2019 saw me experience my first cactus trips. DFZ, Jees, Pete666, Endlessness, coastal, Grey Fox, Sunnyside and I'm sure others I'm missing or forgetting, thanks for all the direction and encouragement along the way! My first cactus trips were a magical time in my psychedelic education.

Cactus has turned out to be my favorite edible plant psychedelic. It is loving and caring and very positive every time I take it, then again I've only ever used it with great set and setting.

When I received my cactus material, I tried to make tea from San Pedro powder and ended up with a goopy slimy mess nobody could drink. The dried P. Torch chips were much better material for making the tea. So, what to do with the powder?

I tried eating some rolled up into little wet dough balls, an idea I got from an old post by Mew. It's difficult to eat enough material this way to have a strong experience (50gr+).

I had 100 grams powder left and decided to extract. I thought about a dry tek, I read through Lovealls recent work with mescaline extractions. I was very close to starting the Pete666 stb method... In the end I decided on a simple alcohol soak, shake, decant, repeat, collect, evaporate, scrape up resin.

100 grams San Pedro powder was placed in a jar and covered with 190° Everclear (grain alcohol, you can also use isopropyl). After a few shake and settle, the alcohol turned black with emerald tint. Decanted (it seperates into two layers very easily, most of the powder stays put at the bottom, so this wasn't difficult). I filtered through funnel with cotton in neck.

I used a pint of Everclear (the darker chunk in the picture) for the first round, collected, and evaporated. Since there was still color to the alcohol, I extracted further with one bottle 70% isopropyl (two pulls, half the bottle each pull, the lighter greenish tinged chunk).

All in all, after dried and scraped. The Everclear chunk weighed 6.4 grams, the isopropyl chunk weighed 5.9. So, 12 grams resin. Seems much more reasonable for me to eat this than 100 grams of powder dough balls (love ya Mew, but that is no fun).

Bioassay and trip report forthcoming.

Edit: Since I see they both look very similar in color in the photo, the left eye is the iso, the right is the Everclear. They worked very similar, save your money and go on down to the dollar store for some iso!

You can further increase purity of the resin by dissolving it in acidic water, filtering and drying.

Thanks for the info doubledog!

It is remarkable to myself and my partner, how similar the Everclear resin looks to black tar heroin. Good thing we are solid in our recovery!

Wish you a good experience with cactus.

Black/green color of alcohol during extraction is not very important, as it is not color of mescaline, most likely it's chlorophyll or something similar.

So I have wonder, how much alcohol would one need to pull all of the goods from 100 grams cactus powder? When do you know you've gotten all the goods.

I suppose you could use coloremetric reagent to test resins after they are evaporated. Or maybe even use them to test the emerald black firewater.

One would need to test leftover powder after extraction.

Would be great to know how many pulls are really needed. I would say that it's enough to make 4 pulls with 80-90% ethanol, but I have never tested it.

I consumed the resin several hours ago. This tek works. Am headed full speed ahead into my experience. The flashing lights effect is very intense, wow.

I've been following this thread a little. Happy to hear positive results.


Did you try this suggestion Tony6Strings? I've recieved similar wisdom from doubledog but have yet to try due to life stuff.....

Have a wonderful journey Tony. Thanks for sharing this extraction info with us.

Man I love you guys so much! Yes the tek is a screaming success!! What I ate in that resin is giving Albert Hoffman and his 200 mics a run for his money tonight!

The night I took the San Pedro resin was truly amazing. Like most any cactus experience, it took hours to come on, during which I experienced some sleepyness, was laying in bed with my honey watching Brave New World, drifted in and out of a dreamy nap while riding out the gastrointestinal discomfort. A couple hours in, I let out a large burp which put most of the nausea behind me.

As I was coming on to the trip, I could not help but reflect upon my LSD experience from several days before. The two compounds have some marked similarities, but are also so very different from one another. Mescaline is truly a unique and wonderful compound, and it kept on hitting me over and over through my experience, this is natural, this is from cactus which grew from the earth. Plant medicine is super badass.

The sensation of flashing light was strong and intense. I know now that all my previous cactus experiences have been on the low end dosage wise. Each time I took some, I enjoyed myself, was definitely effected, but this resin trip was the first time I ever felt like I had the full on entheogenic mescaline trip, psychedelic, visionary, very reminiscent to LSD but very different also, very much its own thing.

