Kemist, the same thing can be said for heat, citric acid, oxygen, etc., all of which can alter alkaloids. If you want the cactus as is without any alteration, eat it fresh. Boiling and evaporation, drying, etc., all alter something in the cactus.

Kemist, in fact doing an extraction also gets rid of a ton of unwanted compounds, and it's very highly likely that pure mescaline is better for you than the whole mix of alkaloids present in the cactus. Pure mescaline has been studied more than any other psychedelic there is and no one has found it to cause any permanent damage.

If you're going to worry at all you should worry about using the plant raw. In it's raw state you're consuming hundreds of compounds of unknown toxicity. When consuming pure mescaline, you're consuming just 1 compound with a huge history of tests done on it, not an unknown untested alkaloid like a lot of what's present in the cactus.

But even so, I think this whole subject is way overblown and you guys are being paranoid for no reason.

These cacti only contain traces of DMPEA and it probably does nothing at all to you at the doses ingested.

You all know about XTC causing similar brain damage right? Well it does so only at large doses. I think more than likely the same thing applies here.

Or it would have came up in one of the many, many studies done on Peyote and people who use Peyote (they even looked for abnormalities in their genetics).



What I like to call the "Holy Three"- 'Shrooms, Cactus and Ayahuasca have been extensively studied and are KNOWN to be safe, safe, SAFE!

Yes all I am really saying is be careful experimenting with high doses (way higher then you ingest if you ingest cactus for mescaline) of unknown alkaloids from cacti because they might contain this compound or other 3,4 substituted phenylethylamines with similar properties. Or might have other weird side effects. The pharmacology is largely unknown of many.

Chowing a cactus or mescaline is fine.

SWIM tends to be a little less cautious than most, but still cautious enough that he’s still alive. Recall SWIM was using strychnine as a nootropic for a while there (still does occasionally). A lot of the dangers of these things are way overblown in the popular literature. If SWIM believed all the hysteria about strychnine in the popular literature, he never would have tried strychnine. Knowing what are the TRUE facts from the exaggerated ones can be tricky. It requires a lot of research. We all know that not all “facts” in print are facts. Some are outright lies, some are just mistakes. Even well known scientists and doctors make mistakes about drugs and write about them as if they are facts.

When doing research, never believe what you read is 100% fact until you have a lot of other data to back it up. Always have a little doubt if there’s nothing else to back it up. Even “laboratory tests” that “confirm” something to be a “fact” are sometimes completely wrong.

We all know of studies that were later proven to be wrong. Look at all the information about cannabis. There are conflicting studies to prove pretty much everything under the sun about cannabis. They can’t all be right of course.

Only when there are a large number of tests that show the same results can you then begin to take the results as fact. All too often there’s something in a study that warps the findings or taints the data. Usually it is human fault, human bias, etc., that taints the data. But when you have a large number of tests from different people showing the same thing to be true about a drug, that’s when the tests become believable to me. Until then, I’m always a little skeptical.

When it comes to psychedelic drugs, there are a lot of studies done on them to specifically prove they are harmful. So beware of such studies. Always look at who’s sponsoring the study and look at how the study is performed. Often times studies use drug doses that are unreasonable, just so they can prove their toxicity.

A good example of a flawed study is the study that proves water is toxic! It’s easy to perform. You inject a steady stream of water into the blood stream of your lab rats and eventually they all die from a water overdose. Such a study can show that water is lethal and leads to all sorts of problems so you should stop drinking water!

Yes and there have not been many follow up studies on this issue. I was looking for people who have taken this research to the next stages but I haven't found much. This could mean they tried doing an oral administration in mice or rats or something and didn't get any positive results so they never published it. This is a flaw with how some people publish papers. They view negative results as not worth publishing while I think they are always worth publishing. Who knows.

I honestly don't think there is much to be concerned about unless one is experimenting with plant sources of unknown alkaloid composition that are not used traditionally or experimenting with alkaloids of virtually unknown pharmacology.

I didn't mean to start this thread to get people all worried but to get more information.

I'm uploading the pdf of the mentioned paper in case someone wants to read it.

I'd also like to mention that upon reading other papers, I found that 3,4-dimethoxyphenethylamine is present in trace amounts in San Pedro extractions (MESCALINE AND THE SAN PEDRO CACTUS RITUAL: ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE IN NORTHERN PERU, Carod-Artal, 2006 and Cactus alkaloids. XXXVI. Mescaline and related compounds from Trichocereus peruvianus). This paper is freely available at least in spanish under the title "Mescalina y ritual del cactus de san Pedro: evidencias arqueológicas y etnográficas en el norte de Perú".

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To be afraid of this medicine is...so ridiculous...[/quote]


agreed!