The legal argument against owning live cactus vs. dried cactus.

Imagine you were charged for ingestion of mescaline because someone saw you make tea out of your cactus and reported you. The police would investigate. If they visited your house and found cactus tea and found 100 Trichocereus cactus growing in your back yard, you would be charged for possession of mescaline by the weight of all the cactus in your house and growing in your yard!

Think about that. Would you rather be caught with 100 grams of dried cactus and charged for 100 grams of mescaline. Or caught with 100 live cacti weighing hundreds of pounds! You’d be charged by weight and charged for having hundreds of pounds of mescaline! You’d be behind bars for A LONG TIME. Plus they would argue that the cacti growing in our yard was meant to be sold as mescaline to other people and get you really good.

That’s my take on it. And if you know the US law, you know that they charge you by the total weight of the plant, not the mescaline content. So fresh cactus would amount to 10 times the mescaline in the eyes of the law as dried cactus.

I suppose if you were caught with the tea. Other wise it makes more sense to be caught with fresh because it can actually be proved that they are cuttings, while with dry cacti, there's not much you can say.

And furthermore, they can confiscate and sell your house and land on which the cacti are growing.

If I were going to grow a lot of cactus on my property I'd try to start a business of selling the cactus for ornamental uses. If you had a history of such work, and kept business records, and could demonstrate you even paid TAXES on your profits from selling ornamental cacti (perhaps numerous species of cacti)...then I don't think a mescaline prosecution would work (or would only work for prosecuting you for any mescaline you had actually extracted).

Of course the safest bet is to grow it elsewhere (public land). But then you run the risk of other people taking it.

yes same thing with LSD you are charged based on the weight of the blotter paper or other inactive filler if gel or microdot. Doesnt make make much sense to me but as they say "consider the source".

I's different where I live. There's a high risk to order dried cacti because of stringent costums. If they find something, you can be sure to earn yourself a raid.

i dont get this - is growing torch/pedro/atchuma illegal or is this for peyote only ?

so someone says they saw u drinking cactus tea - how do they know it was cactus tea ? how can they prove it ? how can they proove what kinda cactus the dried pieces of cactus come from ? is it illegal to own unidentified dried cactus ?

think im missing this whole topic - either that or things like these are just very very different over there.

They'd simply check it in a lab, where I live.

It's legal to grow the cacti in the US if your purpose is to have ornamental plants. As soon as there is evidence that you have USED the cacti for their psychoactive properties, then the SAME cacti that were previously legal are now ILLEGAL.

wow - thats preddy intense man.

I dunno I think growing cacti is pretty safe. Honestly if you your neighbor saw you drinking cactus tea the last thing he would probably do is call the cops and the first thing he would do is laugh at you. The only thing that would be bad is if someone saw you with lab equipment becuase then they think you are manufacturing. I think the cops have better things to do then hassle people who grow cacti. Furthermore a live cactus is NOT a preparation a dried one IS. But yea its a tough pickle that legally makes no sense. I can't stand the whole dried weight versus fresh weight argument its such BS. (edit*) not your argument ron yours makes sense but their logic is the BS not yours.

But overall I wouldn't worry about either that much. As long as you don't act like your growing illegal cactus (cause your not) no one will bother you. If you run around trying to hide and be all weird people will think your up to something funny. Dried or fresh you gotta be pretty bad to get caught. It would be a challenge to get caught. I think best thing is to have non psychoactive cacti around too so people just think you like cacti.

In the UK both live and dried cactus is legal... including peyote.

[EDIT... would someone who knows how to identify magic cactus be interested in locking you up? I doubt a cop knows the difference between t.pachanoi/peruvianus and any old specimen. If you're worried about bourgeouis nosey neighbours, how about putting a high fence around your garden? And make it look pretty, a cactus garden rather than a farm. Or move to a friendlier area. Or grow them indoors, or in an obscured glass greenhouse etc. But if you're worried and can easily buy chips from someone else, maybe just not growing them at all is the best strategy for you. If you have a lab inside your home and you're buying in chemicals, maybe it isn't worth the risk. I agree with Burnt that the lab deliveries are more likely to attract attention than a few cacti.]

