Here is a quote out of PIHKAL on the effects of pure mescaline. The major active alkaloid of San Pedro and Peyote:
DOSAGE: 200-400 mg
DURATION: 10-12 h
QUALITATIVE COMMENTS: (with 300 mg) I would have liked to, and was expecting to, have an exciting visual day, but I seemed to be unable to escape self-analysis. At the peak of the experience I was quite intoxicated and hyper with energy, so that it was not hard to move around. I was quite restless. But I spent most of the day in considerable agony, attempting to break through without success. I learned a great deal about myself and my inner workings. Everything almost was, but in the final analysis, wasn't. I began to become aware of a point, a brilliant white light, that seemed to be where God was entering, and it was inconceivably wonderful to perceive it and to be close to it. One wished for it to approach with all one's heart. I could see that people would sit and meditate for hours on end just in the hope that this little bit of light would contact them. I begged for it to continue and come closer but it did not. It faded away not to return in that particular guise the rest of the day. Listening to Mozart's Requiem, there were magnificent heights of beauty and glory. The world was so far away from God, and nothing was more important than getting back in touch with Him. But I saw how we created the nuclear fiasco to threaten the existence of the planet, as if it would be only through the threat of complete annihilation that people might wake up and begin to become concerned about each other. And so also with the famines in Africa. Many similar scenes of joy and despair kept me in balance. I ended up the experience in a very peaceful space, feeling that though I had been through a lot, I had accomplished a great deal. I felt wonderful, free, and clear.
(with 350 mg) Once I got through the nausea stage, I ventured out-of-doors and I was aware of an intensification of color and a considerable change in the texture of the cloth of my skirt and in the concrete of the sidewalk, and in the flowers and leaves that were handed me by an observer. I experienced the desire to laugh hysterically at what I could only describe as the completely ridiculous state of the entire world. Although I was afraid of motion, I was persuaded to take a ride in a car. The driver turned on the radio and suddenly the music 'The March of the Siamese Children' from 'The King and I' became the most perfect background music for the parody of real life which was indeed the normal activity of Telegraph Avenue on any Saturday morning. The perfectly ordinary people on their perfectly ordinary errands were clearly the most cleverly contrived set of characters all performing all manners of eccentric activities for our particular hilarity and enjoyment. I felt that I was at the same time both observing and performing in an outrageous moving picture. I experienced one moment of transcendant happiness when, while passing Epworth Hall, I looked out of the window of the car and up at the building and I was suddenly in Italy looking up at a gay apartment building with its shutters flung open in sunshine, and with its window boxes with flowers. We stopped at a spot overlooking the bay, but I found the view uninteresting and the sun uncomfortable. I sat there on the seat of the car looking down at the ground, and the earth became a mosaic of beautiful stones which had been placed in an intricate design which soon all began to move in a serpentine manner. Then I became aware that I was looking at the skin of a beautiful snake--all the ground around me was this same huge creature and we were all standing on the back of this gigantic and beautiful reptile. The experience was very pleasing and I felt no revulsion. Just then, another automobile stopped to look at the view and I experienced my first real feeling of persecution and I wanted very much to leave.
(with 400 mg) During the initial phase of the intoxication (between 2 and 3 hours) everything seemed to have a humorous interpretation. People's faces are in caricature, small cars seem to be chasing big cars, and all cars coming towards me seem to have faces. This one is a duchess moving in regal pomp, that one is a wizened old man running away from someone. A remarkable effect of this drug is the extreme empathy felt for all small things; a stone, a flower, an insect. I believe that it would be impossible to harm anything--to commit an overt harmful or painful act on anyone or anything is beyond one's capabilities. One cannot pluck a flower--and even to walk upon a gravel path requires one to pick his footing carefully, to avoid hurting or disturbing the stones. I found the color perception to be the most striking aspect of the experience. The slightest difference of shade could be amplified to extreme contrast. Many subtle hues became phosphorescent in intensity. Saturated colors were often unchanged, but they were surrounded by cascades of new colors tumbling over the edges.
