Right? It was only a year after I was using frequently with my roommate that I had my first cactus and also got some 2C-I to try. And indeed, mushrooms have a kind of strength and intensity that neither of those really offers, so once I found phenethylamines, I saved mushrooms for heavier trips.
Like once, we had a crazy blizzard which shut everything down with 2.5-3 feet of snow. Two days later when the snow stopped, we spent a few hours in the mid-day shoveling our cars out, and then I carried on with a full 1g trip of my mushrooms. I took them and lied in bed, riding out the intense chills and body load which I always got from bigger doses. I found myself connected with the whole Jungian shared consciousness, and there I encountered Dick Cheney and others I did not recognize chanting in some kind of evil ritual. I consciously directed my will to spiritually counteract this ritual, to try to protect humanity, and felt there were others sharing our conscious space who were doing the same. Once I started to come down after about 4 hours, I logged on to my computer, pulled up the news, and learned that the U.S. Iraq War had just started in those hours. The death and destruction were being reported in almost real-time like some kind of sports event.
Weird but relatable lol. I wish I could say we could trip in better times right now. I could definitely see that from mushrooms though. I'd need a bit more than 1 g with the mushrooms I have but I hope to start pushing up into those realms eventually. I have taken up to 5 g but not in a very long time, since around fifteen years ago when I was basically still new to tripping and thought, "5 g in a dark room is what you're supposed to do, right?" It was quite amazing to me at the time but seems like mostly a bunch of nonsense I couldn't relax into in retrospect.... I've only pushed up to 2 g so far since returning recently but definitely feel like I'm getting more out of it now than I could have then. Hoping to see what all they have to show me for real this time around.
For me, 0.5 g of those mushrooms was enough for significant visuals. If I wanted a more casual and social trip, I'd take maybe around 0.3 g. On that dose, I might still need to sit still and breathe for the first hour or so, but once it was settled, I was good to go. I had one trip with some friends I didn't see often in which myself and some others got insanely hungry at like 2 in the morning, and so we walked to a diner where the most sober of us went inside and ordered food. The rest of us waited outside and decided to discuss the facial expressions which all the cars were making. The whole exercise was so absurdly funny I ended up laughing almost non-stop for the entire time we were waiting for the food. I was told later that my laughing had pissed off a group of drunk people who looked like they were going to kick my ass, but I felt no danger at all at the time. After we brought the food back, I ate my entire egg/potato/green chile/cheese skillet and felt immensely satisfied, and then I was down enough that I was ready to drive home. I had laughed so much that my whole abdomen was aching for almost a week.
That sounds like a lot of fun. And poo on those drunk people. If I'm getting intoxicated having fun I'm sure as hell not going to look down on others for having some fun too. I'll never understand how people can get so upset over people doing something like laughing. I enjoy seeing people enjoy themselves.
The most social I ever was on mushrooms was the first time I ever took them, which was also my second time ever tripping on a psychedelic. I took 2 g and my friend from high school who provided me with my first ever cannabis experience drove me to an EDM club. The whole drive I was twisting around in the back seat walking with my feet on the ceiling of the car like we were in outer space or something. By the time we got to the club I thought we had been on a road trip for a week or so and had been reflecting to myself about it. I hopped out of the car barefoot, strolled into the club, and, walking around confused, accidentally crashed into a wall and flipped the light switch so all the lights suddenly came on, lol. Everyone looked over at me stumbling around and laughed, turned the lights off, and one guy came over and started giving me a light show. I saw his hands and the lights coming right at me and suddenly I was in a different room of the club. The whole night I kept jumping around like that, I remember the whole thing as seeming out of chronological order and with lots of unexplainable gaps, something that generally hasn't happened to me with tripping since then. At one point I came to outside with a girl hugging me and saying "Bye!" and I said "Goodbye!!" My friend turned to me and said "Who was that?" and I said "I don't fucking know." lol.
