Mescaline, Peyote and San Pedro: Is sustainability important for cacti consumers?

Dr Liam Engel providing cactus education at EGA’s Garden States 2022. Photo by Big Doofa.

Peyote is under threat in the wild, yet 20% of people in a recent study reported consuming Peyote collected from native habitats 🤯😔🌵

EGA’s cacti guy, Dr Liam Engel has just published the paper ‘Mescaline, Peyote and San Pedro: Is sustainability important for cacti consumers?’ based on data obtained via the Global Drug Survey in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. The paper is open access and it is our hope that it will be read widely and encourage more sustainable approaches towards Peyote, first and foremost, but also to San Pedro.

Preferencing cultivated plants can protect vulnerable plants in the wild; not just for mescaline cacti, but also for DMT Acacia, ayahuasca vine and a wide variety of psychoactive and non-psychoactive plants. Gardening is good for the environment 🍃♻️🏞️💚🌱

Read the full paper here.

Abstract

Background and Aims

Both Peyote and San Pedro cacti contain mescaline, a classical psychedelic eliciting mystical and visual effects, but only Peyote is a vulnerable species. We sought to address the questions 1; do people who use Peyote substitute with San Pedro, and vice versa, and; 2. how popular is the use of wild harvested mescaline cactus compared with the use of cultivated plants?

Methods

Data were collected as part of the 2022 Global Drug Survey, a self-report survey distributed internationally in 11 languages. We asked mescaline cacti consumers about consumption practices, preferences and conservation and conducted chi square tests of associations comparing all motivations by preferred mescaline source.

Results

Of participants who reported using mescaline in the last 12 months (N = 284; 73.2% male, 21.8% female, 5.0% other gender; mean age 36.3, SD 12.5), 20.0% reported consuming Peyote collected from native habitats. Of participants specifying Peyote as their preferred source of mescaline, 82.2% had consumed Peyote in the past 12 months. Indigenous cultural traditions (57.8%), availability (40.0%) and environmental sustainability (33.3%) were the most commonly reported motivations for Peyote preference (n = 45), whereas for San Pedro (n = 86), availability (54.7%), potency (45.3%) and indigenous cultural traditions (44.2%) were most the commonly reported San Pedro preference motivations. Price and potency were significantly more likely to be chosen by those preferring San Pedro compared with Peyote. Less than 7% of participants who consumed San Pedro in the past 12 months had consumed San Pedro from native habitats. Of the participants who specified San Pedro as their preferred source of mescaline, 96.5% had consumed San Pedro in past 12 months. San Pedro was the most commonly reported source of mescaline product consumed (56.1%) with Trichocereus bridgesii being the most reported preferred San Pedro species. Mescaline cacti consumed in the last 12 months rarely deviated from mescaline cacti of preference.

Conclusions

Wild Peyote is not the most popular mescaline source, but consumption of related products remains unsustainable. Promoting San Pedro as a Peyote substitute may act as an intervention to reduce Peyote consumption.