(with 400 mg) It took a long time to come on and I was afraid that I had done it wrong but my concerns were soon ended. The world soon became transformed where objects glowed as if from an inner illumination and my body sprang to life. The sense of my body, being alive in my muscles and sinews, filled me with enormous joy. I watched Ermina fill to brimming with animal spirit, her features tranformed, her body cat-like in her graceful natural movement. I was stopped in my tracks. The world seemed to hold its breath as the cat changed again into the Goddess. As she shed her clothes, she shed her ego and when the dance began, Ermina was no more. There was only the dance without the slightest self-consconciousness. How can anything so beautiful be chained and changed by other's expectations? I became aware of myself in her and as we looked deeply into one another my boundaries disappeared and I became her looking at me.
Here is an experience with San Pedro:
When I was in southern Ecuador I tried San Pedro twice. The first time I bought some from a guy in Vilcabamba and it cost a few dollars. The stuff was pretty weak, and I made the mistake of eating afterwards so the effects were minor. There was a minor feeling of giddiness, I had this feeling like I could talk to animals in the area (pigs for example), and the walpaper in my room sort of undulated slowly.
Then later I met a guy who was an American living down there and he used to make the juice from the cactus, and he gave me some of his batch. The stuff was much more powerful. I was hallucinating for almost a whole day. There was this weird feeling of comprehension--like a mole that I had remembered on someone's arm explaining why the wallpaper patterns were the way they were. It was a feeling like 'It's all so trivial--everything makes sense!' In a neighboring room someone was watching TV, and every once in a while a commercial would come on that played the FLintstones theme music. This induced all sorts of early memories and feelings.
Although I tried to go to sleep I wasn't able to--my mind just kept running. Sounds were sort of coming up and down, like you're slowly changing the volume of a TV. Also when I walked around my perception seemed to be a collection of still images--like there'd be a flash of my surroundings, then the next image I'd have moved a few feet. I talked to some friends that I had met and they said my sentences each alone made sense but they had no relation to each other. I can remember trying to express what I was experiencing and just drifting off and just letting it soak in. I had vivid memories of my childhood that I hadn't recalled I suppose since they happened. From time to time I would experience a memory of a friend from the states saying the phrase 'can't be bothered' in a sort of English accent. It was a very interesting experience.
Visually things were shimmering, rotating, morphing, changing colors, changing shapes, etc, etc.
I think I sort of bracketed the optimum dose--first time I took too little and next time too much. San Pedro is this big cactus that grows all over the place in Southern Ecuador. You cut it up into pieces and boil it for like 18 hours, while frequently squeezing out the liquid in the cactus. Eventually you're left with a thin green liquid. It really is disgusting. Most people drink a bit then puke it back up. I was able to hold it down...perhaps that's why the effect lasted so long.
What's really amazing is that even though the mind is experiencing things in some completely alien way, it all gets recorded so you remember the feeling.
Here is another experience:
I've tripped on mescaline via the San Pedro cactus on several occasions.
After a couple of hours of SIGNIFICANT nausea (which could have been diminished by using an extraction procedure rather than eating the whole cactus), the trip is surprisingly similar to LSD yet different in two main ways. First of all, from a 'stimulant' perspective, it is very mellow compared to LSD--almost a drowsy, dreamy feeling rather than the teeth-grinding 'I'm going to lose it' panicky feeling of high-dose LSD. Yet, at the same time, the mescaline trip is significantly more visually powerful than a comparable dose of acid (more powerful quantitatively, but not qualitatively). The mescaline trip also lasts longer for me than LSD, with a very gentle and gradual come-down. Mescaline is definitely a drug with which the hangover comes before the pleasurable effects, but if you can hang in there without puking for a couple of hours, it can be a very worthwhile experience in a safe and supportive environment.
And another San Pedro experience:
I had a phenomenal experience with San Pedro a few days ago. It had been a long time since I had explored anything other than mushrooms and herb, and I was extremely excited to try San Pedro, as were my friends. We did it in my house, where there was no danger of distractions. I had prepared pillows and soft pads all over the floor of one room, putting in red lights, which, in addition to the living room, gave us two comfortable areas to be in.
