Hi Woolmer,
I personally think that mescaline is a bit of a dirtier substance in terms of its mechanism of action since it is also a strong adrenergic agonist at alpha 1 receptors. This brings in a whole lot of complications from vasodilation to hypertension in the periphery, merely reflecting on which can trigger anxiety or panic attacks. Moreover, in the brain alpha 1 receptors modulate the release of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and glutamate, which may explain how you experienced strong anxiety due to a sudden increase in cortical excitability. I can't explain with confidence how this state of anxiety lasted over a few weeks since I have not previously researched the after effects of adrenergic stimulants, though since I am developing a deeper interest in mescaline I will hopefully be able to come up with an explanation in the future. I believe my experience was something completely different to a mescaline trip, or it was so heavily altered by the rest of the alkaloids in the lophophora, it became unrecognizable to me.
In this lophophora experience 3 dried buttons that were 5 cms when fresh, one 7 cm button and small chunks (total of four dry buttons that were 3-4 cms when fresh) of caespitose were consumed as a raw blended mixture. This was not boiled. This experience didn't induce any classic mescaline effects but instead created a drastic pitch shift where every sound was toned down to lower frequencies. *At some point during the come up I chewed some harsh gum to relieve tense jaw and had an uncomfortable crunch around my left jaw joint. This will be relevant later on. As I got more affected a feeling of vacuum settled in around the left hemisphere of my head, concentrating especially around the ear. Blood pressure was very high and I could feel a quite strong beat pushing against my index finger when I placed it on the carotid arteries in my neck. Unfortunately, I couldn't manage to properly measure my blood pressure. At some point I felt sleepy, laid down and had very convincing dreams of being a gypsy girl of 3 sisters. This fragment of the experience didn't feel profound at all. It just felt like the reality. Also I never really saw classical patterning, felt euphoria or my thoughts manifested themselves. No psychedelia whatsoever. These make me think that what I ate was not L. williamsii, and if there was any in the mixture it must have been an overwhelming minority. After I woke up I was feeling quite disoriented and buzzy in the head. I had a bit of a vague grain in my vision and I had this extremely unpleasant feeling of vacuum in my left ear. There was this soft windblow that I could hear flowing into my left earhole, as if air was constantly beign sucked into my head and it was very annoying, though this dissapeared with the end of the experience. However what I am going to describe now stuck with me for YEARS: I felt like I was seriously deafened in my left ear and had a 2-tone tinnitus, one incredibly high frequency and a pure tone at 2000 hZ. They had both somatic components, meaning that I could feel the shrill sound as some distant mental pain and the mid frequency as a sensation of pressure in my left side. Also I couldn't feel the vibrations in my eardrums, and didn't even notice that it adds so much to hearing experience before I lost that ability that night. It was weird to me that no test indicated actual hearing loss, though I noticed a trend of 10-decibel loss up to 1000 hZ in my left ear indeed. The assembly line called medicine assesses your health in certain situations so that as long as you are well enough to undertake your tasks you are "fine". These tests for subjective hearing threshold usually consider that you have acute hearing until you are unable to hear 15 deciebels at a given frequency, which is ridiculous. A very long story short, I had to spend a year to self-dianose myself with TMJ after ruling out tumors, any bloody ear condition/disease and a host of systemic diseases. The issue, is I got TMJ because of the tense jaw I experienced, which is ultimately a result of peyote consumption. Also to this day I am still not sure if the auditory after effects are because of TMJ or the cactus. I read the literature regarding TMJ and very limited and precious experience reports of peyote and I am convinced that both are capable of inducing these symptoms. This is the conundrum that put me in odds with psychedelics, since I had a perceivable problem and no clear reason behind it. I had a couple of acid and one mushroom experience after that trip. In those I would only see fleeting CEVs that were partial, as if the machinery producing them was not powering up enough to put up a full show. Although I must say that must be my lack of surrendering myself to pretty much any mind alteration afterwards, which might actually be looking at the same thing from different perspectives now that I think about it. In my last mescaline experience CEV intensity was quite nice, but I must note that I made significant progress with the TMJ treatment meanwhile and tinnitus subsided drastically.
I should thank to Coastal again since I am littering his thread with long posts which sometimes come out as a bit off-topic. After reading this thread I decided to put together all the available information on the practices and easily obtainable supplements to combat the bodyload and notorious mental edge inherent to some cactus experiences. It is really inspiring to me when people care to share difficult experiences with relevant details, since these reports provide us with data we can use to have a better grip on the physiology of the experiences which is one of the biggest strengths of this forum.
