Whereas a high dose can fundamentally reframe your relationship with Life, a microdose of San Pedro is like Adderall infused with a subtle sense of gratitude for being alive.
I’ve written numerous other articles about the life-altering power of consuming full doses of San Pedro. This article, however, is about consuming small amounts of San Pedro during an otherwise normal day of life.
My career in harvesting, preparing, and consuming San Pedro goes back by almost two decades. But it wasn’t until this past year that I started experimenting with micro-dosing San Pedro.
As I have expounded in other articles, I strongly advocate preparing your own San Pedro, as opposed to buying it from some dude who says he has good stuff. The benefits to the DIY approach are numerous:
Sourcing a cutting
To prepare San Pedro, the first thing you need to do is source a cutting. The best way to do this is to grow your own plant — either indoors or outdoors, depending on where you live.
Otherwise, you can buy a cutting from a nursery. San Pedro is legally sold in plant nurseries everywhere from California and Arizona to Spain, South Africa, Israel, New Zealand, etc.
If you don’t live in one of these places, you can also buy cuttings online. If you live in the US, try
AWCO.
A nice wall of San Pedro outside of a storefront in Cumbayá, Ecuador.
Preparation
There are a few different preparation methods, although I only recommend two of them. The first method is to put the green flesh into the water and boil it down and then drink it. I go into detail about this method in my article
DIY Mescaline: How to explore San Pedro without a guide. If you want to take a full dose, this works marvelously. But for micro-dosing, it’s less practical.
The second method is to dehydrate the green flesh and grind it into a powder. I describe this method in
Macro-Dosing Mescaline: The danger of not consuming enough San Pedro. Incidentally, this is also the best preparation method for micro-dosing. The powder is easier to dose in small quantities, and you can store it at room temperature for months — if not longer — without reducing its potency.
I ‘m fortunate to live in Ecuador, where San Pedro grows abundantly in gardens, roadsides, and Andean hillsides. For my micro-dosing experiments, I made two different batches, each from the same species of cactus (
Echinopsis pachanoi) but from different parts of the country. I made Batch A from a cutting sourced from a relatively young cactus growing in a garden in Cumbayá, just outside of Quito. Then a few months later I made Batch B from a huge old cactus that was growing near the city of Ibarra.
In both cases, I dehydrated only the green flesh, which is where the mescaline is most abundant. As always, I excluded the white pulp, which only has marginal amounts of mescaline and tastes even less agreeable than the green flesh. If you use only the green flesh, your medicine will be stronger per unit of weight — which means that you only need to consume a very small amount. And it will taste slightly less bad. I strongly recommend using only the green flesh.
Samples from Batch A (left) and Batch B (right). Why the difference in color? Most likely due to the drying conditions. I dehydrated Batch A in a dry environment with sunny weather, and the process went quickly. I dehydrated Batch B in an extremely humid place with rainy weather, and it took a while.
Dosage experiments
When to Ingest: In all cases, I ingested the dose shortly after waking up. Mescaline is a stimulant, and it’s long-lasting — even at small doses. So taking it at nighttime is a bad idea unless you don’t want to sleep. Morning is the perfect time to take it. I always ingested it within 10–30 minutes of eating breakfast — sometimes before, sometimes after. And I would only do it once per week.
How to Ingest: In all cases, I weighed the powder on a food/cannabis scale to ensure the precise weight, and then added the powder to a cup of water and stirred it in. A few times I added honey or sugar to the water, to try to soften the bitterness, but it doesn’t really help. Now I just drink it like a shot. It’s not that bad.
Dosage Comparison: Each batch yielded 19–20 grams of a highly-concentrated green powder, from arm-length sections of cactus that I would ordinarily use as one full dose of San Pedro. In other words, 19–20 grams roughly equates to one “macro-dose” for one person — i.e., a full journey’s worth.
This is the entirety of Batch B before processing, which would qualify as a solid dose for one person who is looking to go deep. Its green flesh ultimately yielded 19 grams of highly-concentrated powder.
0.5 Grams (Batch A): This was the first dose I tried — roughly equivalent to 2.5% of a full dose. I did it in a beautiful place surrounded by nature, but it was a workday. As it turned out, this dosage was below the threshold of perceptibility, in the sense that I never
explicitly felt any effects from the San Pedro, either physically or psychologically. But I had a really good day.
Creativity and mood were both enhanced subtly but noticeably, and my mind was sharp. I was fully capable of managing all daily tasks, social interactions, and physical activities — I could have effectively led a meeting or made a public speech, had I been called to do so. My energy level was high and sustained throughout the day. And the impetus for task-completion was unquestionably strong — shit got done.
I really liked how subtle the effects were, but it left me curious about what a stronger dose would feel like.