Several times during my trip, we went outdoors to smoke cigarettes. At one point, I looked up at the sky, and it was freaking incredible. I got down on my knees there on the sidewalk and stared up into the sky and prayed, and believed, and felt the presence of something more. I felt like I was going to get pulled right up into that amazing beautiful sky, and that was just fine with me.

Later that night, I was laying in bed, eyes closed, had incredible visuals. For hours. Very cool. Mescaline is super badass. I will be working more with cactus, and am looking forward to it!!

One more thing worth mention, I'm sure others have talked about it before, how similar the body sensations of cactus are to MDMA.

Could you elaborate on this step Doubleddog? I have pulled approx 1 liter (4 or 5 pulls) with 75% iso from 14 grams of powdered cactus. I was planning to evap and scrape but would like a more refined product if possible. If I understand you correctly by re-dissolving in acidic water there will be impurities that will be insoluble and filtering and then evapping will yield a cleaner extract.

Is there a target ph that would be ideal for the water? I was thinking about 1 liter for volume.

Just dissolve evaped resin from alcohol pulls in water.
From 14g of cactus you will probably have just few grams of resin, let say 4g.
Use smaller volume of water, 100 - 150 ml would be plenty.
Acid is not really needed, if you have been succesfull in extraction, you have mescaline in form of natural salt, which is very well soluble in water. But you can just add some vinegar, it probably helps. pH is not important, just keep it under pH5.
You will see that some nasty stuff from resin will not dissolve in that water, so filter it or let separate by sedimentation and evap the water.

12.79 g of resin from 100 g San Pedro powder. So we got very similar resin yields Tony. That was 4 pulls.

Embarking on a journey this afternoon with my wife and a buddy. My wife and I will split the resin ball, my buddy is doing his 50 g in water and shooting back the sludge. Looking forward to this, as the last two attempts with tea came from pc San Pedro, so the trip left much to be desired. Wish I had seen the previous post about purifying it a bit further in time, as that’s a lotta damn resin! But the plans are for today so it is what it is.

Later that evening...

Whew buddy, that was a nice day! Almost midnight, almost back to baseline 10 hours later. The resin tek is the bees knees as far as I’m concerned. No nausea, only a mild bubble gut feeling for about 20 minutes during come up. Was able to fit it into 6 gel caps that went down nice and easy. Felt bad for my friend as I watched him struggle through slurping up cactus mud when it was so easy for me. I ate a couple shroom gummies about 4 hours into the trip which really brought in a nice visual aspect to the great body buzz of the Pedro. I danced around my living room, exploding with energy. Man I miss music festivals... but anyway, I am sold; hook, line and sinker, on this wonderful molecule dubbed mescaline.

Thank you gentlefolk for posting and evolving this tek. I very much look forward to trying it soon.

Tony what was the dosage for your journey - did you take the full 12g at once?

Metta thanks for trying the tek and posting your results, looks good, glad you had a good time.

@Belenus, yes I took the entire 12 grams minus a couple small chunks for further analysis.

Wouldn't be dissolving in acidic water directly be much quicker in cheaper? It seams for me that the alcohol pulls unwanted stuff which water doesn't pull.

Good luck dissolving Pedro powder in anything. It just turns to a wet clay consistency with both water and ethanol. And I hate to speak without a source, but I feel like I’ve read that even boiling the Pedro powder in water dosnt pull much. But don’t quote me. But the resin readily dissolves in in water for sure. It’s super easy to clean up with a wet rag.

Water pulls much more unwanted stuff than ethanol. This stuff is mainly pectin-like heteropolysacharide, mucilage responsible for snottines of cactus.
You can have 30g or even more mucilage in 100g of cactus powder, and you will extract it with water.
I did some experiments and resin made with water only is quite low in mescaline, with cactus containing 0,6% it was only 2%.

Ethanol pull lower amount of mucilage, but on the other hand it pulls chlorophyll fraction (quite nasty stuff, with bitter/adstringent taste, definitely something I do not want to consume). Water does not pull this fraction.
Resin made by ethanol only is stronger, maybe 4%.

By using ethanol first, you avoid to extract pectin, by dissolving this resin in water afterwards you get rid of this chlorophyll stuff.
Resin made by use of ethanol and then water could be 8% mescaline.

You can use water first and ethanol next, but then you have to deal with the snot. This means lot of water and lot of time for evaporation.

By ethanol, I mean 85-90% ethanol with some water.

Almost all complications in cactus extractions are caused by the pectin. That's the reason you have to boil it for long time and use lot of water (for tea preparation) or use lot of base (in STB), it is also the cause of emulsions with nonpolar liquid.