For Elliott (not his real name), spiritual reflection comes in the form of a hunk of sage-green cactus, carefully cut into pieces the size of a child’s thumb.
Freezing and thawing the chunks in cycles causes them to leach out their chartreuse-hued juice. The next step is to carefully simmer the mixture in water and vinegar, reducing it over the course of many hours. Patience is rewarded with a green-gold syrup, which then cools overnight. Finally, at sunrise, the elixir is ready to be dried in a warm oven.
If everything goes right, what remains is a layer of translucent gold, ready to be scraped into crystals. The result now contains the alkaloids of the San Pedro cactus, with none of its fibrous plant matter. It’s an innocuous-looking compound—you’d be forgiven for mistaking the crystals for sawdust. But when taken at the right dose, this simple extraction has triggered some of the most important revelations in Elliott’s life.
Though he normally prefers to take small doses of around 100 milligrams, Elliott decided to go big one chilly December afternoon in Oregon, downing 550 milligrams in one go. It was a reminder of the sheer power of mescaline, the key psychoactive within the flesh of the San Pedro cactus.
“I was standing on grass, and my feet began to connect to the grass,” the 29-year-old told me. “I put my hands down, and I just felt the energy of the world flow over my hands. I felt the earth. I’ve done basically every kind of psychedelic you can think of. Now I can’t even trip on shrooms anymore because it’s too nerve-wracking. But the cactus has a calmness. It’s like being cradled by space and time. You feel your ego dissolving, but you don’t worry. You just take it all in.”
Elliott credits his ex-girlfriend for introducing him to San Pedro, brewed into a tea in the manner traditional to Indigenous cultures along the Andes, where it grows natively. She also gave him a cactus; he let it grow. It now provides him medicine and a passion, shared online with other psychonauts and cacti-curious minds.
Elliott has done “nearly every psychedelic” one can think of, and proclaims that mescaline has a uniquely gentle touch among its peers. It also saved his life.
“I’ve been hooked on heroin, meth, fentanyl, alcohol, all of it,” he said. “If it wasn’t for mescaline, I’d most likely still be drinking all day, every day, and smoking fent. I love my cooking job now. It sparked my love of music again. I think the mescaline changed something in my brain. I want to be a better person now.”
For most, mentions of mescaline likely inspire images of a mysterious white powder once popular with hedonists like Hunter S. Thompson. To some degree, the stereotypes are true: Mescaline had its heyday from the Great Depression to the 1950s, spurred on by beatniks and intellectuals like Aldous Huxley. Then, seemingly overnight, its popularity plummeted in America and Europe, to be replaced by newer, stronger, and cheaper psychedelics like LSD.
Even today, with modern life inspiring a psychedelic “renaissance” that’s catapulted once-demonized compounds into the Western mainstream, mescaline remains a fringe curiosity, not a protagonist. Instead, the power of mescaline has been largely cultivated and preserved by Indigenous communities and amateur herbalists, who share common ground in their love of plant medicine despite having vastly different beliefs and approaches.
The medicine itself comes from a few select flora: The renowned peyote cactus of North America, the San Pedro cactus of the Andes, and the Bolivian torch cactus. All have the wondrous ability to develop psychoactive alkaloids, namely mescaline, in their flesh. According to Mike Jay, a cultural historian and author of Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic, it’s these plants—not the powdered mescaline synthesized in the 1950s—that have recaptured people’s attention lately. “What’s striking, and what nobody would’ve guessed in the 1950s, is the near disappearance of pure [powdered] mescaline and the enormous resurgence in the use of cacti,” he said.
Mescaline is the oldest known hallucinogen in human history, with evidence of usage stretching back nearly 6,000 years. Anthropologists have even found effigies of dried peyote in the Shumla caves along the Rio Grande and the Texas border dating back to roughly 3700 B.C.
Despite longstanding spiritual use by Native American tribes like the Lipan Apache and Tonkawa, as well as Indigenous groups in northern Mexico and South America, Western observers only grew curious about the power of medicinal cacti in the late 19th century. In 1896, German chemist Arthur Heffter became the first person to take a peyote plant and isolate the psychoactive compound within. Heffter named the chemical “mescaline,” after an alternative name for peyote, “mescal.”
The next milestone arrived two decades later, when Ernst Späth synthesized pure mescaline at the University of Vienna in 1919.
“By 1920, Merck made it widely available as a white powder, sold in a pharmaceutical setting,” said Jay. “That really severed the connection with cacti and botany and Indigenous history. Now, mescaline was just a miracle of modern science, used into the 1950s by cognitive psychologists, artists, and avant-gardists.”