2.0 Grams (Batch A): For my second dose, I jumped up to 2 grams (roughly 10% of a full dose), and it did not go as well. Shortly after ingestion, I felt the physical jitters I associate with the onset of a full dose of San Pedro — similar to what I feel if I consume too much coffee. It ranged from mildly to moderately uncomfortable. Again I was in a beautiful place surrounded by nature. This time I was too jittery to sit down and write, so I got up and started doing heavy manual labor in the yard.
About two hours after ingestion, I started feeling subtle waves of psychedelic awareness. It was kind of nice, but the jitters dampened the pleasure of it, and the psychedelia wasn’t deep enough to have a lasting impact. It was exactly what I warned about in my “Macro-Dosing Mescaline” article: I was in that weird Interzone between normalcy and a proper mescaline experience, which seemed to have the downsides of both without the benefits of either.
I tried skinny-dipping in a cold river, to flush the jitters out of my system, but it didn’t work. I ended up spending a few hours just kind of sitting around, doing nothing. Fortunately I didn’t see anyone during this stretch, but if I did, it would have been hard to “play it cool.” It felt like I drank two really big cups of coffee and then chased it with a heady strain of Sativa. It was the feeling of having too much energy and no way to properly channel it.
At about six hours into the experience, the jitters gradually wore off, and so did the subtle psychedelic awareness. The rest of the day had the feeling of a coffee hangover.
1.0 Grams (Batch A): This, too, was over the threshold of perceptibility. Again I felt the jitters. It was only slightly uncomfortable, but it was distracting enough to impede a creative activity like writing. Working in the yard was okay, but less pleasant than it normally is. A few times I felt the whiff of psychedelic awareness pass through, but only a whiff. Overall, it was not something I would want to repeat.
Batch A, dehydrated in the sun and then ground in a coffee grinder.
Back to 0.5 Grams (Batch A): After my experiences with 2 grams and 1 gram, I went back to limiting the dosage to 0.5 grams, and the results were the same as they were the first time. Zero jitters, zero explicit physical and psychological effects, but noticeably positive effects on creativity, mood, and energy. And once again, work got done.
My day was also peppered with little moments of appreciation for Existence. It’s a feeling I also experience without ingesting anything, but on this day those moments came more often. It was nice.
To illustrate what I mean by sub-threshold and yet still noticeable, here’s a hypothetical scenario. If someone had somehow slipped this amount of powder into my drink in the morning (and I somehow didn’t notice the acrid taste), I would have never known I had consumed San Pedro that day. But later, if asked how my day went, I would likely describe it as a good day, and I wouldn’t necessarily know why. I would have also gotten a ton of stuff done.
I went on to repeat this dosage several times, and it was always positive. It felt like I had found my optimal dosage.
0.7 Grams (Batch A): In the interest of fine-tuning the dosage, I eventually moved up to 0.7 grams. This amount was still within the sweet spot — below the threshold of physical discomfort but accompanied by a subtle boost in creativity, mood, and energy. And, yet again, focus and task-completion were unquestionably high. I finally designated this as my optimal dose for Batch A — roughly 3.5% of a full dose. One or two days a week, this is how I would start off my day. It never failed to produce what I call “a pretty good day.”
Set and Setting
I also experimented with micro-dosing San Pedro in four different locations. Two of the locations were beaches, one was a forest, and one was a city. In all cases, micro-dosing the optimal amount yielded days that I would rate “better” than baseline days (i.e., non-micro-dosing days) in the same place. (“Better” in the sense of overall well-being and awareness, in addition to levels of creativity, mood, energy, and focus.)
One day I even micro-dosed in Quito (a city I do not particularly enjoy) on a day of heavy civil unrest (the riots of October 2019), and the results were still positive. But in general, places of natural beauty are much more conducive to a fruitful San Pedro experience, regardless of the dosage.
This is not the source of Batch B. It’s just a nice little specimen I saw in Quito one day.
Batch B
After a few months of experimenting with Batch A, I made Batch B and started testing it. Although the powder from Batch B wasn’t as beguilingly green as Batch A, it was slightly more potent.
A dose of 0.7 grams yielded some jitters, but it was still generally a positive experience. If anything, the impetus for task-completion was too high — once I got started on a task, there was no stopping me until the task was complete. It actually felt a lot like Adderall.
Ultimately, I settled on 0.5 grams as the optimal dosage from Batch B (roughly 2.6% of a full dose). I found this to be a good balance between productivity and a general sense of well-being.
Comparing San Pedro to other psychedelics
How would I compare San Pedro to LSD and psilocybin mushrooms, as a tool for micro-dosing? One thing for sure is that it’s much more task-oriented. It’s like a preternaturally effective cup of coffee with no midday crash. Or, to use another analogy, it’s like Adderall but groovier, more fluid.
As I said in the disclaimer above, everyone reacts differently to different plants and chemical compounds. Hopefully the data I’ve shared here serves as a useful starting point for your own experiments.
