DOSE:

40 g

oral

Cacti - columnar

(tea)

BODY WEIGHT:

72 kg

I received 40 grams (dried) of trichocereus terscheckii (for ornamental purposes only) that I boiled with some lemon juice for about 6 ½ hours. The resultant black liquid was filtered and put into a glass for consumption. People go on about how disgusting mescaline containing cocktails taste and before this experience I thought that the taste was rated worse than it really is. If anything, it tastes worse than it is rated. It is THE foulest thing I have ever drank/eaten. But, as one does in the quest to get high, one bears these discomforts.

I took me about an hour to finish the approx 400ml of liquid. After the last gulp I said to myself, “You fucking idiot, it tasted like shit for a reason, you’ve poisoned yourself and no emergency room is gonna be too helpful to some kid who has eaten a cactus hoping to get high.” I was seriously considering throwing it all up and going to A&E (ER for American audiences). But there was maybe the slightest sparkle of something there (12:00pm) - I’m not sure if it was a psychosomatic response. At some point about 10 minutes later I took a deep breath of air and felt so goddam incredibly ALIVE. Much the same as when you take a deep breath whilst on MDMA. An overriding feeling of optimism filled me. Things were going to be okay. They really were.

I decided to go into the kitchen and socialise with my housemates. My cactus project has been something of a source of humour among my housemates, and I’m sure that they would be glad to hear that my labours had finally borne fruits. They are mostly a non-drug using bunch of people but I really do get along very well with them; and always feel comfortable tripping around them; and they are always curious about what I am experiencing. Upon my entry into the kitchen the first thing I noticed was the pot-plant on the kitchen table. It was glowing with a sort of energy. The energy moved all around the plant, through its circulatory system, into the earth and into the atmosphere. I was seeing the plant living. This sight filled me with total awe as I realised that this was happening all over the earth, all this life, all this movement of energy. I felt I wasn’t ready to head into the garden, I feared that it might be a bit too much as I was still adjusting to the headspace of the mescaline. The next thing I noticed was a box of fruit juice with an orange printed on it. The orange grew out of the box and became a 3 dimensional object that began to rotate, much like those 3d models of the earth you sometimes see. All these things fascinated my housemates and they offered to go outside with me if I still felt fearful. Their concern for me touched me very deeply and I realised that even though they were very different people to me, they were essentially very good souls. These feelings for them were very unlike the love one feels on MDMA that I have come to think is somewhat insincere. It was recognition of their faults as well as their goodness and they were still all beautiful to me… not perfect, but still beautiful creatures who are adding to the love in the world. In the garden the energy fields became VERY apparent. Each plant was joined to each plant in close proximity by a band of energy also. This amazing, pulsing energy flowing through all these plants suddenly seemed to be flowing through all the bugs in the garden as well. Then I could see it flowing through us. There were these energy auras surrounding us and once again I was filled with this feeling of balance. Everything was as it should be. Not perfect, but getting there. Even for all the bad things that are happening in the world, change is happening. Slowly, but it is happening. Wow, all these thoughts and feelings that I was experiencing did seem at all like revelations, they seemed more like things I have forever known, but merely forgotten. The cosmic aspect of LSD was defiantly not so apparent here; this was a very ‘earthy’ experience. I also came to the realisation there in the garden that my ketamine use was getting a bit out of control and would soon become a problem in my life if I continued to use it with the frequency as I had been recently; and I resolved to chill out a bit on the k-holes. Since the mescaline trip, I have not done any ketamine, something which was very hard at first but now not such a big thing. The decision to take a break from the k gave me a feeling of great emancipation. The air tasted even more wonderful than before.

I decided to celebrate all this happiness by going off to dance. My housemates asked me if I was okay to head off on my own or if I wanted any of them to come along to make sure I was okay. They are all very much not into the rave scene so I was again touched by their concern. But I felt absolutely capable of handling the London underground system on my own… I went upstairs to go online and check what parties were on that Sunday afternoon but my PC was refusing to boot up, as it is often wont to do. Ah yes, I had taken out my hard drive when visiting a friend yesterday and had not reconnected it - and I defiantly didn’t feel like trying to fix it at that point so I decided to head off to an internet café to see what was on. My experience at the café showed me that I was not as capable of navigating the ‘real’ world as I had thought, I felt rather disjointed there but I don’t think I caused any sort of disturbance, I just felt out of place. I managed to find a decent party not far from me in north London. The tube ride there was uneventful, I found myself smiling goofily for the trip, attracting the usual odd looks when I’ve headed out whilst intoxicated on something or other.

