In a dream...

I took about an 18 inch section of San Pedro cactus I'd had growing for years, about 3 inches diameter. I despined it, deskinned it, and cut out the core. I then search online for how to best dry it to turn it into powder. Unfortunately, I found little help with my searches, a combination perhaps of lack of creativity in my search terms and impatience.

I ended up putting the resulting flesh -- cut into small pieces -- into a glass baking dish in the oven at 170F (the lowest it would go). I also put the core into a separate glass baking dish in the oven, too. I had read some people saying the core has psychoactive properties and I figured I could separately run an extraction on the non-core flesh and the core to settle this once and for all.

After five hours, it was not close to dry, so I turned the oven off and went to bed. (Felt weird leaving the oven on all night). After about 16 hours, I got back to it and turned the overn on 170F for another 5 hours, then turned it off before bed again. The next morning, it seemed all dry. (Note, the core had seemed dry earlier than the outer flesh, though the pieces were no bigger. I'm thinking the core started out dryer.)

I took the pieces to the garage with a coffee grinder and pulverized them into powder, which worked pretty well. However, I was shocked to discover how little powder I had left. I was not sure I'd have enough for any worthwhile extract. I ran some online searches to try to find out what the "usual" amount of dried powder people get from fresh cactus is, but found no good guidelines. Again, they may be out there and it may be my limited searching is to blame.

I proceeded to weigh the powder. It was more than I'd thought. I had 33 grams of core powder and 65 grams of outer flesh powder.

I am very pleased with the quantities. My plan is to run Ron's D-limonene extraction TEK separately on both powders, scaling it down by 2/3 for for the outer flesh powder and 1/3 for for the core powder. The math is very easy, and it is nice the ratios came out so simple. I am actually kind of amazed the total powder came out to almost exactly 100 grams, since I had no idea when I started what I would wind up with.

I had a few questions.

First, is this a normal amount of powder from this length of San Pedro?

Second, did I destroy the mescaline by using the oven to dry it? Some recent searching led me to a "heat and mescaline" thread where it was suggested that this amount of heat will reduce potency. Is it still worth proceeding with my extraction at all using this powder? If I did damage the mescaline, will I simply extract LESS mescaline acetate, or will I get the same volume of acetate but with weaker potency? And does anyone have any idea how much less or weaker it may be?

Third, I've read that the mescaline is in the "dark" green flesh. However, almost all the flesh between the skin and the core was light greenish yellow. There was a very thin strip of dark green flesh just under the skin, perhaps as thick as the skin itself. Is this unusual? Would it make sense to just cut away and use the dark green flesh and not bother with the light greenish yellow flesh?

Fourth, to avoid damaging the mescaline, I will probably just hang dry the flesh next time. Do I need to take any precautions about bugs or mold or bacteria or anything when I do this?

---

Then I woke up.

If you're using Trichocereus canadiens, then that may be part of your problem.

I read that SWIM just recently had a dream, in which she abandoned her usual "modified resin" tek (deskin-slice-freeze-crockpot, 3 pulls) in favor of a food dehydrator tek (slice skinless and coreess stars under 1/4" thick, toss in dehydrator for 24 hours). The resultant crispy cactus chips ... perhaps we could call them frites ... go straight into the blender and then into size 00 caps and it's your call after that. Now SWIM's friend contends that the output via dehydrator is significantly better than crockpotting. Unfortunately SWIM woke up before verifying this contention, but perhaps she will have Part 2 of the dream in a few days.

SWIM's research, much of which one can read for himself right here and on similar websites, does little to resolve the disagreement over the "heat" issue, or even the "core, skin and white tissue" issue. It appears one will get decent results as long as you don't go overboard with heat, and until precise, controlled experiments are done with and without core and skin and the white tissue, this will remain an open issue. SWIM heself knows of an expert who contends the the skin of some genus are the best part.

You may wish to check the "full spectrum", straight from blender product, and compare it to the results from the more involved extraction teks, with which SWIM, being a big fan of full spectrum, has little experience.


24 hours in a dehydrator keeps the mold away, at least south of the 49th parallel.

18" is a very small section for most cacti. make tea, an extract tek of 18"is silly and a waste of time. everything must be done perfectly, and that cacti would need to be uber potent for a sucsessful outcome

if you had more cacti----skip the core, there may be some goodies there, but damn little for the extra effort, deffinately not worth it ime

Fully agree ... if it takes 18" of cactus, it's time to find a more convenient cactus! Eventually many cactus fans familiarilze themselves with more potent specimans...plenty of them around that open your doors with just 6", and some with even less.

Um...you are both confusing me.

dg - you say it is not worth doing an extraction on 18" of cactus, but I got 66 grams of powder from that 18 inches EXCLUDING the core and Ron69's d-limonene mescaline extraction TEK only calls for 100 grams of powder, so it appears I am in the ball park for amount of cactus that I am running the TEK on. Why do you say this is not enough? What length, in your mind, would be appropriate?

pau - you say you "fully agree" with dg, but the substance of your post completely DISAGREES with him. dg's saying that 18" is NOT enough cactus for an extract because it will barely get you high, but you are saying that 18" is plenty and that 6" should get you high.

12" of a decent cactus should give you a very satisfactory trip... well me anyways.

I guess the amount of cactus you need depends a lot on what you call a good trip. Cacti can have anything in between 0-6% mescaline by dry weight, so it's very possible to have a very strong trip on a small amount of the right cactus.

Frij, sorry, I may have skimmed over the original comment too quickly. The concept was that if an 18" chunk of Trich is only 3" thick, then it's likely been indoors grown and/or potted most of its life, and is more likely to have a relatively thin dark green layer under the skin.

Outdoor grown, 18" chunks of some species or specimans can easily be 6" thick. That's easily 4X the goodies compared to 3" diameter: they love sun and warmth and grow thicker dark green layers in that environment. And on top of that, a "strong" speciman will again easily be triple the potency of a weaker speciman...or more! So where are we ... 12X?

So it becomes a lot of work for relatively small return to run an average 18" chunk of a 3 incher thru an extraction tek ... for not more more effort spent you could do 4 such pieces at the same time. OR....go full spectrum: simply dehydrate and pulverize...and stop there. All sorts of synergestic goodies in there in addition to M that can really add up to alot more grams of useful product than an extraction.

Also, as SWIM has just learned from his friend, a food dehydrator is way more eficient (both energy-wise and extract-wise) than an oven or a crockpot!

Have a great weekend!