I would personally worry more NOT if one would/could identify some cactuses in the my yard as t.peruvianus or pachanoi but rather if they looked regularly harvested. The latter means that I use the cactuses somehow. When it comes to what these cactuses contain, one can speculate what they are used for.

What can these cacti be used for after harvesting? Well... wikipedia article on San Pedro has piled up many and variable uses for this cactus. In which case just make sure you really use the cactus somehow in a legit way if you're getting a bit paranoid.

My view is that, in the US, they will charge you based on the weight of the product. If you had 100 grams of dried powder, first of all, how would they even know what it was? It doesn't look like cactus. Secondly, if they did test it and found mescaline, it would be very hard to prove which cactus its from. Thirdly, you would be charged by the weight of the product and because it's dried powder, it would be about less than 1/10 the amount of product as compared to fresh cactus.

Now if they found fresh cactus cuttings too small to be rooted, and you were charged for ingesting the cactus, it would be easy to identify the cactus as cactus because it looks like cactus. Secondly, the weight of the fresh cactus is more than 10 times that of dried cactus so you'd be charge for possession of nearly 10 times as much product. It would all be counted in weight as pure mescaline, even though its not. That's the law in the US.

So what would you rather be caught with? Some powder that's hard to identify and weighs only 100 grams, or live cactus that's easy to identify and weighs about 1000 grams for the same amount of material (because it's wet). In court the 100 grams of dried cactus would get you a sentence based on 100 grams of mescaline. The 1000 grams of the same wet cactus would get you a sentence based on 1000 grams of mescaline.

I think the powder is a much safer bet. People will have no idea what it is when they see it. It could be anything. Live cactus is obviously cactus. Anyone who knows what Trichocereus looks like would know the cactus is a mescaline cactus. The powder is a different story. You can't easily tell what it is by looking at it. You can't even tell its cactus.

what about the mailing aspect don't suppliers tell you what cactus it is right on the bag,or whatever inside?

Some vendors do not put labels on the cactus powder, and some do. If you get it and put it in an oregano spice jar in your spice shelf, who the heck is going to know its cactus!

yeah nobody if it's labeled in the mail it'd be nice if they just did abbreviations like SP,BG,PT.

hehe - swim has what seems like a lot of badly off spices

Before getting into deeper discussions I would like to ask exactly what is the relevant law (mescaline and/or mescaline containing plants possession) re these issues and which other laws are relevant to this. I.e. what makes the growing of cacti an issue? Which criteria are used to justify suspicion of intended drug use etc.

The way laws and the legislational system works (irrespective of country) is not always firmly based on logic and reason. A clever lawyer can certainly help someone get a fairer judgement if he gets caught with a fair amount of grown cacti amist allegations of drug use. On the other hand, a prosecutor can press charges for dried cactus solely on the basis that it is mescaline preparation. You may want the living cactus for decorative purposes a lawyer can claim even though you once "gave away to temptation" and decided to "try" it. But do you have a use for the dried powder other than getting high?

If police decides to search your house and find a pile of green powder they won't let it go away. Sooner or later they'll find out.

Do we have any people around here that are really relevant with and know the law very well (and not think they just know the law)?

I still don't see how it would be based on the cactus weight and not mescaline. Peyote would because it is the actual cactus material that is illegal. How does this work for San Pedro?

If you have a yard full of catci in the US that include a variety of species its real easy to keep 25 small non active specimins. Since San P is also one of the best grafting stock around simply have a few grafted specmins around, that explaines all the cuts. I have bought active ones (albeit weak but active cheap) at wallmart when I lived in Florida(yeah the good old days ). I think it would be hard to get it trouble in the US with a couple simple safeguards but not impossible. I would like to think our highly decorated public servants(the pi....the wonderful police force) would have more important things to do than set up survalance on a suspected "catcus tea drinker". I guess you could tell them someone has been in my house and replaced my Maxwell House instant coffie with some kind of bitter powder i would like to file a report Im glad you stoped by officer come on in for a cup of coffie so I can tell you all about it.