DOSE:

35 g

oral

Cacti - T. peruvianus

(capsule)

BODY WEIGHT:

135 lb

My first experience with mescaline was a great one, so good that it almost became a favourite. Only the lack of intense visuals and horrible taste of the drink were against it.

I had taken single doses of the cactus a few more times. The only thing getting to me was swallowing it. On the third or fourth time, I was very nearly sick just swallowing it but had been doing well holding it down for the entire duration before.

I should now say, the following takes place while I had a particularly bad cold. I'd also been working in a lab this afternoon and had accidentally inhaled industrial bleach vapours, making my throat extremely sore and me cough up lots of fluid. Not the best condition to be in when doing this at all, but I felt that I wanted to do it and would be okay - I'm fairly experienced with all this now.

I decided that I wanted to step up a level with the cactus and so bought two packs the next time. I'm not sure how much was in each pack, but I think it was between 15 and 20g of dried skin. I spent a long time powdering the cactus and filling it into a huge number of 00 gel caps so's that I could swallow it without the taste. This worked okay and about two hours later I was only feeling mild twitches in my stomach, I had absorbed myself in playing Wipeout to try and ignore the sickness I knew should be coming. My friend wanted to go out for a drink at the university bar, so we walk out around 8.30pm. It was halloween, which made things seem particularly interesting to me, although I still wasn't experiencing many visual effects yet.

People say that when you're expecting to be sick, anticipating it, it'll come for sure. But sometimes, even when you try and hard as you can to blank the memories and fact that you've taken something, it's unavoidable.

Not long after reaching the bar, I felt my stomach begin to tighten up. I went to the toilets and sure enough was quite violently sick. Predictable for this experience as I now knew, and I felt a bit better for having been sick. I also felt the need to urinate, but since I'd had nothing to drink for around three hours, and that'd just been some apple juice with the capsules, I couldn't.

I know that the Native Americans actually welcome this stage, and in some way I do too. The first and last time I actually was sick with Peruvian Torch, it removes a lot of the loaded down feeling and, unlike things like H. Baby Woodrose seeds, I continue to get a lot of the benefits of the cactus provided I've managed to hold it down for a while.

We sat in almost silence in the noisey bar, I was simply too dazed and focused on how I was feeling to motivate my mouth. My eyes were now darkening, watering and bright red from being sick so hard, my body felt extremely hot and I'd guess I was looking pretty hard done by as I sat in there. Virtually everyone I walked by would stare at me. This wasn't too bad, I'm used to dealing with quite a lot when in an altered state now.

People around me were shouting, running around dressed in costumes and someone was blowing a whistle right by me. I sat still for another five or ten minutes before starting to feel unwell again. Something about the intensity of the whistle seemed to enhance how sick I was still feeling. I eventually ended up in the toilet again being sick, this time thinking that maybe I still had a small amount in me that I just had to get rid of.

I told my friend I wasn't feeling so great and that I wanted to go home. He said he'd come too and we started the long, cold walk back. Things were starting to jump around a little and look brighter than they should by now. Before we'd even left the university, I had to detour to the toilets again to be sick for the third time. I still felt the need to go to the toilet but couldn't. I couldn't stand to be inside, I needed fresh air, stillness and quiet.

Even on the way home I was feeling the load and had to fight the urge to fall down and try to be sick some more. I was starting to feel overwhelmed and had even thought of curling up somewhere outside and hidden in the university to ride the experience out. The walk was long.

By the time we reached the house, I went straight to the toilet and was sick for the third or fourth time.

It was now that I began an evening that would prove to be a test.

I fell out on my bed and curled up. It wasn't long before the sickness was coming back, this time joined with something else I'd experienced the last time, I sensation of needing to empty my bowls as rapidly as possible.

It seems that the more one takes this chemical, the more its negative effects grow on them. If you've ever washed out a blender used for cactus, you'll know it's almost like soap, it foams. And it has that terrible Bitrex taste, like the stuff they put in Stardrops soap to stop kids drinking it.

I was soon back on my hands and knees trying to force the saliva I'd swallowed back out of my stomach. I was now also privileged with diarrhea.

The next six or so hours began to turn into a messy haze. I felt extremely drunk and tired, even though I'd not had anything to drink. This would pass with moments of clarity.

I wanted to fall asleep, badly. I'd been tired before starting but it was only around 10 when I started feeling as though I was going to pass out for tireness. I had now started being sick on a regular basis, every quarter to half an hour, as well as continually needing the toilet. I couldn't hold down a few sips of water or even my own saliva. I was being sick even when nothing would come.

The experience of being sick wasn't great while altered. I would twitch a lot just after being sick.

I found myself lying on the bathroom floor in a bathrobe, looking and feeling like I was fighting the world alone.

When I got back into bed, I'd simply roll around, drift off into a daze and then 'wake' back up from it soon after when the toilet called for my attention. I was being teased with sleep in this way all night.

