Micro-Dosing Mescaline Part One: How it Came to Pass and My First Experience

A few weeks ago, I was asked if I had ever tried micro-dosing psychedelics and I responded with the thing that I usually say when this subject comes up: "I am more of a 'macro-dose' kind of guy." However, I failed to remember that I do, in fact, have a little experience with that kind of use. I think that I often forget those short periods of my psychedelic exploration because the results (due to the manner in which the drug was prepared and consumed) were unremarkable in terms of their trippy effects but that does not mean that micro-dosing was ineffective. Looking back on things, there were some noticeable difference between those periods of frequent micro-dosing and my normal unaltered life. Most of those differences were positive, a few were neutral, and a one or two were negative. At any rate, I thought it might be fun to discuss my retrospective observations of the time that I spent micro-dosing mescaline. However, this is a bigger topic than one might expect and there is some background information that is necessary for me to convey for one to understand how and why my micro-dosing experiences came to pass. That being the case, I am going to break this topic into two posts. Here, I will explain how and why I came into possession of some crudely (and mostly accidentally) made powdered mescaline cactus juice all those years ago and briefly describe my first micro-dose experience.

I was never fortunate enough to have a source of peyote or pure mescaline. Peyote is either endangered or threatened so one cannot simply go wander around in the desert and have a realistic hope of finding any and, even if he or she does stumble across some, there are ethical concerns associated with harvesting it (it is rare, it takes a really long time to grow, and it holds religious significance for some people so picking it in the wild for a semi-frivolous trip is kind of a "dick move"). Pure mescaline, can be made from other cacti but, from my experience, it is a niche drug and it is extremely hard to find in most markets. Those sad facts always upset me because, from what I have been told by more experienced psychoanuts than I could ever hope to be, mescaline provides a very interesting and, often, very meaningful trip. However, I learned that one could legally (at least, back then but I don't know if laws have changed) buy other mescaline containing cacti. I was pretty much an adult at the time and I possessed both the internet and a debit card so I found a distributor and bought a rather large San Pedro cactus.

The instructions that I found said that we should dethorn and skin the cactus before removing the woody core. We did that and proceeded to simmer the fleshy bits until they were completely liquefied, as we were instructed. In the end, we had enough for four doses but there were only two of us tripping that afternoon and, that being the case, there was some of the cactus juice left over.

That day's trip deserves a post of it's own. It was interesting but not particularly strong. The problem was that the cactus juice was the worst tasting thing that I have ever ingested (it still is too). Even though there was extra juice, neither myself nor my friend was willing to drink the alkaline flavored liquid, which had only thickened and, presumably, become more foul tasting with time.

I am not one to let things go to waste and especially not perfectly good psychedelics. I called a few friends to see if they wanted to come by and drink it but they all said no. Having no other options, except to just pour the stuff down the drain, we decided to do a little experimenting. We were no chemists so we couldn't get the pure mescaline out of the juice but we thought that we may be able to concentrate the juice to make consuming it easier. We poured it into a glass baking pan and put it on the warmer on my stove top for several hours, while we went about our business. Some time went by and my friend went back to her house. I checked the pan and noticed that the juice was now more of a "goop" than a liquid. I thought I might be able to push things a little farther so I decided to transfer the pan into the oven on the lowest heat setting and I went to sleep for an hour or two.

When I got up, I thought that I had made a horrible mistake. The "goop" was completely dried onto the bottom of the pan in a layer that was about three millimeters thick. I examined it for a moment and while it was very dry (but, somehow, also sticky), it did not appear to be burnt. In an attempt to salvage the situation, I decided to scrape all the concentrated cactus juice off of the pan with a blade. It took a lot of doing but the scraping process produced a few grams of brown sticky powder that looked like brown sugar but had the texture of crushed hard candy.

This powdered cactus juice is what I have micro dose experience with but I am well aware that its method of preparation is far from ideal and that it was much weaker than what a professional who is doing a proper extraction could produce. If you want to trip on this stuff or micro-dose it, you should either seek it out in its pure form or resign yourself to the fact that you will need to drink some really bad tasting cactus juice. That being said, the stuff that I was left with in the end, was functional enough.

I looked the cactus juice powder and I had no idea if it would work, how strong it was if it did work, or how long the sticky powder, that I had collected and put in a corner of a bag, would last before it started to grow mold. I had just finished tripping and most psychonauts (myself included) would agree that it is not always the best idea to trip too soon after returning to reality. I am a bit impatient and a little overindulgent, however, and I couldn't resist the idea of taking a little taste of the stuff.

I took a pinch, rolled it into a ball (it would stick together if you did that) and swallowed it like a pill. I did not trip but I did not expect to. There could have been no more than two recreational doses of powder because that was the amount of juice that I had started with and I did not consume anything close to half of the powder. I did feel a little something, though. I began to have a mild glow that I recognized as psychedelic in its character. I was a little more giddy than normal. I laughed a little harder at the jokes on the comedy show that I was watching and I felt a bit like I do a day or two after a very intense mushroom trip. I hoped for some visual effects to accompany these feelings that I was having but, with two exceptions, they never appeared which did not come as a shock. Overall, I felt good and at peace. I make no claims to having clinical depression or anxiety (I do have my moments, though) but I noticed that I felt "better," in a general sense, after taking that tiny dose and that feeling stuck around for, at least, a day or two (I dosed again after that, so I don't know how long it would have lasted on its own).

The two visual effects were not a major component of the micro-dose experience but they are worth mentioning. The first was a fairly standard and rather dim closed eye visual. I was in a dark room a few hours after I had taken my tiny dose. I closed my eyes and saw what looked a bit like the outline of a crystal in the shape of a star, snowflake, or flower. It was cool but I would never have noticed it if I had been in a well lit room and it was not accompanied by the emotional meaning that psychedelic visuals typically carry at recreational doses. It felt less like a hallucination and more like looking at a "picture" of a hallucination. The second effect was the weirder one. The little bit of mescaline seemed to increase my ability to see in the dark, slightly. I suspect that, despite being a tiny dose, the mescaline had caused my pupils to dilate in the way most psychedelics do. This may be a common effect of psychedelics that can easily go unnoticed because the other effects of the trip overshadow such a subtle change in visual acuity but I could be mistaken about that. Whatever the reason may have been, it was an interesting thing to have occurred.

I really hate to do posts in parts but this is starting to get long and I don't think any of you singed up to read a novel when you clicked on this so I will leave off here and pick things back up in my next post (probably tomorrow). Next time, I will cover some more of my individual experiences with micro-dosing this drug, how they made me feel over a period of time, the effects (both positive and negative), and my thoughts on the concept and of micro-dosing mescaline and its efficacy.

Peace.

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