Anyone ever tried this? Just curious if one of those high powered juicers would do a very efficient job of squeezing all the goodies out of a cactus. I imagine it would be hard to get every bit out, but could be used as part of an extraction process...

You would need something strong enough to Lyse cell walls like a devise used to juice wheat grass, even then expect a loss

A garbage disposal works well. In this pictorial, you can see the process of creating 17 grams of mesc sulfate.

http://www.scribd.com/do...cereus-Cactus-Extraction

It works well but can have some issues.

With a nice centrifuge (Omega)_ juicer:
You will want to remove the outer layer of skin, the waxy paper like stuff
you will want to remove the vascular core tissue
you will want to use hydrated cuttings
you will want to use extra water to wash out the mash
you can get a lot of foam, but a quick rinse of that works well
you can't do that much at once and smaller batches are more efficient than larger ones

done with a fresh cutting it works well, the pulp having hardly any bitterness and the juice being very bitter, you can take shots of the juice

If you look close it is not so much juice as a liquid with a lot of cellular matter in it, if you dry the juice you will notice this more and if you let it settle the cloudiness goes away and becomes a sediment layer

it is wise to note that candicine can be found in some of these cacti and while it is unlikely to found in a tea or a crystal extract of alkaloids it is more likely to be ingested with juice and may be undesirable.

Secondly reports of persistent adverse effects have been known from some clones when consumed raw, this is not well understood but it might not be wise to ingest raw cactus, or at least it might lead to greater risk of negative side effects.

I am not sure how trapped the mescaline is, I believe it is found in rather soluble salts. Perhaps I am wrong.

I juiced fresh san pedro (sliced, core removed, but not skinned), put both the juice and rejected pulp into a container and refrigerated for a day. I poured off and consumed the liquid and got a very entheogenic dose. Unfortunately, that also resulted in a difficult time due to a severe headache forming about 5 hours into an otherwise "normal" experience. I've long suspected it was due to my accidental ingestion of solvent fumes from the previous day's spice extraction activities; however, I wonder if any raw compounds in the cactus were the culprits?

My only other raw data point is eating half a pound of raw, skinned, green tissue on top of a tea made with a traditional water extraction of another pound. That was a good time.

I plan to try a freezer tek soon, so will have another raw data point.

^ headaches are not that uncommon for some, maybe Albert could chime in?

mew has made more cactus smoothies than he can remember, never any adverse reaction. sometimes a bit of a headache that couldve been avoided (and is often) by prehydrating before dosing


one time this old dude told me his friend died because a raw san pedro was infected some serious bacteria, he also told me he rode a manta ray 20 feet into the air after training his forearms with his friends by playing george of the jungle tree tag on limbs :/

I've had some severe and serious issues with headaches and mescaline containing cacti, including however fairly pure mescaline crystals.

I had them maybe the first 20 times i took mescaline or so, very consistent... then they stopped. A minority of the population gets them fairly consistently, it might have something to do with a neurochemical variation, I think likely having to do with dopamine metabolism. Some never get them at all, some get them so often they don't take mescaline. Some get them now and again. It is confusing.

I tried all sorts of things, hydration, blood sugar issues etc. I did find that an aspirin like drug about 2-3 hours in seemed to help, but now it is a non-issue. No idea why or if it will happen again.

mostly prehydrating solves it, however i had prehydrated recently (2/3 gallon) after a night of drinking and ate about 750 mg hcl, and drank pretty seriously to have a raging headache as i went to bed and early into the next day till i chugged another 2/3 gallon water

me thinks water will be the best bet here

I tried it with a decent centrifugal juicer and it was a MESS. I would not recommend it. Too much "slime".

maybe that is clone specific?
I tried it a few times and it worked well, but some clones gave out a foamy slime but others gave out a nice liquid...

the foam/slime factor is relevant to how hydrated the specimen is before juicing, amongst perhaps other things

I think that is true in general, but have seen some clones that were far more or far less slimy when at full hydration. Early work on the species ( E. pachanoi) used the outer skin because the slime often interferes with extractions...

why not de-skin, freeze for a few days, and then run thru juicer? The waxy skin is oft-reported as nausea-inducing, and feezing is a well-regarded way of getting those pesky cell walls to burst. And if cores are alkaloid-free (or nearly so) why not lose the core, too...just a bunch of added pulp.

the skin is totally inert and emetic

the chlorophylic layer contains roughly 70% in about 40% of the cactis mass

the inner white + core contains the last 30% in the other 60% of mass


the skin should be discarded, always

ive made conditioning shampoo from the cores before, didnt realize then that my soap bottle had several grams of alkaloids in it

the core/white is very slimy/frothy when blended