DOSE: T+ 0:00	7 g	oral	Cacti - Mescaline-containing	(extract)
T+ 2:00		vaporized	Cannabis
T+ 2:30	0.5 hits	sublingual	LSD	(blotter / tab)
T+ 6:00		vaporized	Cannabis
T+ 6:30		oral	Alcohol
T+ 0:00	repeated	vaporized	Cannabis

BODY WEIGHT:

115 lb

I swallowed the seven grams of encapsulated mescaline tar with a 15 oz bottle of orange juice following a hike with my dog. It was the first thing I’d had in about twenty-four hours, since 8:30 or so the night before. I wanted to dose early; mescaline takes a while to set in and lasts a long time, and I was already tired from sleeping poorly over the two previous nights.

Capsules downed, I started up the truck and rolled out of the parking lot. The drive home was only twenty minutes or so, and I knew from experience that I wouldn’t feel anything for another hour at the earliest, probably longer.

Upon arriving home, I found out that my brother-in-law had taken the day off. I’m normally the only one off on Mondays, which are my “Saturdays”, so that’s why it’s my trip day. I stay at home for the vast majority of my trips, and prefer to be alone for them.

Not only that, but this day was a celebratory day. Two years and ten days before, I’d taken my first psychedelic journey courtesy of some San Pedro tea. I like marking the occasion with a mescaline trip around the same time each year, and it was the first opportunity I’d had, and a day I’d been quite looking forward to for some time. I was mad that he’d chosen this day of all days to take off, but there was nothing I could do about it. Capsules had already been swallowed.

I waited out the long wait by cleaning my room up, showering, vacuuming, washing dishes. I like having everything done before a trip so I’m not left anxious by anything undone. I try to have an optimally eased mindset before embarking, and going through the routine prepares my mind for the journey ahead.

I was reading a collection of Dorothy Parker book reviews and texting with a friend when I suddenly felt like I had to lie down. The moment I’d reclined, I was jumping back to my feet and rushing off to deal with the purge. It wasn’t the worst I’d had, but I got some of the orange juice in my sinuses, which was on the terrible side. I heaved out the OJ, coughed up the residual tar and bile, and was brushing my teeth and using a neti pot for my nose within a few minutes. From point of feeling like something might be off to being done with the purge, that was the fastest transition I’ve had so far (out of the ten or so experiments I’ve had with this tar method).

This was at 10:30 AM, almost exactly two hours from ingesting. Right on schedule.

My computer was down, so I couldn’t check my trip record to find out how long it usually takes the mescaline to hit me after throwing it up. I hoped it would be soon. I vaped some Sour Diesel, wishing marijuana would get things going. I believed I could see slight movements, but I do this all often enough that I tend to get motion if I look at something long enough whenever I’ve had some weed (which is at least once a day typically, and has been for a few years now).

Time seemed to be passing very slowly. I listened to Portishead and Sagittarius, hoping to set a peaceful, psychedelic mood for the trip. Already I felt as if I needed to be calmed. Things were edgy, but I attributed that to the pot thoughts.

I watched the sun coming in through the eastern window in my bedroom, my exhaled lungfulls of vapor twisting in the light. A small, bright parallelogram fell on the carpet. So small. And getting smaller. I looked out the window and cursed the overhang shielding the neighboring room’s door to the side yard. If it weren’t for that, I would get sunlight in here during the fall and winter, and my room wouldn’t be so freezing cold at this time of year.

I thought about our hemisphere of the earth tilting away from the sun during these days, going farther and farther away. The days grow shorted, everything’s colder, the sun around less. I thought of the earth’s constant rotation, the wobble, it’s tilt-a-whirl motion as it flies the elliptical path around the sun. And the sun, also travelling a path, within an arm of the travelling spiral galaxy, all of us spinning in empty blackness. I felt like if I paid enough attention, I’d be able to feel the hurtling speeds.

I checked my phone’s clock every few minutes, waiting in exciting anticipation and time-diluted trip space. Time was dragging by, and I’d set myself a schedule. “Well, are you going to do it?”

Yes, but I wanted to wait until 11:00.

At 10:58 I stood up and got the wooden treasure chest out of my stash drawer. From within the chest, I pulled out half of a tab of Avatar blotter. Word has it they are about 170 micrograms each, but I don’t know if you can trust word. If that’s the case, this bit would ring in at somewhere between 70-80 mcg. It’s not an exact science (thank you, government, for ensuring that).

It was under my tongue at 10:58.

I laid back, watching things around the room start to come to life. I felt like 7 grams of mescaline tar wouldn’t be enough (when I’d previously done just fine on similar amounts). I wanted things to be going stronger.

