Hello all. I am contemplating my first cactus experience. My love and I want to trip together, neither of us have ever experienced cactus alkaloids. I am considering getting some scrap cuttings of San Pedro. On the other hand I am also considering getting dried bridgesii chips or powder. Pros and cons? First time we plan to drink tea but at some point I'm bound to do an extraction.

I personally would stick with bridgesii, the others can be a potency crap shoot unless you have some reliable San Pedro sourced. Few things are worse than drinking that tea and getting nothing in return.

I second that bridgesii is much more consistent in potency

As others said it depends on the mescaline content, but you can't know beforehand. Some of the highest as well as lowest yielding cactus have been both bridgesii as well as pachanoi. (sources)

I have no experience with commercial powdered bridge, but the few cuttings I have from both pachanoi and bridge are similarly potent. The average content of both species seem similar, with a slight edge to bridgesii.

People may have different experience depending on the cact source.I'm not sure what commercial bridgesii chips are like, in terms of yield.

Is your plan to just make a tea with powdered cact? I've never tried boiling powdered cact drink, but it should work fine, at least the alkaloids will be there...Though maybe it forms a nasty thick snot to drink though and no clue how will filtering will work.. Anybody else here has tried it?

If you brew fresh cact in small pieces, not blended, it forms a clean syrupy liquid, it doesn't taste very nice but you can get it down. It's easy to filter the cact pieces with a coarse strainer/filter of any sort.

As for the cact source in general if you can grow it yourself, grow all species you can hehe.

I'd imagine whatever you do, will be a good experience. Or at least I hope and wish you so! Let us know how it goes

cant go wrong with both.
bridgesii is obviously potent, pachanoi makes you work for a smooth ride

be safe because living plants are legit usually whereas processed ones are not

even though theres a slight alkaloid weight difference between bridgesii and pachanoi (something like 20% more potent) the effect feels more like 2x for whatever reason.

dosing in the day is usually a fraction of its potency at night, if you had a strong day trip you can bet it will be most impressive in the dark.

Hello everyone! I have my cactus material! 😈 240 grams dried Peruvian torch chips, also 240 grams San Pedro powder. I know, I know, I know that alkaloids vary from cactus to cactus. That being said, what ballpark amount of material should each person ingest (cactus will be made into tea)? 50 grams per person for strong experience? More/less? Thanks all.

Check the links I posted above, you can arrive at that info easily.

In the link you can see 0.76% is the average mesc content per dry bridgesii, then 100g bridgesii has 0.76g (i.e. 760mg) mescaline. So half of that, 50g bridgesii, to get 380mg mescaline, would be a good dosage in the case of an average bridgesii, you could even go a tiny bit lower.

This value can go up or down, so maybe you have a cact that is twice as potent as the average, you need to adjust the value accordingly.

In order to play safe, you can try maybe 25g powder and see how it feels, and adjust next time. The highest yielding bridgesii that had some GC-MS testing to confirm had 2% mescaline. If your own cact had that much, this would mean consuming 25g cact = 500mg mescaline, which would be a potent dose but not unsafe at all. If you had a very low yielding cact you wouldn't feel anything. So try it out safely first and you'll know better the second time

Thank you endlessness, this is exactly the information I was after.

Powder is no good for making tea. It globs up into a gelatinous mass that looks like split pea baby shit, 100 grams is now drying out in my oven. I will extract the powder. For tea we fared much better with the dried chips. 100 grams was simmered in water with lime for several hours this evening. Drank it. In the middle of the experience right now. 😈

How was the experience Tony? Do you think you dosed enough of the chips?

Thanks for asking, Grey Fox!! Dosage wise, I had a light trip, very subtle with the visuals, but very pleasant. Took a long time to come on and lasted all night long into the AM. My girl had a very unpleasant experience, I was worried for her and doing all I could to care for her and make her feel better. All in all it was an interesting night, I enjoyed the cactus and am looking forward to working more with it, next time I would like to take a larger dose.

Physically or psychically?

Wife's tried cactus twice and both times it immobilized her on the couch for hours and she was nauseated for the duration. No more cactus for her.

Sorry to hear about your girlfriend's challenging experience. I hope that she feels better soon. This cactus has a way of continuing to work on your psyche and body for days and even weeks after the experience. It just seems to stick around and keep working on you for longer than other psychedelics. So even though the "trip" has ended, whatever she experienced that upset her will still be much closer to the surface than usual. If she feels strong enough to go back to those thoughts and feelings she may find an enhanced ability to work through those things while the San Pedro is still acting on her. Maybe with your help she can do some of that. But YMMV. I wish you all the best. Peace Tony.

Mostly psychologically. The shift in perception seemed to bring on a panic attack. @ Grey Fox, the medicine working on me is something I am very much counting on and looking forward to. I want to heal and grow in a very real way. Thanks everyone for your help I love this place and I am very grateful for all of you. Love.

Ok, we can help with physical discomfort. When it is not accepted by psyche, it's hard to help :/

Oh, I know that. Sorry to hear that it was like that for your partner has had such an experience. How's she doing now, how's her outlook on the experience? She regrets doing it?

I ask because I myself had a tough one recently. It was good, in the end, but in the thick of it, really difficult.

My best wishes to you!

Thanks all so much for your concern. She is doing ok. This weekend, I am going to take the (now only slightly damp) San Pedro goo material from the powder debacle, and I am going to eat 50 grams rolled up in goo balls (seems like it's already the perfect consistency, I moved the cookie sheet from oven into fridge). Hopefully this will give me the next level type of cactus trip Im hoping for. For right now, the 80 mg harmalas I ate are kicking in, and I've got 50 mg loaded in my GVG that is calling my name. Lookout hyperspace, here I come!!!

Ambitious Have a good journey.

Some people think that San Pedro is so gentle that you cannot have a bad trip on it. But that idea is wrong.

The effects are dosage dependent. A low to moderate dose is usually tolerated well by experienced trippers. These trips usually are not too challenging physically, and there is often a feeling of connectedness and euphoria. But for someone who is not experienced in the psychedelic realms even the low to moderate dose San Pedro trip can be challenging, especially considering how long San Pedro trips last for. There is a definite shift in mood and thought patterns, and even though there are not many visuals at this dose range, there is still a strange feeling of otherness that shades everything and can be unsettling for some.

At higher doses the experience becomes much more psychedelic in the classical sense. There are profound visuals, a strong disconnect from normal reality, and even a feeling that one is dying. These high trips can be very hard on the body, with lots of nausea and muscle cramps. And these trips last a long time. At these higher doses anyone can experience a bad trip. It is a long and deeply psychedelic journey that takes a toll on the body. I have only gone very deep a few times. It is not something that is easy on the body or that you want to do frequently. But the lessons are profound and last a lifetime. High dose Bridgesii is what has gotten me there... 18 to 24 inches of thick, mature bridgesii cuttings.

Tony I wish you all the best on your next San Pedro journey. But you may have to up the dose significantly if you really want to go deep with it. Be safe.