Where In The World Is Evan?

After reading Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception while I was in Bangkok I’d become quite intrigued by his self documented experience with mescaline. Huxley makes an interesting sociological argument about the role of alcohol in western society. The boring nature of most of our lives creates a demand for a readily available and socially acceptable inebriant to allow us to experience altered states of consciousness. Whilst he argues that in an ideal society this need would be abated we must face the reality of our present condition.

The social acceptance of alcohol, as opposed to marijuana or other inebriants, is a historical oddity, primarily of western society. He argues that so long as society requires an inebriant is behoves us in the modern era to discard the historical acceptance of alcohol in favour of a drug that has less detrimental side effects. Every year we see countless deaths and acts of violence caused by the aggressive effects of alcohol. Mescaline, he argues, whilst not being completely free of negative side effects itself is a much more spiritually and intellectually satisfying drug than alcohol, and instead of producing aggression it induces a sense of well being and respect for the beauty of nature.

With a long history of use by Native American Indians the processing of mescaline from San Pedro and Peyote cacti is reasonably well understood. With this in mind I happened to come by 9’7” of San Pedro cactus, and along with three friends began the slow process of extraction.

Mescaline is a hallucinogenic alkaloid that is found primarily in the rich green layer of flesh just below the waxy skin of the cactus. To properly process the alkaloids is a relatively simple procedure in theory, but as we were to discover, it takes a damn long time and is a dirty and unpleasant job.

In all the literature we’d read while researching this project the average threshold dose for mescaline is about one to one and a half foot of cactus per trip. With the quantity we had we figured we should be able to produce enough for six good strong trips.

Step 1: Despining
Before you can freely handle the cactus you must first painstakingly remove each and every one of the razor sharp spines that cover the outer point of the star shaped cactus. With a team of four people working in tandem it took us several hours just to complete this initial preparatory step.

Step 2: Skinning
Once the spines are removed you need to lift the wax like skin of the cactus off the fleshy layer without damaging what lies underneath. What sounds so simple in theory is in fact a very slow and extremely tedious process. Inclusive of regular breaks to mitigate the crippling boredom this took a full day of three people’s labour to complete.

Step 3: Coring
After the removal of the skin you need to separate the alkaloid rich green and white flesh layers from the tough fibrous core that gives the cactus its structural integrity. This can be done pretty quickly with a knife but handling the cactus during this phase is rather unpleasant as it oozes a highly sticky sap that invariably gets stuck all over your hands and clothes.

Step 4: Blending
To extract the alkaloids from what’s left of the cactus you need to break down the flesh in a blender with a small quantity of water mixed with citric acid. The resulting product looks disconcertingly similar to a viscous jug of green mucus. Imagine the sort of thick green snot you get with a bad case of the flu, and then multiply its quantity until you have about 20 litres of it. Despite all our preparation we’d just not considered the sheer volume of material that we would be dealing with.

Step 5: Boiling
Once you have your mucus paste you need to mix it with an equal quantity of water and boil it on the stove. As this increased our gross volume of product to around 40 litres the kitchen began to look like something out of a horror film with four pots of boiling green snot on the stove, and two buckets and an esky sitting on the floor.

Step 6: Strain and Repeat
When the snot has been boiled for a sufficient period of time you strain the cactus pulp from the acidic solution using a simple cloth filter, and then add more acidic water and repeat the process two more times. Thankfully each time the process is repeated the resulting hydrated solution looks less and less objectionable, as the mucus membranes in the cactus pulp are broken down by the prolonged heat.

Step 7: Reduce
After all the pulp has been boiled and strained three times the resulting solution is itself reboiled and allowed to reduce to a consumable quantity. From the lofty peak of 40 litres we were able to extract a final product of approximately two litres.

In total it took us over four days of continuous toil to produce a two litre milk carton of green-black solution from 9’7” of cactus. Needless to say we had high hopes for our mescaline experience after so much work.

The final stage of the processing was completed down at my family’s beach house and the resulting product consumed there. Unfortunately one of the participants couldn’t come and we were reduced to just three people.

After a reasonably sedate day of mental relaxation and preparation we each consumed 330 ml (equivalent to 1’6” of cactus) of solution. Actually drinking the stuff was no small task in itself, as it tasted like rotting seaweed mixed with lemon juice. Almost instantaneously the solution produced mild stomach cramps and nausea.

After 45 minutes time the onset of symptoms became apparent when the camp fire I was sitting around suddenly flared—not in any physical way, but rather, it flared with radiant intensity and an indefinable significance. This perception was frustratingly fleeting, however, so we resolved to play some hacky-sack in the hope of stimulating our digestion. After two hours, and with no observable increase in the intensity of symptoms, we retuned inside and consumed the remaining litre of solution.

An hour or so later, and still with no increase in symptoms, J ran inside to use the toilet. He emerged quite a while later looking rather worse for wear and admitting to having ‘purged’. By this time my stomach cramps had taken over from the very mild euphoric effect of the mescaline and I was in quite a bit of discomfort. When B dashed inside to use the toilet an hour later I tried to convince myself that my stomach cramps were a good thing. J and B couldn’t very well hope for any increase in their mescaline experience if they’d purged the solution.

To ease the discomfort we went inside and started to smoke some pot. This revealed the most unexpected of outcomes. Something in the solution seemed to be blocking the effect of the marijuana. We smoked cone after cone but just couldn’t get stoned.

I was very soon, however, to discover for myself the meaning of ‘purged’. A crippling bowel spasm sent me running for the toilet just in time to experience explosive diarrhoea like I’ve never had before.

We’d gone into this experiment expecting a truly memorable experience, and in a perverse sort of way that’s exactly what we got. Who could ever forget the experience of shitting green snot for every hour or two for 24 hours straight?