That isn’t why I took the acid, though. I’ve taken mescaline a dozen or so times, an acid probably an equal amount, but I’ve never taken them together. And since I was celebrating, I figured why not? I was also considering adding some MDMA, but was feeling so paranoid about serotonin syndrome that I didn’t want to risk having a bad trip worrying about it. There was also a bit of ketamine I was considering, but after experiencing ego death the last time I’d done it (with LSD and MDMA), I kept it in the back of my mind.

I took a swig of Coke and felt something foreign in my mouth, perhaps a piece of food that had become dislodged from whatever toothy hiding spot it had been sequestered in. Flicking it out with my tongue in disgust, I realized it was my blotter rectangle. Somehow I’d momentarily forgotten that I had that in there. I swallowed it soon thereafter.

My plan had been to take 50mg MDMA at noon and then meditate, staggering the doses and hopefully peaking as I came out of the meditation. Nearing noon, I decided I’d wait to find out what combining the two powerful psychedelics was like before adding anything else to the mix.

The meditation was okay, but not one of my best sessions. With my computer out of commission, I couldn’t listen to the guided session with earbuds, as I always do. I had to listen to it over my room stereo, and with my brother-in-law home, I was paranoid about having it on too loudly. So it was soft and I couldn’t hear it very well, which meant it didn’t take me on the same deep journey. Don’t know if that’s the reason, or if it’s something else, but I also didn’t get any head zaps, which I nearly always do when meditating while tripping.

About half an hour into the meditation, my sinuses began to swell. For a few moments, I was reminded of the feeling when insufflated ketamine hits, but then I realized it was the acid. I haven’t heard of this in other reports, but acid really hits me in the sinuses. Now I got it from a reputable and trustworthy source, but what source is really reputable or trustworthy on the black market? There’s a chance that I didn’t get acid, with all of the research iterations floating around these days. I believe it’s acid and am sure one of the other customers would’ve complained if we’d been duped. Anyway, the stuff always hits me in the sinuses (like pseudoephedrine does), and it also gives me the tummy rumbles.

When I came out of the meditation session about forty-five minutes later (that’ll be roughly four hours since ingesting cactus tar and two since the blotter), things were going strong. The CEVs hadn’t impressed me too much, seeming to me mostly like the floral CEVs of acid, but darker. But I could barely open my eyelids thanks to the soft fractalled ambiance I could not get a focus on.

The strongest visuals I get are most often those that await me when coming out of these deep meditative states. This was no exception. I had to keep closing and slowly reopening my eyes, it was just too much to look at.

Once I’d regained my composure somewhat, I got up to change back to music. Any sort of activity is a great well to kill a visual trip, I’ve found. My movements weren’t entirely smooth, but the task was easy enough, and soon I was back on my bed with Four Tet’s “There is Love in You” playing over the stereo. It’s a great psychedelic album, and one I was particularly fond of at the time.

I decided that no, I wasn’t going to add MDMA. Things were going very strongly already, movements and color changes to my surroundings being very animated. And my eyes already felt as if they were having trouble with all the stimulation; I thought adding some nystagmus to that would be a bad idea.

I was quite surprised by the strength of it all, actually. 7 grams is a decent dose, but not a huge one. And I’d had the other half of that blotter square a couple of weeks beforehand, and it had done very little. What I was experiencing was different from the previous trips I’d had on either substance alone, and they seemed to be strengthening each other exponentially.

When the Four Tet album was done, I decided to put on “Person Pitch”, which had been the album I’d listened to repeatedly for my first thirteen-plus hour trip. And it was all going well and good, until “Bros” came on.

“Bros” is that song for me, that one you tell people is “your” song, the one that best represents you. The last time I’d heard it tripping, I was on LSD and MDMA (which hadn’t quite kicked in, sadly), seeing it performed live. That night, I’d gone home, put on the album, and snorted a bump of ketamine. When I came back from ego death, I was stuck on the repetitive part of “Bros”, fighting to get back to my body and filled with anxiety and mortal dread.

So I couldn’t have been too surprised when the anxiety came back, just as soon as I got to the post ego-death part of the song. I recognized what was happening and tried to talk myself through it, but nothing was going to make me feel better as long as that song was playing. Just like I’d done when I heard it post-ketamine, I had to pull myself off of my bed and change the music.

Watch out for these drugs, kids. You never know when they’re going to ruin your favorite song for you (at least I can still listen to it sober fine).

I was unsettled after that. I didn’t know what music to put on that would fix the situation, so I put my iPod on random and started up on the vape again, figuring some weed might normalize me.

