Say my cat was wanting to order some dried cacti incense pieces for his special cat-meditation sessions, which cacti would better benefit my cat in terms of alkaloid content, San pedro or P. Torch?

and would he be better off getting powdered incense or incense pieces?

for cat meditation go with pedro

for cat on the prowl go with torch

get whole dried pieces. Powder often has lots of white tissue.

so which one are you saying is stronger?

Swim's feline prefers Torch. It seems to give better results than SP, at least in swim's exp.
He says it's beautiful and he loves you all.

It depends on the individual cactus. If the cactus is well established it can survive some pretty heavy winds and moderate frost...

SWIM goes for powder always. The techs he uses all use powder and grinding cacti is NO FUN. The dust from it makes you sneeze like crazy.

Seconded.
Swim actually enjoys the sneezing, believe it or not. He finds it stimulating and gets a bit of endorphin rush from it.

Would you still recommend powder if SWIM plans on just eating the raw cacti or simply boiling it into a resin/tea?

I believe ive decided on p. torch.

Anyone have any experience with smoking spice on mesc? i would guess the combination is EPIC.

Im no cacti expert, however chopping it into small pieces should work fine for the resin tek. There's nothing wrong with using powder for a resin tek. With powder, more is exposed, making it easier to get the actives. Do what seems best for swiy's situation. If one has the money, swim recommends buying pre-powdered.

Use whole pieces for resin, grind it for extracting.

Blended cactus is a pain to filter.

^^ I would like to second this.

For the resin tek, cactus in chip form is preferable to powdered. Acidic water (with a pinch of lemon juice) will pull the vast majority of the alks out, especially with repeated freeze/thaw, and simmering steps (I do 3). Powdered cacti will make it harder to filter, (I don't need to filter the chips at all) and likely increase levels of other gunk in the resin...powdered cactus is obviously essential for extractions though. So I guess with regard to powdered/chips, it depends on what you plan to do with it. I'm all about the resin tek these days.

FV?

This is all very helpful information. thanks guys.

swim has decided to go with p. torch powder this time around.

Once he gives that a try he will probably eventually move onto extractions later, but this is great for now.

thanks again for all the help.

I have to agree, when I tried to prepare my peruvian torch pieces, I had to grind them first to make a powder which is a lot harder to do than it sounds. The coffee grinder we have just didn't make the powder fine enough, and when we went to make our little pill-ball thingies, they were really chunky and hard to swallow.

I don't know if it is any less potent, but it would sure be a lot easier if I had bought it pre-ground.

We used a tek where the ground torch was combined with lemon juice until it was a paste,made little balls, then froze it overnight.. when we did it, we just ate/swallowed the little balls after they had thawed out.

Gave me a tummy-ache and I couldn't finish my portion...my bf later ate the rest of mine on top of his dose, and had a hell of a time.

~BC