DOSE: T+ 0:00	364 g	oral	Cacti - T. peruvianus	(plant material)
T+ 0:00	392 g	oral	Cacti - T. pachanoi	(plant material)
T+ 2:00	1.5 bowls	smoked	Cannabis	(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

140 lb

I had tried San Pedro twice before, once by eating a bowlful of fresh chunks and once by blending it with orange juice into a pulpy, foamy concoction. Both tasted hideous, and the results were unimpressive at best (I didn’t even get sick). Though years passed without any inclination on my part to do it again, I was inspired to give it another shot after finding four little Pedros in the garden section of Lowes.

This particular story begins with my good friend K and I processing about 728g of Peruvianus and 784g of Pachanoi I had received in the mail. We started by removing the spines and freezing the vegetables for a few days. Then we wrapped them in foil and briefly ran hot water over them to quick-thaw the outer layer and loosen the skin, which all peeled away very nicely. The green tissue was then separated and processed via blender into a guacamolish substance, which was added to the mucilage that we wrung from the rest of the cacti, and strained several times through cheesecloth until we were left with what looked like cloudy lime-green honey. All in all, this yielded about 3.75 cups, which we divided equally between the two of us.

We did this in my apartment, which is where we normally do this kind of thing. Pleasant associations a-plenty here. Though I was keeping my hopes high and my expectations low, I was excited simply by my friend’s excitement at trying something new.

Because I have the metabolism of a hummingbird, K went an hour before me so that the timing of our trips would coincide better (a trick we learned with X). He drank his slime down at a slow, reasonable pace that took maybe twenty minutes to finish. Though it was not quite as awful as I had led him to expect, he was grateful for the grapefruit juice chaser nonetheless.

We went on my balcony and fucked around with our guitars until about an hour had passed. Though I was less than eager to imbibe the cold green goo, I was able to force down all but the dregs in four chugs. It took a little fortitude to pull this off, but the Pedro preparations I had employed before had tasted much worse and felt awful going down. Honestly, the pulpy grapefruit juice tasted more bilious to me; but then, I hate grapefruit.

By this time, K was exhibiting marked physical arousal, wandering around my living room to fend off nausea while twirling a sizable carven stick in his hands. His pupils were dilated, but aside from a feeling of physical malaise and a sense of mild alteration, he reported no other effects.

We conversed freely for about an hour, mostly trying to kill time until the drug kicked in. Then the nausea began creeping up my throat, and I retreated to the bathroom whereupon I vomited up some liquid and immediately felt better. I took my sickness as a good sign that something was happening. I came out, was momentarily startled by the reflection of light off of my guitar, and realized that I too was feeling mildly altered.

We fucked around for another hour, laying in the dark and listening to a trip CD I had put together for previous outings to the crazy mill. I felt good, but nothing particularly special was happening. Three hours had passed since my friend ingested the green honey, and two for me, so I decided to try to take things up a notch by smoking what K affectionately calls “the sweet ganj.”

After about 1.5 little bowls between the two of us, things began to accelerate.

“Uh oh,” K said, having closed his eyes. “I’m getting colors and seeing deals.” I too had closed my eyes and was also was seeing colors and deals, in the form of what looked like a batik of a turtle’s shell streaming with purples and reds. I retired to the floor and gave K the couch, the better for him to see the lightshow.

“What does this mean to you?” He asked me: “Crouching Color, Hidden Skwirkle.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “A color crouching behind a bush, stalking something?”

“Yes!” He said. “A color stalking a skwirkle that’s trying to hide. It’s like the colors are chasing the skwirkles.”

Skwirkle. K was in neologism territory now, a good indicator of things to come.

I set my head on a large pillow and pulled another up over my face, and remained in this position for a good long while, feeling a decent body high (more intense than the sweet ganj by itself, but not as pronounced as with shrooms or X) as more designs continued to project themselves against my psychic widescreen. Most of them were so ephemeral and in such extreme flux that I could not, and cannot, describe in any more detail beyond that they appeared as very unusual geometrical forms overlaid atop each other, coursing and rippling with colors of contrasting brightness to complement my flight of ideas. I can also remember seeing hundreds of thousands of arrowheads floating in space, maintaining a spherical pattern that would shrink and grow as the arrowheads put more or less distance between each other. This theme gave rise to an idea/vision of some kind of divine, space-faring stellar bow. The fuck?

K notified me that he was now able to perceive the spirit world. “I can see why the cactus is used spiritually,” he said. Turns out he could squint so the candle flames would appear to stream up and down, which served as a substrate for another hallucination, which would then generate another hallucination perceived in three dimensions. K, engrossed by the actions of a spirit-arm reaching for him, coined this phenomenon meta-hallucination and said the mescaline + MJ experience was proving to be more visually powerful for him than our mushroom or ayahuasca experiments.

I asked K if he felt like braving the outside world, and he was up for it. We went for a walk around my complex, openly staring at wispy silver clouds racing against the night sky, and communicating in an amusing mixture of esoteric humor and fluent conversational nonsense, trying not to arouse attention while stumbling up the street and spinning in circles with paranoia-tinted excitement. It would have been *really* cool to go into the woods, but it had rained a lot recently and I had had enough slime for one night without getting more in my sandals. (Sorry, K.)

When we got back to my place, I produced a calumet and we fired up more of the sweet ganj. We did this several more times over the next eight hours or so, retreating into blissful inner or spiritual worlds as our visions and flight of ideas intensified before emerging once again into the milder consensual insanity we call folie a deux.

Around 8 A.M., K was still feeling too silly to drive home, so he crashed and we slept into the wee hours of the afternoon. I woke up feeling very slightly hungover, with a pronounced headache.

To sum up this experience, I would have to say that Pedro was less than I was really hoping for, but certainly more than I was expecting based on earlier trials. Unlike with mushrooms, however, I don’t feel as if any lessons of eternal value were imparted. I also think the mental clarity pervading the experience contributed to the perceived mildness of the drug, though the copious amount of sweet ganj we smoked throughout the night helped the trip along tremendously. The sloppy calculations I had performed beforehand, based on average potencies and total wet weight, had come out to a little over 400mg of mescaline for each of us. I don’t think we ended up taking that much, either because the potencies of our cacti were below the mean and/or our extraction process was inefficient, but it nonetheless provided for a worthwhile and delightful evening that’s definitely worth repeating.

Exp Year: 2002	ExpID: 16094
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jul 22, 2002	Views: 11,700
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Cannabis (1), Cacti - T. pachanoi (64), Cacti - T. peruvianus (69) : Small Group (2-9) (17), General (1)