It was about 2:30 in the afternoon. Whole lot of tripping to go, according to my calculations. Mescaline hits after a few hours and lasts twelve, acid hits after two and lasts six or more. Damn…so much time to go.

I wasn’t feeling that great anymore. None of the usual body euphoria from mescaline was hitting me. I felt okay, but not great. The anxiety was slow to leave, and I was full of fear of dying (not from the drugs, just in the inevitable sense). Also very thirsty, but then again, I’d thrown up everything I’d had in the early part of the day, aside from that Coke. I drank glass after glass of water. Didn’t want to eat yet, though.

I laid down on my bed and watched the indescribably beautiful colors on the underside of a CD as they shifted and blended. One of the many issues I have with the current status of psychedelics in modern (and historic) Western culture is that there hasn’t yet been much of a need to develop a psychedelic language. These things just can’t be described in sober words, but as long as the majority of people go on never experiencing them, there’s little point to coming up with the vocabulary to communicate like-mind to like-mind. So I’m forced to use sober language to describe the psychedelic realm, and words like “rainbow”, “fractal” and “geometry” just don’t cut it.

I’m forced to use sober language to describe the psychedelic realm, and words like “rainbow”, “fractal” and “geometry” just don’t cut it.

And another problem is, well-intentioned that I am, I honestly don’t know if what I’m doing is going to ultimately be helpful for me or not. There’s no psychedelic support group that I’m personally aware of, though I know they exist. I take these drugs and I listen to these guided meditation sessions which are supposed to be therapeutic, but my main problem comes with integration. What I want is a real guide, who knows the substances and what they’re doing to my psyche and mind (even someone whom I can go to in order to ask about the brain zaps and why they tend to get worse in these meditative states – my theory is that the brain is shocking itself back into a state of awareness as the mind enters the bodiless realms). Because while I’ve educated myself and go on learning more, there are plenty of people out there who have self-educated themselves into delusion. What we need is a new model of the shaman.

The mescaline seemed dulled, somehow. It was lacking its sharpness, both mentally and visually. Of what I’ve ingested, mescaline gives the most “magnified” sort of visual activity – it’s very cellular. Thoughts have tended to be peaceful and mostly comfortable. And the body euphoria! But that pleasant edge was gone. “Unfocused” is what I wrote in my notebook (and what fun I had writing, struggling to get through words one letter at a time, staring delightedly at the page as the script took form on it). I considered doing some automatic writing, but I didn’t want to use up a page of the notebook for the sort of insanity I expected would come from that.

It was nearing 3:00 and I’d eaten nothing all day, so I put some taquitos in the oven. Drank a hard cider along with plenty of water. Don’t think the alcohol affected me much at all. Ate hungrily, but slowly. The tastes of the cheesy bean filling and salsa I was dipping in them were abnormally noticeable, really jumping out on my tastebuds.

Things seemed to wind down a bit after this, early as it was. I vaped more weed and put Four Tet on again, listening to the album on repeat for the rest of the adventure.

Around 5:30 I felt exhausted, and a headache was coming on. I’d thought the two would have me going late into the night, but perhaps the combination was flaming out, my mind depleted early on from the toll they were exacting. I vaped more weed every hour or so, hybrids and indicas, hoping to rid myself of the ache in my head. And it would work for a while, but then it would wear off and the pain would return. Or maybe too much weed was responsible.

My eyes felt worn out, so I turned off the lights and spent the early evening hours watching the room grow darker. The clouds painted on the ceiling were moving lackadaisically, hardly animated any more. It was only 7:30 PM or so. A short-lived trip for either substance.

I had some cannabis wax around 8:30 or 9 PM, and fell asleep shortly thereafter.

Unlike most post-trip mornings when I wake up feeling fine, I had a massive headache when I woke up around 6:00 AM or so (a typical waking time for me). I felt like I’d done something I needed to recover from, and was glad to have the day off to do it.

I was happy to have first tried this combination at home, and glad that I had started conservatively. The experiment was done with festivals in mind, but I doubt that I’ll ever put the two together in an environment like that. If I do try it again, it’ll be in nature, somewhere comfortable where I’m not likely to be disturbed by anyone. I still wonder whether going for the flip with the added MDMA would be worth it (mescaline + MDMA is one of my favorite combinations, but one I’m cautious about employing), but it’s a question I’m willing to wait for a future experiment to answer.

Exp Year: 2011	ExpID: 93375
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 29
Published: May 1, 2019	Views: 2,443
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Cacti - Mescaline-containing (809), LSD (2) : Hangover / Days After (46), Combinations (3), Alone (16)