Scientists hoped that the compound’s mind-warping power could unlock the secrets of brain function, and they used mescaline in a variety of human trials. Ultimately, researchers were disappointed to discover that, despite superficial similarities, a mescaline trip had very little in common with chronic conditions like schizophrenia or psychosis. But outside the lab, mescaline fueled a litany of creatives and fringe thinkers of the mid-20th century, who used the drug to reach new dimensions of perception, consciousness, and self-reflection.
It was unlike alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, or codeine—instead of simply intoxicating, mescaline seemed to enlighten. Devotees included French theater pioneer Antonin Artaud, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and most of all, Aldous Huxley. The English philosopher detailed his mescaline trips in the groundbreaking 1954 book The Doors of Perception, preaching its power to reveal “the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.” His experiences even inspired his friend, the psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, to coin the term “psychedelic,” combining the Greek words for “mind” and “reveal.” Later, Hunter S. Thompson would extoll the value of sucking down “pellets” of mescaline in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, writing colorful descriptions of wonked-out trips and the joys of mixing drugs.
(To be fair, not every big-brained thinker enjoyed their foray into psychedelia. Jean-Paul Sartre was famously “seized with fear” at visions of serpents, and complained his mescaline trip left him seeing imaginary crabs.)
Mescaline would go on to fascinate others working on the cutting edge of human perception, including the legendary chemist Alexander Shulgin, whose first trip inspired him to seek related compounds that would have similar effects. He went on to study and synthesize MDMA, 2C compounds, and a slew of other phenethylamines, which affect the body’s flow of serotonin to supercharge mood, perception, and desire.
“Although mescaline is not very potent—the dose is 200–300 milligrams—it has characteristic features such as beautiful color visions and synesthesia that most other phenethylamines do not produce,” David Nichols, a pioneering pharmacologist and researcher of psychedelics who worked closely with Shulgin, told me over email. “It’s also unique because it was the first, and only, phenethylamine produced by a plant.”
But by the time the counterculture bloomed in the 1960s, mescaline was rapidly supplanted by LSD as the object of fascination. Part of this was due to the cultural attention brought on by its proponents, notably researcher Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass), who pioneered hands-on research while at Harvard University. But LSD also had a number of practical advantages: It had a quicker come-up and a shorter duration, making it possible to trip in, say, six hours versus the usual half-day needed for mescaline. LSD was also far more potent, making it more economical and practical than mescaline for both research and recreational use. Finally, mescaline had a reputation for triggering nausea—symbolically appropriate in a spiritual setting, but a turn-off for counterculture kids trying to party.
By the late 1960s, the phenomenon of young people choosing to “turn on, tune in, and drop out” was reaching new heights. Spurred by a spreading moral panic over drugs, President Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act into law in 1970, banning nearly every psychedelic drug—including mescaline—on a national level.
This included the peyote beloved by Native Americans, who were already well accustomed to the threat of federal prosecution impacting their lives. After forcing Native Americans to resettle onto reservations in the late 1800s, the U.S. government cracked down on their tribal languages, celebrations, and dances, hoping to force assimilation and quash any semblance of dissent or independence. Faced with the destruction of their distinct cultures, many communities began to quietly adopt the peyote ceremony from tribes in Texas and Oklahoma, seeking solidarity, wisdom, and an affirmed sense of identity through the early 1900s.
By melding ancient tribal culture and the peyote sacrament with elements of Christianity, Native Americans legitimized a new pan-Indian faith in just a few decades. It was dubbed the “Native American Church,” and it survived the fight for religious recognition intact. It now touts an estimated 250,000 members.
Access to peyote remains the crux, as it always was. The Native American Church fought hard for the right to peyote as a bona fide religious sacrament, despite repeated efforts by the U.S. to ban harvesting of the cacti in the 1880s, 1930s, and 1970s—it was only in 1994 that the federal government formally recognized the right for members to buy, transport, and consume the plant. This an achievement that 52-year-old Sandor Iron Rope does not take for granted.
“There’s always been a problem with our access to plant medicine, and a willful misunderstanding of Indigenous cultures,” Iron Rope told me. “As tribal people, we’ve had to advocate hard for legislation to allow us to harvest peyote, transport it, and ingest it. It’s been a fight all along.”
As an Oglala Lakota man raised on the peyote ceremony, Iron Rope has spent a lifetime contemplating how plant medicine both reflects the past and spurs future healing. Iron Rope is a founding board member for the nonprofit Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative, which attempts to protect Native access to peyote in southern Texas. He’s also a president of the Native American Church in South Dakota, where he leads peyote ceremonies on Lakota territory.
