Salvia Out of Body Experience is published by the team behind Avalon Magic Plants, a smartshop in the Netherlands that sells salvia leaves and extracts. The product links on this site go to that shop, and when you buy through one of them, the shop earns from the sale.
We say that first because it matters for how you read everything else. The site has one subject: why salvia can feel like leaving the body. It explains the receptor, what controlled studies recorded, how salvia compares with ketamine, DXM and psilocybin, and why the moving body needs a sitter. Most writing on this subject is either a single dramatic story or a one-line warning. We wanted to set out the science calmly, including the parts that do not help sales.
How the pages are made
- The essays rest on placebo-controlled studies from Johns Hopkins University, Yale and Barcelona, on surveys of salvia users, including one run with Erowid, and on public sources such as FRANK, the DEA and the Dutch RIVM. Every page links to the sources it uses.
- Text in quotation marks is from study participants as published by the researchers.
- The one trip account on the site is a composite, labelled as such, assembled from recurring patterns in those published narratives. It is not one person's experience. We do not invent names, reviews or testimonials.
- Legal information comes from the legal texts themselves, with the date on which they were checked.
- Product information is the shop's own description, presented as such.
- When we could not confirm something in a reliable source, we left it out. We make no medical or health claims.
How the figures work
The figures on the home page and in the essays can be switched or dragged: a receptor you can change, a time axis where you pick a substance, a diagram where body and awareness separate. Every figure also works as a static picture without JavaScript, and none of them shows data that is not in the linked studies. The time axis uses rounded values from those studies; individual sessions differ.
About the shop
Avalon Magic Plants ships from the Netherlands and sells only to adults. Selling salvia is legal in the Netherlands; buying, owning or importing it is not legal everywhere. The page on the law lists the position in the UK, the United States and the Netherlands with dates. Every page shows when it was last updated. If something here is out of date or wrong, Avalon's customer service can pass it on to us.