DOSE:

412 mg

oral

Mescaline

(capsule)

BODY WEIGHT:

170 lb

Background:
Two years ago I started growing San Pedro cacti as a hobby. It began with buying one small Pachanoi from a vendor, no bigger than the size of my thumb, but the hobby quickly morphed int owning many different types of psychedelic cacti. Bridgesii, Peruvianus, Macrogonus, Tersheckii, Scopulicola, hybrids, I cultivate them all and my spare room is full of rare genetics growing from seed.

While I have consumed San Pedro in the past, it was over 19 years ago. In fact, it has been many years since I’ve had any psychedelic experience other than the occasional THC edible. Their magical properties weren’t the main reason I liked cultivating them. It was more their beauty. There is a huge variety of forms, shapes, and colors in this plant. They’re like living sculptures, living pieces of art. Caring for them and being around them is a simple and peaceful joy in my life.

Being around the cacti so much I soon felt the curiosity to experience Mescaline, their primary active alkaloid. I opted to learn how to extract and isolate pure mescaline from the cacti rather than brewing a tea. My reasoning for this was twofold. The first, and most important, it would allow me to measure my dose down to the milligram. As I’ve grown older it’s become clear to me that dosage is one of the most important data points in being able to optimize the use of psychedelics and enjoy them. The second reason was that I heard pure mescaline induced less nausea than tea.

The Experience:
T 0:00 beginning
I had almost 3 grams of sparkling Mescaline Citrate crystals in my jar. I put 412 mg (240ish HCL equivalent) in a gelcap and swallowed it after eating some toast and drinking my morning coffee. I had woken up early so I could dose at 6:30am because I knew mescaline was a long trip and I wanted to be back to baseline at a reasonable hour. I also chose a dose in the “common” range of Erowid’s dosage information page but on the lighter side of it because I tend to be sensitive to psychedelics.

It was a very rainy day in the mountains where I live and I would be spending the entire trip indoors. My wife was getting my two young children ready for school as the initial effects began to show themselves.

T 0:50 - 1:00 Coming Up
The first signs of effects were a bit of energy and a slight euphoria. There was an overall “good vibes” quality to it that put a smile on my face. The sheer excitement just from knowing that my extraction was successful was a great feeling as well. The come up was happening. Slight signs of nausea presented themselves but it was very minor.

T 1:00 - 2:00 coming up
Over the next hour the effects continued to build. It felt quite nice to take large deep inhales and feel the bed sheets against my skin. At that moment it felt like low dose MDMA. Slight jaw clenching, temperature changes, and pupil dilation were present also reminiscent of ecstasy.

My thoughts began to change. Similar to low dose THC in a way. I noticed myself withdrawn in them. When talking with my wife I found it more difficult to seem “normal” and I was looking forward for some time alone in the house to let myself get my bearings with the new state of consciousness that was growing.

T 2:00 - 3:00 Still coming up.
Mescaline has a long come-up. I had the house to myself now and the effects were still growing. I alternated between laying on my bed and getting up and walking around while I observed the sensations in my body changing.

There was a very strong tactile component to it. An energy and euphoria was growing inside me. I often felt like laying down and letting it wash over me as I swam in blankets, but soon after the restlessness and energy in my body would get me up to my feet again and I would need to walk around. It was stronger than I anticipated for the dose I chose.

My thoughts during this phase were just as restless as my body. They would jump from one thing to the next. I was unable to think about any one thing for more than a few seconds. I felt unable to harness this energy to think deeply. I was just on the edge of breaking through, but wasn’t able to do so.

The tension grew and I remember thinking “shit, this too much fucking energy building in my body.” A nervousness hit me for how altered I might appear when my children arrived home from preschool. I was starting to think my plans of “dipping my toe in to test the water” were changing to “dipping the entire foot.”

T 3:00 - 7:00 The Peak
Suddenly I noticed how dirty my house was. I work a full time job and my wife has her hands full with two rowdy kids and it was one of those days where things were messy. In that state of mind, being in that environment, I realized how lazy it was not to clean the damn house right that very moment, how my house was a reflection of my insides. I turned on a playlist and began to clean as the effects started peaking.