I arrived at the venue (one I had never been to before) and had a genial chat with the door-whore and bouncers who were on duty, to which they were responsive to, but did search me more thoroughly than normal as I’m sure my manner was a sign of being high! On my way down the stairs I began to feel the bass of the venue going through me, and damn it felt so good. I love dancing so much and I just knew that dancing on mescaline would be awesome… After purchasing the obligatory bottle of water, I headed straight to the floor; where I had my only unpleasant hallucination of the whole trip – once on the floor I danced a bit with my head down and when I lifted up my head, it seemed as though everyone in the club was running towards me with their teeth bared. Jesus! I looked down again to get away from this awful vision… and when I looked up again, it was worse – everyone’s faces had kind of gone wolf-like and they were definitely snarling at me. After about 15 seconds, however, it all faded and things were all back to normal. I was shaken for a bit though – I think that it happened simply because I changed the ‘pace’ of my trip so quickly and it took a bit to adjust to my environment.

After about a minute of dancing I slipped very easily into my ‘raving headpsace’ (it normally takes me at least 30-45 mins to do this). When I get into this state, everything else seems to fade into the background, I stop listening to the music – I start to feel it – and I no longer concentrate on my dancing. I am simply ‘flowing’ with the music. I get to the point where I am no longer sure if I am moving the music, or if the music is moving me…. Or if ‘I’ even exist any more. Powerful stuff. In this state, I often ponder philosophical things and I started to think of the ‘energy fields’ that I saw in the garden earlier… at the same time I noticed how the song that was playing sounded and awful lot like another song I liked very much; then I could hear another song somewhere in there. Pretty soon, I was hearing ever single song I had ever heard and then every single song that had ever been played was playing. Then the heartbeat of everyone in the club joined in… soon every single rhythm in the entire universe could be heard; and they all combined into this sort of heartbeat sound… I decided that this was the great song that binds us all – the fist drum-kick started with the big bang and the beat has been going on ever since. This was the song that the birds sang to, the planets moved to, our hearts beat to, and that we danced to. The closer that we were to this great song; the closer we were to our true selves, the closer we were to happiness. However we get to the song is irrelevant, but the closer we live to it, the closer we were to the truth. I felt at this point I was moving exactly in time to the song, or maybe just a little bit out but I again felt that overwhelming sense of peace and that ‘everything is going to be ok’ feeling. I decided that governments, big business and those who crave power are so totally wrong about how they are living. They tell us how to live, they make us use their money, they tell us what we want (and make it unattainable), they tell us what is beautiful and they tell us that we are unhappy. And we let them get away with it all, we simply obey them, almost blindly, because ‘this is just the way things are’ – why do they have to be this fucked up? There has to be an alternative. I knew that more and more people around the world were beginning to feel this way about how we are being coerced into this unhappiness and this filled me with hope. I had this vision (kinda like a lucid dream) of (almost) everyone in the world simply turning around one day, looking these people in the eye and saying ‘no’. I looked around the room at my fellow ravers – we were very close to the beat right now and all those hang-ups and stresses that THEY impose on us were so far away – and for this THEY hate us… they try so hard to stop us from doing these things because it makes them lose control of us… it makes us realise that we do not need them telling us how unhappy we are. Drugs allow us to see another way of doing things and that scares the shit out of them. I’m not saying that whatever we feel and think whilst intoxicated by drugs is absolute truth, but the drug experience is something that can teach us valuable lessons about how better to serve ourselves and the world around us. I realised that this change would not happen anytime soon – easily not within my lifetime, but it would happen and if I started right now by trying to make the change happen, not in the revolutionary sense, but merely by trying to be as loving as I could in a world that was so devoid of love. I realised that getting rid of so much social conditioning is very difficult and can be frustrating, but that now-familiar sense of everything’s-going-to-be-okay made it seem as if these lofty goals were somewhat unattainable. I felt like a child who has not yet been told that a lot of things are impossible. I felt free of all that conditioning that reminds us how helpless we are to change things… I felt that over every horizon was boundless opportunity and that there were no longer any limits imposed upon me.

A number of hours had now passed and I looked at my phone to see what the time was… 9:00pm!! Jaysus, up for about 9 hours now! I knew I was pretty much down at this stage but there was no feeling of disappointment like I normally get when I’m coming down off drugs – I had no desire in me to do more. During the tube trip home, I watched two kids playing this game where they would try to guess on which side of the train the doors would open onto the platform. I found myself joining in the game (in my head) and having a wonderful time. I danced in the street all the way home. Once home I regaled the tale of my wonderful day to my wide-eyed housemates. Needless to say, two of them have since broken their psychedelic virginities on mescaline. I was pretty sure the trip was totally over when I crawled into bed at about 12:00, but when I closed my eyes I was greeted by a huge plumed Aztec snake with the head of quetzalcoatl flying around an amazing patterned landscape. I watched him dancing in the skies behind my eyes until I fell asleep.

A genial good manner lasted for the next few weeks with me feeling like I had a totally new lease on life, so absolutely no comedown off the mescaline. One of my best drug experiences, and because I found it so special, I hardly ever do mescaline, to preserve the magic.

Exp Year: 2003	ExpID: 34700
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jun 26, 2004	Views: 38,495
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Cacti - T. terscheckii (818) : Various (28), Relationships (44), Music Discussion (22), Nature / Outdoors (23), Mystical Experiences (9), Glowing Experiences (4)