Brain Damage from Salvia Use

It has been obviously clear that using salvia can play with your mind and temporarily modify your brain’s management but it has never been discovered that salvia use can lead to permanent brain damage. Although, there are some characteristics that salvia possesses which could point towards it being possible.

Salvinorin A
The salvinorin A content in salvia has some similar characteristics to drugs like PCP and ketamine which work as the opposite of social drugs. PCP and ketamine are two (of many) drugs which can lead to brain damage if a large dosage size is used. Since salvinorin A holds common characteristics to those drugs it would make sense that brain damage from excess of salvia use could occur.

The bottom line at the moment is that there is no solid evidence linking brain damage to salvia use and there have been no reported cases of anyone getting brain damage from using too much salvia. It makes sense that if you are chewing the salvia leaves that you are using a very safe ingestion method and you don’t have much to worry about. If you are smoking the salvia then there is probably a higher chance of something bad happening but there is still no reported cases of using salvia (even in an extremely high dose) leading to brain damage.