee for president, the thousands of delegates and reporters packed into a Philadelphia arena were given a peek at what party strategists planned to sell to the American people.

The beautifully realized infomercial was mostly shots of Bush at his Crawford, Tex., ranch, tending stock, mending fences, driving a vintage pickup truck with his spaniel perched on his lap, all the while talking about his vision of a big country with small-town values.

It was a persona lifted straight from a Hollywood Western. The likeable, soft-talking cowpoke who knows the value of an honest day's work and isn't afraid to take on the guys in the black hats when the town's in trouble. Reagan successfully mined the same vein for eight years.

And it's an image that continues to pay dividends for Bush, playing off his folksy, good-natured strengths, and positioning him as someone who might reasonably be excused for not reading newspapers or knowing the names of his foreign counterparts. Clearing brush on the back forty is a lot more man-of-the-people than weekending at the palatial family compound in Kennebunkport, Me.

But Canadians have never been that comfortable with the type of cowboys who take the law into their own hands.

Our frontier heroes were the scarlet-clad North West Mounted Police, not lone gunslingers. In a pre-9/11 world, when Bush was vowing to be a domestic-policy president, it didn't seem to matter that much. But over the past 2 1/2 years, his muscular commitment to protecting and advancing U.S. interests abroad -- unilaterally if allies and international bodies such as the UN fail to sign on -- has unsettled many around the world.

There is a burgeoning cottage industry of writers and analysts exploring the underpinnings and fallout of this new American "imperialism." In Canada, a country that has always fretted about being swallowed up, either territorially or culturally, by the behemoth to the south, the spectre of an expanding American Empire feeds a deep-seated paranoia.

At least for some.

David Frum, the Canadian author and pundit who spent 13 months working as a speech writer for Bush -- he is credited with co-authorship of the infamous "axis of evil" line -- says he doesn't believe polls that suggest a yawning chasm between American and Canadian perceptions of the President. "My contention is that the differences are much less dramatic than they are usually made out to be," he says. And if Bush is held in less esteem north of the border, adds Frum, it is largely because of the distorted lens the public sees him through. "The Canadian media have generally taken a very belittling approach to him. By and large, they do not take the terror problem very seriously, and they communicate that to public opinion."

Canadians might understandably prefer presidents who are reluctant to flex their global political power, either economically or militarily, says Frum, but when it comes to things that really matter, we should have the good grace to at least not stand in the way. "There's no expectation in Washington that Canada and the U.S. should agree on every issue. But they do, as a friend, expect to be given the benefit of the doubt on issues that they regard as essential to their security."

It's a point of view that many Canadians find difficult to swallow, given the dubious claims of weapons of mass destruction and hostile intentions that fuelled America's foray into Iraq. ( The Maclean's annual year-end poll found that 75 per cent of Canadians believe Ottawa was right to refuse to commit troops to Iraq, even if it annoyed our closest trading partner. ) Yes, we're friends and neighbours, but with feelings running so high, there is a danger that our distaste for the leader will spill over to the people he represents.

Clifford Krauss, Canadian correspondent for the New York Times, recently encountered two young boys on the street outside his Toronto home, holding a sign that read Honk if you hate President Bush! ( This is a school project. ) "I was shocked because of the word hate," says Krauss. "You'd never see a sign like that about Saddam Hussein, or Slobodan Milosevic." It's a virulent strain of anti-Americanism that the Times reporter says he encounters more and more frequently. "I've experienced rude and prejudiced behaviour, just because I'm an American," says Krauss. "I've lived in countries in Latin America that have tricky relationships with the U.S., but I didn't expect that sort of thing here."

Truth is, we might well be the ones in need of a dose of perspective. With the Canadian political landscape now virtually emptied of leaders we feel passionately about -- either negatively or positively -- we might be guilty of transference. Our growing distaste for Bush is smug and more than a bit juvenile, argues Reginald Stuart, a Mount Saint Vincent University expert on U.S.-Canada relations, now in residence at Washington's Woodrow Wilson International Center. "When the Communists were in power, we dealt with Russian leaders that we disagreed vehemently with on some very fundamental issues," he notes.

Our worries that the Bush administration, viewed by the bulk of the Canadian public as overly religious and conservative, will somehow interfere with progressive social policies in this country ( the Maclean's year-end poll identified same-sex marriage and proposals to relax marijuana laws as new "wellsprings of national pride" ) are overblown, says Stuart. In Canada, there is still no surer kiss of death for a politician than caving into American pressure.

For decades now, we have alternately railed against, and revelled in, the generalized American ignorance of Canada. At the same time, we have prided ourselves on being one of our neighbour's harshest critics.

At the centre of our relationship is the conceit that so much of what we produce -- resources, goods, culture, people -- flows south, that America must really need us. Now, with the U.S. showing a willingness to stand alone and demand the obeisance due to the last remaining superpower, Canada, like the rest of the world, is caught up in an uncomfortable new reality.

Bush's repeated "with us or against us" declarations have made it clear that there are new, tougher requirements for being America's ally. And as long as he remains well-positioned for another four years in the White House, we may have to do our share of puckering up. Canadians know that. We just don't have to like it.
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IN ENGLAND last thursday marijuana was reclassified to a Class C drug. "What the hell does that mean?" I hear you ask. Well in England they have three classes of drugs, Class A, which includes really bad ones like Cocaine, Heroin and the like, Class B, which includes speed and Class C, which includes stuff like Valium, Steroids and now Cannabis. What this means is that in England you can no longer be arrested for carrying small amounts of marijuana around, or for smoking it in a private place. As soon as the law came into effect, cannabis cafe's opened around the country, well at least a few did. They are still sort of illegal but they believed that since police could no longer arrest you they would be OK. Time will tell at least in England, cause in Scotland they are tending to still take a hardline approach. As Canada enacts similar laws soon when their parliarment gets back into business, times will get very interesting. Maybe Australia will soon follow? We can only hope.
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