For all its spiritual magnificence, the peyote plant is rather unassuming—it looks like a button-shaped squash, sometimes topped with delicate pink flowers. But for Iron Rope, the cactus is a living being, the “eyes and ears of all things”: “It is your grandma, your grandpa, your ancestral knowledge,” he said.
Iron Rope often leads peyote ceremonies on Saturdays, starting with the raising of a magnificent tipi and the lighting of a fire within. The ceremony frequently focuses on an individual or family seeking clarity and relief, with peyote consumed over the course of the night. Songs, percussion, prayer and affirmations, led by a “road man” like Iron Rope, are used to guide the spiritual energy. Eventually, as the sun rises, the meeting concludes with a sharing of food and water—much-needed nourishment after a sleepless evening, but also a metaphor for renewal.
“I think our hope is to really realize the connection to Mother Earth and all the medicinal gifts she gives to us,” Iron Rope said. “Mental health is a concern in our community, and COVID has made us more distant than ever from one another. Our trust in community has to be rebuilt, reawakened. And for us Indigenous people, peyote helps us see that connection to all things.”
Getting the peyote, however, still relies on a minuscule network of peyoteros, or peyote dealers, who have special licensing from the Drug Enforcement Administration to harvest and sell the cacti to Native people. It’s been this way for more than 100 years, with Native American Church communities around the country depending on peyoteros as caretakers, not just vendors.
Peyote used to dot the entire landscape of the southern Texas plains, with gargantuan patches peeking through the mottled shadows of honey mesquite trees. Old peyoteros tell of a time when a crew of pickers could go roaming and each harvest 1,000 buttons—enough to make a living off the job alone.
The last few decades, however, have scarred the environment with human development. Bulldozing the chaparral is great if you’re a rancher in need of new cattle grazing lands, or perhaps a developer trying to raise a Walmart. But when it comes to peyote, such change to the habitat has been an existential crisis complicated by the fact that the vast majority of peyote territory is currently owned by private ranchers. This forces peyoteros to negotiate pricey short-term leases for access, and spurs the presence of illegal poachers, who jump fences at night.
All of these factors have withered not just the number of peyote cacti, but the number of peyoteros: As of a 2018 report, there are only four working in southern Texas.
Given the delicate context, Iron Rope remains apprehensive about how a modern psychedelic trend could affect this ecosystem. Native leaders across America have spoken out against efforts to decriminalize peyote for all, instead favoring the existing legal exemption for the Native American Church. Perhaps ironically, this is a view shared by many amateur mescaline experts online. As Elliott puts it: “Don’t fuck with peyote. Don’t eat that stuff. Keep the peyote going. It’s not for us.”
On Reddit’s r/mescaline page, pretty much every thread asking about peyote includes adamant suggestions against sourcing or harvesting it. Poaching is viewed as a deadly sin, and some consider it a waste to trip on a plant that can take decades to mature. Instead, curious minds are pointed toward much faster-growing, less-threatened species like San Pedro and Bolivian torch, which are legal to grow in the U.S. and can be readily purchased online. (Membership in the Reddit forums for mescaline and San Pedro cacti grew dramatically during the pandemic—perhaps all that time inside inspired interest in mind-bending cacti.)
The only wrinkle is that these cacti often have considerably lower mescaline concentrations than peyote, meaning you have to eat (or drink) more of it to feel its effects—a potentially unfortunate fact, given the intense nausea and potential vomiting that mescaline cacti can trigger. Such was the conundrum that pseudonymous Thomas, a 21-year-old in South Carolina, faced after a recent viewing of the Netflix documentary series How to Change Your Mind sparked a new fascination with mescaline.
“The most common option is to make a tea with the cutting and drink, like, a solid liter of snot that smells like vomit and cigarette butts. And you pretty much have to throw it up,” Thomas said. “The second is to boil that down to about a cup. It’s still really, really gross, and again, you’ll probably end up purging.”
Thomas improvised his own solution: He took chopped-up pieces of Bolivian torch cacti, tossed them in a dehydrator, then pulverized the dry pieces into powder. He gulped down the powder with some soda, then waited. Everything was fine, until it wasn’t—about 90 minutes in, as the dried plant matter bloated in his stomach, Thomas knew he had to spew. So much for all that work, he thought.
Soon, however, Thomas began to feel a transcendental force wash over him. Part of it was euphoria: “Everything was in its right place, and everything was going to be all right,” he recalled. But more than that, he felt the power of insight into his body and health. Suddenly, it was as if he could “communicate telepathically” with his muscles. Giddy with energy, Thomas began exercising in his room.
