While my experience is also all positive with Mescaline, I can certainly see how it would cause a person to feel vulnerable. I remember how I felt one time when I was in the peak of a peyote trip, and I was barely seeing anything that didn't swirl into "rolling logs" or swastikas, and my girlfriends nipples were shooting out sparks in spirals, one boob clockwise the other one the other way, and like thousands of little mishapen beastys are just shooting up out of no where, and she decides she is bored because she threw up right away, and didn't get off, so she wants to go out to a bar. And she is like insisting, she's not gonna stick around until I am straight enough to make love and pay her any attention. And we are somewhere where she doesn't really know the culture. So it's like , fine, go, I have to stay here, because I can't deal with that kind of stuff, basically because I was so high that I felt vulnerable, which is only natural. If we were living in nature, you wouldn't trip unless you had some security, a little pause were you didn't have to struggle. A good harvest, the vikings haven't been heard from for a few months, a feast day alone or with friends, -- drop!
When I think of it, peyote has given me some of my most visual in a mythical, sense, the most fantastic hallucinations that would be not just flowing detail and patterns, but people and animals and gods and demons; stuff that should scare you, but there is always this just calm, like none of it can reach me, strong observer parallax.
I remember the first time I took peyote, It was magical. I had like two dollars left and I decided to go and buy a pack of Russian cigarettes, for no good reason at all. I was in Tucson, about early seveties, and I pick up this hitch-hicker, a young well dressed Mexican kid. I ask him were he's going, and he asks me where I am going. I tell him, and he wants to come along.
Anyhow, I was broke until the next day, so he offered to buy me dinner after we finished shooting pool. We went to a Polynesian place and he got his own private room for us, and we feasted. Then we went to his friend the brujo who lived by the university, and he had these huge fresh buttons. Like three times bigger than I ever saw again. He pulls them out of the fridge and they both watch me with great interest as I eat some.
I didn't know they were supposed to taste so bad, and they didn't taste bad to me. But evidently these guys were waiting to laugh at me when I spit it out. So their asking me like, "Tastes Ok huh?" And I am chomping away on his fresh peyote saying, "NOt bad." So they thought I was alright because Mescaleto obviously liked me a lot more than them, because they were pretty affected by the taste. We partied until dawn, at which point I fell asleep in my car outside a bar, and never saw either of them again.