I Went Looking for Legal Absinthe, Drank Sage Tea Instead, and Ended Up Staring Into the Abyss of Herbs

How I Met Herbs#

Plum wine season has arrived. I’ve never made it myself, but while researching how you get a tasty umeshu (Japanese plum wine) out of the process, I somehow arrived at the thought: “Couldn’t I legally make something absinthe-like?”

Absinthe is a liqueur whose main ingredient is wormwood, and the cause of its various rumored special effects is said, by one theory, to be a compound in it called thujone.

(The common explanation seems to be that thujone doesn’t cause hallucinations at all, and that it was really heavy metals in low-quality bottles, or plain old alcohol poisoning from drinking too much. But never mind that for now…)

Wormwood looked pretty hard to get hold of, but plain mugwort essential oil is sold everywhere.

Still, swallowing essential oil is honestly scary. So I rejected that idea.

Thinking it through from there: if thujone is the goal, there must be plenty of other ways to get it. There’s no reason to fixate on wormwood in the first place. I kept digging and found that common sage (Salvia officinalis) is rich in α-thujone, the psychoactive one, even richer than wormwood, supposedly.

Also, there’s a very similar plant called white sage (Salvia apiana), and apparently there’s a Native American tradition of burning it and using the smoke for (some kind of spiritual) cleansing. That’s really interesting.

Luckily, common sage is sold as an ordinary culinary herb, used to flavor meat dishes and so on. That makes it easy to get, and even if it has no “those” kinds of effects, I can at least use it to cook proper Italian food.

So I went and bought some common sage at Otsuya (a long-established spice shop in Ueno’s Ameyoko market, Tokyo).

Let’s Drink Common Sage Tea#

Apparently you can drink sage as tea too. So I decided to try that first.

Professor Gemini (the AI) warned me that the aroma is very strong and I should absolutely use only a little, so I followed that advice: one pinch (under 1 g?) steeped in 150 ml of hot water.

…And it is seriously delicious! I’m a coffee person and had barely ever drunk herbal tea, but this is good. It doesn’t taste medicinal, it’s just properly tasty, and I feel like my mind calms down a little, though that might be my imagination.

Honestly, it beats the “herbal tea to help you fall asleep” stuff I once bought on Amazon. It has no caffeine, so drinking it before bed is no problem at all, and it actually relaxes me. Noelle had been nagging me to drink plain hot water, so this ticks that box too. Two birds, one stone.

So these days I drink sage tea every night before bed.

Let’s Have Lucid Dreams with Basil#

A few days before I met sage, I’d found a huge bag of basil at the Gyomu Super (a Japanese discount food chain) and bought it. At the time I just picked it up thinking it would help me make Mondstadt-style dishes, but after my sage experience I looked into it again and found something interesting.

Basil contains estragole (a relative of anethole, “mild arousal”) and linalool (familiar from lavender, “strong sedation”). On top of that, β-caryophyllene, found in both sage and basil, acts on the CB2 receptor and deeply relaxes the body.

So if I take them all together, wouldn’t I reach the ideal state for lucid dreaming, with a mind that’s awake and a body that’s relaxed?

So I pan-fried a chicken thigh steak, covered it in a ton of basil, sage and pepper, and ate it. Apparently pepper helps boost the effects of these compounds, so I didn’t forget that either.

The heavily herbed chicken thigh steak was, simply, very delicious. Sadly I didn’t get a lucid dream, but the day after I ate a huge amount of basil with hash browns, I had a dream for the first time in a week, so maybe there really is some kind of effect.

By the way, when you heat sage, an extremely strong smell comes out that I never noticed in the tea. Frankly, it was a perfect match for the marijuana smell I often caught on the streets of Las Vegas.

Realizations#

By now, my image of “herbs” has changed a lot. Honestly, I used to think the “relaxing aromas” of essential oils were just pseudoscience. But when I actually took herbs, I really did feel something working on my mind.

In other words, stated strictly, a “relaxing scent” is the scent of linalool, and linalool has a sedative effect on the brain.

Burning sacred leaves and bathing in the smoke, or sprinkling them on food and savoring the aroma: wasn’t that basically an ancient way of getting totally blissed out?

At this point, treating herbs as merely something to “flavor your cooking” starts to feel like a waste. Floating them in hot water for tea might not extract all the active compounds. Sautéing them in oil might let the volatile compounds fly off.

Maybe the best way to absorb the active compounds of herbs efficiently is to burn them and inhale the smoke, like tobacco.

Then I suddenly remembered there was a book called Zassō de You (“Getting High on Weeds”). I borrowed it from the library and started reading, and today I found out my idea wasn’t entirely off base.

Ancient History#

Back in high school, for a Call of Cthulhu TRPG session, I once made a character who was a member of the Weed Research Club, with 70 points put into Pharmacy and Botany. I’d heard the campaign was about a cult pulling off something like the Tokyo subway sarin attack, so I figured that knowledge would come in handy.

Maybe my current interest is the result of unconsciously chasing the afterimage of that character left in my deep psyche.

What Just Happened#

I was riding the subway home reading Zassō de You, which I’d borrowed from the library, when I found a woman crouched at the edge of the passage at my nearest station. She was dressed stylishly all in black, with a black mask on. Roughly speaking, she had a hostess-bar sort of look.

I was worried and spoke to her, but all she said in a small voice was “I’m fine.” There was no way she was fine. An emergency quest had begun.

I asked an elderly lady walking behind me for help, and while she kept an eye on the woman, I ran to get a station attendant. The attendant rushed over, put her in a wheelchair, and it seems she was taken to the station office to rest.

In the meantime, from what the elderly lady managed to find out, the woman was 15 and hadn’t been drinking. But given how old her outfit made her look, maybe she had OD’d or something.

Just rescuing a sick person in an emergency quest would be rare enough, but for it to happen on the very day I borrowed Zassō de You: what a coincidence, what synchronicity.

Maybe it’s a warning from my unconscious: “You’ve found something interesting, but be careful not to head in a dangerous direction.”