There isn't really an authority to define the classification, the pharmacology is so atypical that even there we lack the reference to say anything definitive. The only thing we are clearly doing is trying to show what it is similar to at most, but ultimately technically not. While hallucinogenic, the action is IMO qualitatively different enough from classic psychedelics to make it kind of iffy.
I'd say that the dissociative component (and hallucinations in that *breakthrough* immersed dissociated state) qualifies Salvia as primarily a dissociative type hallucinogen.
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The fact that a DMT breakthrough can be dissociative too and makes differentiation very blurry, or that salvia can perhaps produce trips with some meaningful 'narrative' attest the contrary - indeed almost all psychedelics can be dissociative, and dissociatives can be psychedelic. So none of the words used for Salvia here are wrong enough to make it truly important what or who is right, or the most right. There are limits though... just because you can go delirious on 2C-B doesn't make it okay for us to classify it as a deliriant.
Perhaps I didn't make this clear enough, but I don't find salvia overly similar to either psychedelics or dissociatives. My argument is that it should not be defined as either, but simply as its own thing. What I was trying say with DMT is that it causing dissociative-level hallucinations does not make it a dissociative in my eyes, so nor does the same do that for salvia. As for the actual content of the hallucinations as well, I would have to argue as well that there are quite a few extremely prevalent patterns obvious among salvia trips, not only in reports but even in the scientific literature, that I do not hear about with any sort of frequency on NMDA antagonists. While the trips may seem superficially similar particularly in their intense abstractness, I still believe that they are quite different when truly scrutinized.
That it's not like arylcyclohexylamines is a bad argument. Tryptamines can be unlike phenethylamines but if phenethylamines were at one point the only psychedelics we knew, I wonder if we would hesitate to call tryptamines psychedelic. Don't see if it reminds you of known drugs, but see if technically what definition of a descriptor like 'dissociative' behaves like the most.
Did someone say that it's not like arylcyclohexylamines specifically? Perhaps I missed this. I have only had one experiences with that class period, with ketamine, so I really wasn't making that comparison.
While I get what you're saying, and have my own opinions down that road as well, I have to say that I still think it falls outside of the reach of salvia. While I do find tryptamines and phenethylamines to be quite different in some ways, I still find them to have remarkable similarities on a level that salvia does not have with any dissociatives I have tried of any class, whether it was ketamine, DXM, memantine, or nitrous oxide, despite the fact that I find them all comparable to each other on a similar level.
I wonder if ether is a dissociative for that matter. I tried it but couldn't get significant effect from it before it all evaporated.
Ether also has significant GABAergic effects, does it not? I've never tried it, but to me it always sounded more like a version of alcohol that was simply usable enough by a rapid delivery route that some more noticeable dissociative effects could be reached.
"Psychedelic" is mind-manifesting, and the trip content is unlike say that of deliriant hallucinogenic effect (which is rather of a delusional or illusory nature) a distortion or manifestation of our thoughts and feelings.
Salvia's effects are in my opinion more mystical like a dream-like vision, and occur most of all in the dissolution of normal awareness, say of time/space or our bodies, of being a human organism. That type of action: apparently having your mind fill in fantastical things when failing to register normal benchmarks of reality, is I would say the approach of a dissociative drug. And unlike most psychedelics, for Salvia it is normal to experience such dissociative effects at low dose or the lighter effect range.
I completely understand your argument, as I have known many people who have made essentially the same one. However, I am on the other side of the field. I would not call anything a psychedelic that is not a 5-HT2A agonist, nor would I call anything a dissociative that is a not a NMDA antagonist. I personally believe that categorizing a drug by its inherently widely variable and difficult to understand subjective effects only leads to far more confusion than simply naming them for what they're scientifically shown to do. Why not just call it kappaergic, or something else? While people may not recognize what that means at first, they surely would if we just gave it time to become more a known thing like dissociatives now are.
Perhaps notably, I would also say that psychedelics dissolve my normal awareness of time, space, my body, and my normal life at low doses. The way they do so is different from what dissociatives do to me, but then, so is salvia.
Anyway classifying it is mostly useful at this point to give people some general ballpark idea of what the drug is like. Atypical and hallucinogenic should be the main descriptors and they don't seem to be so subjective, but choosing between psychedelic or dissociative is a complex topic for discussion and despite that I have my own explanation for my opinion, I am generally very open to the opposite stance.
We must really be on the opposite sides of this lol. While I do agree that those terms would probably be more fitting when describing drugs as a whole, it seems to be going in the opposite direction of what I'm trying to achieve. I think they should be segregated more, not less, if people are to really come to understand them for what they are.
Anyway, this of course is highly subjective once again, but I just don't personally believe that calling salvia a dissociative
does give one a ballpark idea of what the drug is like. I quite honestly find salvia and NMDA antagonists to be extremely different, in psychological, emotional, physical, and hallucinogenic effects. If someone had tried to prepare me for salvia by telling me it would be like any of the dissociatives I've used, I'd probably be pretty pissed off when I came down from it.
But it can help to narrow it down what the 'tactics' of the effect develop like like i tried to ^, or at least it's interesting, if you ask me.
I find it interesting to compare and contrast them, without a doubt. I just don't think we should be using the same labels for things that are ultimately quite different as a whole. But, to each their own. I also know people who are perfectly happy calling deliriants psychedelics because they are also clearly "mind-manifesting", and this I cannot objectively argue either.
