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Cactus DB: idea for a project

Migrated topic.
Adivino

Adivino

Rising Star
I've seen a lot of confusion regarding the identification of psychoactive cacti, in particular T. pachanoi and peruvianus. I'm not a cacti expert (just a noob) and I'm full of doubt when I have the possibility of buying a T. pachanoi. I know some basics traits: spines, shape, color, ribs, a sum of everything after all. However I'm afraid that I may have bought a specimen that's not very interesting. Do not take this bad, I'm not saying that they are not desired, I'm just saying that there's a reason beneath their cultivation: which is most probably their alkaloids.

This is why I don't think that we have to spend a lot of time and effort trying to tell if a cactus is a T. pachanoi or not, a T. peruvianus or a cuzcoensis. Rather, I think that the actual question should be how potent a certain cactus is. Since we don't have standard cacti to compare ours, it's a lot of guessing. Either that or rooting a plant with known potency.

I have an idea that may be too ambitious, but let me write it here. Could we build a database which includes standardized pictures and standardized descriptions of bioassayed cacti together with their subjective comments?

An example of an entry would be:

Images: top, close up of areoles, full body.
Description: size used, age, color, where you suspect it comes from, city (or country) (or continent), wet weight, time of the year it was harvested, method used for ingestion, amount ingested, if done extraction its estimated yield.
Subjective comments.
Subjective potency rating: 0 (no effect), 1 (very mild effects, probably placebo), 2 (mild effects, probably placebo), 3 (noticeable effects, definitely not placebo), 4 (strong effects), 5 (mescaline bliss). It's possible to use decimals. For example 2.5 for mild effects that are definitely not placebo.
Click to expand...

This way we could try to find the most similar cactus to ours and infer its characteristics.
Do you think this will help us identify interesting cacti? What other descriptions would you add?
 
I think coatl dedicated several threads to all the psycho-active cacti available. The only thing is that for coatl, ALL cactusses are sacred so there was no system that indicated the relative power of each type and strain.

Several threads have been going on about this. There is a lot of difference between the several types and the several strains, but there is also a big difference in between individual cacti of each strain itself. Only peyote seems to be pretty consistent.

I think it's a good idea to have such a thread, though.
The best way to get this started is via a poll.
 
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