Excited to see someone taking this seriously! I can’t thank you enough for your precision and dedication despite the complexities.
There have been mixed results from others, including one difficult experience at an unmeasured dose (they had approximated by counting leaves). Additionally, about 50% of people have attempted Salvine Tek through methods never recommended in the document; I clearly need to make V02.01 clearer and less meandering. My personal anecdote about flan caused numerous people to try Salvine using a small quantity of cooked eggs as the phospholipid source, which—in addition to digesting slowly—would be severely lacking in phosphatidylcholine (I recently learned that each egg yolk might provide ~100-150mg). This is another reason why I spent more time investigating purified phospholipids. My flan experience was only perceptible enough to guide me, and I will likely remove it from future documentation as a means of prioritizing ideal administration methods.
500mg is an interesting dose—I only realized how inconsistent it can be within the last few months. The newest version of my dosage chart keeps pushing toward 1g being an easily perceptible threshold. I'm also second-guessing what to recommend as a stronger dose (currently fluxuating between 2g-4g). I find myself redoing a lot of tests lately. Perhaps I had been consuming something that was unknowingly potentiating the experience, or my homegrown leaf is exremely inconsistent. I tend to blend ~20g at a time to homogenize material (following FIFO with supply).
If you fail to feel anything at 1g then we may have our first well-documented problem. My hypotheses would be related to water intake, digestion, quality of leaf, and/or source of phospholipids (I've primarily been using soy-based). Your comment about "feeling it in waves" makes me wonder if you were drinking water prior to those more perceptible moments—hydration can impact the strength for me (another necessary point to emphasize in V02.01). It's also important to note that there might actually be noticeable tolerance with Salvine (anecdotal), so it would be a good idea to wait a day or two between tests.
plain salvia leaf ... isnt going to have much actives in it..but there are other salvia species that are quite strong..i use to get it from a botanical farm in canada..for plain leaf it was amazingly strong! they were very proud of their product..
The leaf to gram ratio can be ~10:1 for Salvia divinorum, meaning the the quantity of plain leaf salvia being used is large (20-40 leaves for a medium to strong dose). Documented oral use is rare in Mazatec history, but I have read of shamans using ~50-100 leaves for slurries that are meant to be swallowed. Throw a bioavailability enhancer in there... you might start to see my point. A poor estimate is that 1g of Salvia divinorum leaf powder could contain ≈ 1-4mg of salvinorin A. Perhaps a decent analogy is that 20 leaves is like smoking a bowl of 20x, the key difference being distribution of effect over 1-3 hours (comparable to DMT vs. pharmahuasca).
There are some speculative considerations about enzymatic activity, as enterohepatic circulation—facilitated by phosphatidlycholine—may re-acetylate salvinorin B (based on what
@Volshebnik shared about fermentation acetylating compounds in Panax quinquefolius). This would mean that loss could be significantly reduced compared to what we are used to with typical pharmaceuticals. I'm not sure it would be possible to prove this outside of a complicated clinical trial, though.