I can't even begin to count the number of times I had to be sick or go to the toilet. Eventually, my toilet visits where entirely water. It's almost as if my body wanted to get rid of everything inside it right away. I had been sick right through tasting just my stomach acid in the sick and into just tasting some kind of tangy green foam - which could have been cactus from my stomach lining, but I'd already been sick ten or more times before then and had just been sicking up yellowy coloured stomach juice.
I hadn't eaten much all day, and neither had I had much to drink. I'd now sicked up everything inside me, shit out so much that my body was now obviously pouring water from my body into my intestines to wash the alkaloids, or something else in the cactus, out of me.

I started to worry that I'd made a mistake tonight - maybe a big one, it was the first time I've worried about ODing. I felt like all the energy was being pulled from me, like I'd just collapse if I let go for a second. As I felt myself drifting into sleep, I would stop myself, worried that I'd actually taken too much and was drifting in a bad way.

Even though I knew what'd happen to it, I kept drinking a few mouthfuls of water now to avoid excessive dehydration. The fridge cooled water felt incredible, but it never lasted.

My experience of temperature was swinging from freezing cold to annoyingly hot. I had a heater running full in my room all night, I expect it was like the tropics in there, but I couldn't really tell.

It was hard to notice the positive effects of the cactus with so much negativity, but they were there.

I eventually settled into the fact that I wasn't going to sleep and I would be seeing the bathroom on a regular basis - the birds were tweeting in the morning and there I was, coughing and twitching on the floor.

Sometime in the morning, when I heard my friends getting up, I fell into some much needed sleep.

I woke up five or six hours later, still slightly dizzy and decided to document the results.

I'm still not sure what happened, whether it was my less than ideal state to begin with, the double dose, that I've now taken it a few times, that I'd convinced myself of the sickness and the drug was enforcing the idea or some combination of them all. I personally believe most of it came from the double dose.

The first few times I took the cactus, I was able to swallow it, hold it down permanently and didn't really feel the urge to go the toilet. But this last experience was a test - leaving me with tears of effort running down my face from trying to empty my stomach so hard.

I'm not a big believer in bad trips. For me, a trip can only be difficult, as this one was. Even as I sat there, knowing I had hours of sickness left, I wasn't in a psychedelic nightmare being confronted by my unrealised fears, I was just feeling more rough than I ever have before.

I've had some very revealing moments with peruvian torch and the first time I tried it I realised why the Native Americans refer to it as a dream quest. I found questions that I didn't even know I wanted to ask being answered. I also felt a strong connection with wildlife and other humans. I sore my own hands begin to change into those of animals and lizards, although only suggestively - not in an intense visual sense. I could understand why insects, animals, plants and all the other forms of life behaved in the way they did. I'm not usually great at socialising, but on a single dose of cactus it seems to be the easiest thing in the world to start conversations and connect on an almost base level with people.

My first time, I had been wondering why my trips were never filled with love. I'd heard a digital voice singing the name mescaline, and it'd answer me almost telepathically if I mentally asked questions. When I'd been asking where this love was I didn't seem to be experiencing, it answered that I didn't need to look for it because I was it, that people with such hearts are like gods and can never be harmed by the negatives of an experience because their goodness matches or surpasses the evils of life. This experience makes it much easier for me to confront fears, even if I see something horrible and begin to fall, I can face up to it and believe in my own ability to overcome it. When I see pure evil in an experience and it comes towards me, I don't shy away from it but go towards it and absorb it.

I didn't really obtain any powerful answers on my double dose, or if I did, they're still working their way through to my conscious - as I now appreciate just how long it takes to incorporate all of an experience into one's mind. For now, I'm just happy to not be being sick anymore and am impressed at my determination.

I'm not sure how quickly I'll be repeating a double dose of cactus. I'm interested in extracting the cactus though to see if the sickness is quite as strong. If it isn't, this is definitely a favourite.

As I've read elsewhere, increasing the dose of the cactus doesn't work like it does for chemicals like LSD, where one can take tens or hundreds of doses with the effects being mentally based and perhaps some body load. With cactus, taking just twice as much seems to mean a significant increase in the body load. So much so that it arguably surpasses the mental experience - which does itself increase, but not seemingly at the same rate as the loading.

Cactus is probably the only halucinogen I'd recommend to a straight. Provided you can get over the sickness, a single dose seems difficult to make mistakes with. It's not as erratic as mushrooms, which can suddenly and without any outside prompt present one with intense horrors; this is much more stable and, for me, almost impossible to force into a negative place even when given more than enough outside help. The sensory halucinations aren't as strong as they are for an 1/8th of Psilocybe, but that's definitely not a bad thing if you're not able to deal with those when they go negative.

Cactus is about meaning and understanding I think.

My friend probably described cactus the best when he said 'It's as if there's so much to say, but at the same time nothing to say'

Take care fellow explorers!

Exp Year: 2007	ExpID: 66756
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Nov 30, 2007	Views: 26,418
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Cacti - T. peruvianus (69) : Alone (16), Difficult Experiences (5), Preparation / Recipes (30)