We all removed the spines, peeled the skin, and started to eat the green area directly under the skin. My friend M and I shared a 16 inch cactus, and everyone else had much smaller doses. The taste was initially quite bitter, but palatable. However, after eating about half of our desired doses, it seemed that our taste buds became saturated with bitterness, and each bite became a chore. We ended up running the remaining portions through a juicer, mixed with watermelon and ginger, and M drank his slowly. I though it might be interesting to add the white, central portion to my juice, and regretted it immensely, as it was far more bitter than M's. I managed to drink some of it, but it proved too much for me.
I felt a slight alteration in my perception after about 30 minutes, but after even 3 hours it hadn't grown to anywhere near the level of experience I had been hoping for. I decided to bring out the mescaline by smoking a hit or two of marijuana. Within a few minutes after smoking, it was clear that I had arrived.
I had some wonderful experiences that night, but it would take pages to describe them in detail. I will summarize them as concisely as I can.
The most pervading effect of the cactus was that I simply had fun. I was like a child again, in that I knew very deeply that it was ridiculous to live without fun. Walking to the park, I enjoyed myself greatly by reciting spontaneous poetry, playing 'follow the leader', and feeling the cool night air on my skin. In my house, my friends and I laughed, played music, and wrote several group poems (each person writes one line) that varied from wonderful to eccentric to bizarre to horrible, but we had a wonderful time doing it.
Unlike a child, however, I had some deeper levels of consciousness directing me to ask the important questions, and to search for truth, even as I was enjoying myself so much on the surface.
The visual effects were also sometimes experiential. In other words, there were hallucinations that I saw, and there were others that I experienced more directly. At one point, for example, I looked at a white wall and saw thousands of tiny, shimmering diamonds, all of them radiant, equally spaced. They were the stuff that comprises the universe, I half-believed. Immediately after seeing them, I began to experience them as filling all space, including the space around and inside my body. In fact, it was clear that the border between the inside of my body and the outside meant nothing to these diamonds. They extended infinitely in all directions, intricate, impartial, and the difference between matter and open space was irrelevant to them.
For most of the trip, I felt the flow of time through my body. It reminded me of my LSD trips long ago, except that with acid, the flow of time was choppy and harsh, angular and almost too clean, whereas with San Pedro it was exceedingly gentle and smooth, and flowed lovingly. It seemed to me to be the difference between watching a movie and seeing someone flip the pages of one of those books of drawings that looks like it moves. This was the real thing, and acid was just a caricature of this truth.
At one point, my friends and I were talking, and I said 'it all comes down to this. This moment - every moment - has what you need.' (Quoting Rumi). My friends and I decided that that was the point of all that we were doing - not just this trip, but all psychedelic experience.
Later in the trip, roughly 9 hours after finishing the cactus, I was getting tired, and so smoked another hit or two of pot (marijuana acts as a stimulant for me, believe it or not). It again brought out the mescaline, and I began to trip harder than I had the entire night, although my friends were falling asleep one by one. I listened to a CD I had recorded of some spiritual literature, including Zen, Sufism, and other mystical traditions, and felt very much at peace. I finally fell asleep around 12 hours after eating the cactus.
The interaction of marijuana and mescaline was fascinating to me. When I am on mushrooms, the marijuana doesn't affect me at all while the 'shrooms are strongly active. On LSD, the pot takes the acid world and multiplies it, but it's still the acid world that I'm in. With San Pedro, however, the effects of both drugs embraced one another, and combined into a single, inseparable, whole effect - and a fantastically pleasant and enlightening one at that.
I learned several things on this trip, but the most important was that I had been too serious for too long. I think that I have already changed my thinking about life, and am enjoying every minute. This is related to the idea that each moment is complete in and of itself, and has what we all need, which is another of the lessons I was granted by San Pedro.
I look forward to some more experiences with San Pedro, and to learning more about how to respect, even more deeply, this great gift-giver.
) ie take off all the spikes, then slit the skin open and eat the flesh. apparently the slimy stuff nearest the skin has the most concentrated amount of mescaline in it. Thats about all i know, feel free to correct me if im wrong