This was unlike his previous trips on psilocybin mushrooms, which sometimes left him feeling like a passenger on an unplanned ride. The cactus gifted him control and the ability to introspect, he told me.
Again and again, people who experiment with mescaline cacti say that they conjure uniquely gentle, long-lasting psychedelic breakthroughs full of reverence. While some psychonauts seek synthetic or otherwise highly purified forms of mescaline, Thomas is now a budding expert on cacti, intrigued as much by the plant as the promise of a powerful trip.
Many new mescaline users, like Thomas, rely on online recipes to extract and consume a more concentrated form of mescaline, rather than consuming the whole plant cuttings. Others go a little further: Last spring, after having pored over existing recipes on the internet, Elliott devised his own “tek” (slang for “technique”) in the hunt for clean mescaline crystals. The best teks required some basic lab-grade chemicals and equipment, but Elliott wanted a simpler alternative using just vinegar, water, heat, and time.
He was surprised to discover his elegant tek, which he posted online after several test batches, had earned him something resembling a fandom. Now, Elliott continues to invest time in several online hubs to help others hone their process. He even gives away his extractions, hoping to spur more interest into a psychedelic that has shifted the course of his life.
He’s not alone: Many Native American and Indigenous people suggest that their experiences with peyote and other mescaline cacti, especially in the context of a spiritual ceremony, have allowed them to stave off trauma and harmful addiction. That link has inspired one clinical startup, Journey Colab, to announce it is pursuing mescaline research with the goal of obtaining FDA approval for the treatment of alcohol use disorder. One study even suggested that mescaline use may improve symptoms of PTSD and depression, with an “afterglow” effect that lasts beyond the mescaline trip itself.
Nonetheless, to my knowledge, there are zero active clinical trials for human use of mescaline in the U.S. today—a somewhat unusual situation given the rapidly rising interest (and corporate investment) into psychedelics as mental health treatments. One problem is that, despite its longstanding use by humans, there’s very little existing clinical research on mescaline, said Albert Garcia-Romeu, a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who studies the effects of psychedelics on the human body.
“And because mescaline is a natural product that is not owned by any pharma company, there are few people willing to pony up the money and spend all the time necessary to make it and subject it to all the requisite safety testing. It costs a lot, with little hope for [return on investment],” Garcia-Romeu added.
In other words, we may not see mescaline mentioned in the same breath as ketamine, MDMA, psilocybin, and LSD for some time. Jay noted that while pharma juggernauts like Merck and Sigma-Aldrich still supply pure mescaline, legal use is heavily limited beyond forensic analysis and toxicology. Elliott tells me mescaline isn’t even all that popular on the dark web, making it a weird contradiction in the modern drug scene: People know of mescaline, but few have actually consumed it.
There’s some relief in that for Iron Rope, who remains skeptical of the Western approach to using plant medicines. Creating a communal haven, informed by ritual and the wisdom of elders, has been key to keeping the peyote ceremony safe and effective, he told me. Iron Rope questions whether true healing can take place in a clinic with a practitioner who may not have any personal experience or bond to the medicine. Most of all, he’s perturbed by the push to monetize psychedelics en masse.
“It feels unethical to me,” he said. “You’re developing these medicines for what? You say healing, but underlining that is profit. For Indigenous cultures, profit is unheard of. Monetary value is a modern idea, and mixing that with our traditions of ceremony and healing is wrong. But that’s the direction society is going in.”
For now, Iron Rope is focused on the IPCI’s mission to build up its “home site” in southern Texas, on a legendary property known as the Peyote Gardens. He’s planning a pilgrimage there with young Lakota people in March, and he hopes that in the near future, the IPCI will secure its own license to harvest and distribute peyote from the site, at a lower price than the peyoteros offer.
“I see growing interest in the peyote ceremony from various Indigenous communities and especially the younger generation, people in their 20s,” Iron Rope observed. “I’m getting older, but I have a responsibility to teach proper spiritual etiquette and protocol to these young people who are searching for their culture.”
Part of that is treating the cacti as if it is a living being and asking it for permission and wisdom. A peyote cut with the intention of making a buck has a “different molecular structure” than one that has been blessed with prayer, Iron Rope said—an ethereal idea that affirms the ties between human, plant, and earth.
Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that one can sense a similar energy in the subculture of DIY mescaline lovers, even with the lack of religiosity. Elliott, for one, spoke of mescaline with awe and appreciation, and bluntly rejected the notion that he could make money by evangelizing on his growing knowledge and methods.
“Honestly, that’s a disgusting idea. I’m not doing this for profit,” Elliott declared, scrunching his face on our video call for effect. “I’m doing it for one reason: so more people can hopefully experience this immensely beautiful thing.”