I’m not sure if it was just giving the molecules time to arrive at their destination, or if it was the act of moving my body that did it, but things really began feeling amazing. I danced to the music while I cleaned the house.

I’ve heard that the traditional use of San Pedro was very communal, that it was done in groups as a shared experience, and in that moment I could totally relate. I felt the euphoria and excitement of a party, of celebration. In that moment I yearned for the experience of being surrounded by the tribe that I never had, immersed in a cactus party and feeling the good vibes together. I felt disappointed that our culture prohibits shared experiences like this between family members and communities.

There was an interesting mind body connection that was apparent. The more I focused the movement of my body on action, the more my thoughts also became focused and clear. The urge to clean wasn’t just an urge to clean up my environment, I wanted to clean my soul. I wanted to clean who I was on the inside, to be a better man, be a better husband, a better father, a better employee. It wasn’t enough to just want it, or to just feel it. I wanted to DO IT. Cleaning up was something physical I could do in that moment, an action, not words or feelings.

Not long into cleaning up I noticed my son’s blanket on the ground and went to pick it up and put it back in its place. It was a bit dirty from something he had spilled on it. The image of my wife cleaning it flashed in my mind and I was filled with a deep gratitude for her. There I was, doing the tasks she does week after week, all the little things that keep a house running but that in the busyness of life are often taken for granted. I felt my eyes tear up. Love and gratitude were there inside me, but also a sadness at the thought of her works going by un-praised, of her feeling unappreciated as we all do from time to time.

The release of emotion felt good and allowed me to enjoy the energy pulsing through my body even more. In a podcast with author and historian Mike Jay, he remarked how mushrooms/tryptamines always tend to feel like something external which he is being visited by or coming in to contact with, whereas mescaline feels like something coming from within and emanating out. This certainly agrees with what I was experiencing in those moments. The bodily component of the trip emphasized it. Movement, breathing, grooving, they were integral to working with the mescaline, working with the energy radiating from within me. Music was like a partner that I needed to share the experience with.

I thought of the stone engravings in the stela of Chavín de Huántar, some of the oldest depictions of ritualistic cactus use. In these stelas a man holding a San Pedro cactus is turning into a jaguar. Was that there conceptualization of this energy?

My wife came home midway through the peak. I explained to her what I felt earlier, the love and gratitude I had for her and small tears left my eyes and my voice crackled from the intensity of emotions.

We hugged and began a long and deep conversation about relationships, parenting, life, religion, spiritual growth. I can be a pretty agnostic person at times but the importance of spiritual growth was clear to me under the influence of mescaline. At the end of your life when your body has broken down, your money is useless because you’ve ran out of time, and your intelligence isn’t quite what it once was, what’s left? Your spirit that’s what, your memories of who you were and how you treated people. It’s so important to cultivate that spirit now. To be the person that will leave you satisfied at the end of your life.

T7:00 - T11:00
The remainder of the experience was a very gradual return to baseline. My kids came home and I had so much motivation to be the father I thought of earlier. I played with them, I felt present, I felt patient with their arguments, and I felt happy to be their dad.
11 hours after dosing I felt pretty close to baseline. I went to bed at 10pm that night and slept well by my standards.

I thought about the experience over the next few weeks and would often use it as motivation to do those difficult little things each day to be a better version of myself. Tuning into this experience every month or two to brush off the cobwebs could be quite useful. Mescaline at that dose felt very practical, it wasn’t about receiving some meaning to the universe. It felt more pragmatic, more applicable to my life, more human centric, more community centric. Like receiving advice from grandfather who points out what things matter and how you can change your day to day life to cultivate them. I would really like to explore mescaline at a higher dose to see just how deep the rabbit hole goes and how much it changes at the higher end, but 415 - 450 citrate felt like a a nice toe in the water.

Exp Year: 2025	ExpID: 118784
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 35
Published: Apr 28, 2025	Views: Not Supported
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Mescaline (36), Cacti - columnar (10) : Alone (16), Cultivation / Synthesis (31), Glowing Experiences (4), General (1)