At one point I came across these two guys who were friends hanging out there together. One of them was drunk and the other was, weirdly enough, on a salvia quid. The latter guy kept describing lots of hilarious visuals, like at one point he thought we were in the stands at a baseball game but also everyone had buckteeth except on the bottom teeth that were coming up through their upper lips. The former guy became very focused on making sure I had water the whole time and just kind of made sure I was okay throughout my trip. I didn't feel like it was necessary at the time and just thought he was too drunk to tell otherwise but I appreciated him nonetheless.
It was one of the most magical nights of my young life for sure. It made me fall in love with clubbing for a while. It was the first time I heard this song, which was an extremely popular club song where I lived at the time:
I remember that when the song started, the club went from everyone individually doing their own thing in separate groups to all dancing in perfect unison. It was pretty amazing to my bemushroomed mind at the time.
Good memories.
Well you enjoy cannabis just fine, even if every plant is different. If you try cacti or mescaline and like the effect, maybe you'll acquire a kind of interest in cactus alkaloids that way you've taken to exploring phyto-cannabinoids. The nice thing about plant psychedelics is that for the most part they can fly under the law enforcement radar. No one, in the US at least, cares if you grow some cacti. Mushrooms can be grown in generous quantity very very discretely. I suspect it will be far easier to decriminalize or legalize plant psychedelics as well than any scheduled chemical drugs. I just wish, like if there actually were a God or something, that we could have legal LSD along with the plant psychedelics.
I do like cannabis, but to be fair I never had any option but to take the plant as it is prior to now. One of my favorite things about phytocannabinoids now is being able to explore each of them individually and separately from any other, like when I took 30 mg of CBC the other day for instance, I specifically waited until the effects seemed to be largely over to go back to smoking more flower. And I'm actually currently tapering down my use of cannabis in general so that I can save my tolerance specifically for only experimenting with precisely dosed and individual phytocannabinoids for now. Being able to just take exactly-dosed units of Δ9-THC orally has been one of my favorite things by far about finally living somewhere where cannabis is legal, and I also quickly learned that I do prefer it without any other phytocannabinoids mixed in, including CBD which I personally find to seem to take away from the things I like the most about Δ9-THC, although I also like exploring with CBD on its own. Today I actually took 40 mg of isolated CBN and had a quite wonderful experience; believe it or not, I'm rapidly beginning to suspect that I might come to like oral CBN more than I like oral Δ9-THC, and end up calling it my favorite phytocannabinoid of all. I do want to have a few more experiments at least before I feel confident in saying that, but things seem like they may be heading in that direction right now. I intend to write a comprehensive trip report about my experiences with it, how they compare to my experiences with oral Δ9-THC, and what I make of it all after I've taken the experiments far enough.
I would certainly be interested in exploring and understanding the other cactus alkaloids that contribute to the differences between the cacti experiences and those on pure mescaline as well. I would just prefer to be able to do it while dosing them each precisely and individually from one another rather than as part of the cacti's default mix, heh. If they're really that much better together I could still just mix them purposefully later on after I discover that through some experimentation. Like with cannabis prior to moving to a legal state though, it's not like I'm going to just not take the cactus out of wishing I could have the chemicals all individually, other than mescaline of course which is the one I would actually theoretically be able to obtain that way currently. My preferences aren't going to make me totally forgo an available altered state experience, but they persist nonetheless.
While I agree with your point about natural psychedelics probably being easier to achieve legalization with than synthetic ones, I also will say I think it's probably LSD that is by far the most likely of all the synthetic psychedelics to become legalized anyway. I think I'd actually be surprised if LSD is ultimately left out of the wave of psychedelic legalization. Perhaps that is wishful thinking, though. I certainly want LSD to become legalized far more than I want it of any natural psychedelics, even though I very much want it for all of them. In part because of how much more difficult it is to obtain otherwise, I suppose. But I also just like it that much.
I would like to become educated in growing natural psychedelics myself, although I'm not really at a point in my life where I'm still wanting to take risks like that currently, even if the risks are relatively small. I really hope they just start appearing in stores soon enough. It does seem to me like psychedelics are on a steady if slow path to becoming more universally accepted, hopefully that's not going to be derailed again.
But I’d try the cacti too even if I had it.
