At Nick’s Garden Center and Farm Market in Aurora, it takes some searching to find the few San Pedro cacti for sale inside of the sprawling greenhouse.
On Tuesday afternoon, fresh Christmas wreathes and holiday decorations garnered more attention from customers of the nursery at 2001 S. Chambers Road than the shelves of cacti displayed farther back. Even as two women paused to peer at eye-catching varieties like golden barrel cactus, the spiky, green San Pedro cacti sat largely unnoticed among more than 200 other plants.
“I think it’s beautiful, but it doesn’t have any shocking features,” horticulturist Colette Haskell, 49, said. Still, when the garden center stocks up on San Pedro cacti, or Trichocereus, “they definitely do sell out pretty quickly,” she added.
An enthusiastic following of both professional and amateur horticulturists is growing around the cactus, as they largely prize it for its appearance. But with the recent decriminalization of certain natural psychedelics in Colorado, interest in San Pedro cacti is rising for another reason: it’s a source of mescaline, a hallucinogen that can result in euphoric feelings, a boost in energy, distortions of space, time and perception, nausea and more.
Native to South America, the San Pedro cacti is illegally poached for its mescaline, as is the peyote cacti, or Lophophora williamsii – a plant endemic to the southern U.S. and northern México that’s considered a religious sacrament by some Native Americans. Horticulturists and members of the Native American Church worry about how to effectively keep these plants around for years to come, but Colorado’s growers see hope in their survival.
“People are into house plants again,” Haskell said. “It’s like the ’70s all over again.”
Store-bought vs. home-grown
Typically, Nick’s customers choose San Pedro cacti for collective purposes, religious reasons and preventative measures to keep it from extinction, Haskell said.
The business purchases from professional growers certified by the U.S. Agriculture Department to grow the plants from seeds, not people who harvest wild cacti. It can only buy them in limited amounts because they grow slowly, “and they shouldn’t be harvested irresponsibly,” Haskell said.
She pointed to one real fear in her industry: plant poaching. “You can’t just buy from some guy who comes in and says he’s got all these San Pedros,” she added.
Among the seven in stock, the smallest at 6 inches tall was priced at $44.99, while the largest — towering over patrons in its seven-gallon pot — could be bought for $429.99.
Meanwhile, Jacob Lara, a 28-year-old Denverite, sells San Pedro cacti fully rooted at $15 per foot on Facebook Marketplace, with his plants ranging in height from 6 inches to over 2 feet.
“In California, you’ll find, I’m talking like, 8- to 10-foot San Pedro cactuses in people’s front yards,” he said. “I did not have perfect growing conditions,” so his cacti usually reach an average size.
Many of his customers are other plant cultivators. “There’s not really a very big psychedelic culture around mescaline,” Lara said. “It’s still kind of like a very elusive hallucinogen.”
Last year, Coloradans voted to decriminalize the personal possession, growing, use and sharing of mescaline for adults, along with several other naturally-occurring psychedelics, through the passage of Proposition 122. The sale of these psychedelics and any underage access remains illegal, with the federal government labeling mescaline a Schedule I substance under the Controlled Substances Act.
“A lot of people in this subculture really value just the aesthetic of the plants,” Lara said. “I’ve met nobody that cultivates them for the mescaline.”
Pre-Proposition 122
The 2022 National Survey on Drug Use and Health reported that about 8.5 million Americans aged 12 and older who partook in illicit drugs over one year’s time consumed hallucinogens. Mescaline isn’t asked about specifically because “it’s not that prevalent at all,” said Joshua Kappel, attorney and founding partner of cannabis and psychedelics law firm Vicente LLP.
He said hundreds of cacti species contain various amounts of mescaline, with the plants legally sold across the U.S.
Even before Proposition 122 passed, “people have been selling San Pedro cactus in Colorado for decades. It’s not like this is something new,” Kappel said. “A lot of people buy these cactuses, and don’t know that they even contain mescaline.”
He called mescaline’s overall legal status “incredibly gray.”
“You can’t sell natural medicines in Colorado,” Kappel said, but “the commonly-accepted status is that you can grow cacti containing mescaline for ornamental purposes.”
“Special protections” are given to the peyote cacti, with “exceptions for religious uses of peyote by the Native American Church,” Kappel added.
“Original plant stewards”
The Native American Church considers peyote a sacred being, and “mescaline is part of that being,” said Troy, the Last Captive of the Comanches, taken in the old way by Eviyah and brought into the Ohnononuh band of Numunuh as Kwinnai mahkweetsoi okweetuni (He who saves the eagle from the water).
He also just goes by Troy. “Where the peyote grows is our homeland,” he said.
As a Kwihnia Puhakat (Eagle Priest), Troy’s part of the Piah Puha Kahni (Mother Church) of the Comanche Native American Church. The Comanche people settled in southwest Oklahoma after moving across the Plains states, including Colorado.
They’ve long held ceremonies where “all are welcome to pray, sing, and eat peyote,” according to the Comanche National Museum and Cultural Center. “The Creator also said when you eat the peyote, you will know me.”
And in South America, pre-Columbian cultures similarly used San Pedro cacti for rituals, with shamans still turning to them today for healing purposes. The name San Pedro is an allusion to “St. Peter’s role as the gatekeeper to heaven,” the Journal of Ethnopharmacology says.
The ritual includes “sniff tobacco with alcohol, ingest San Pedro, pinpoint the diseases, cleanse the evil and ‘florecer’ (flourish) the sick person,” according to the National Library of Medicine.
“The longer a cactus has been stored, the stronger and the higher its content in mescaline-derived alkaloids will be,” with an individual cactus’ mescaline content also varying based on its environmental temperature, levels of rainfall and more.
Mescaline can be consumed as a powder, tablet, capsule or liquid, with the option to chew peyote fresh or dried, the Alcohol and Drug Foundation says.
The decriminalization of mescaline and other naturally-occurring psychedelics “puts a deeper stress on these plant medicines,” with thieves stealing the San Pedro and peyote cacti, Troy said.
Instead, he’s pushing for the societal acceptance of synthetic alternatives like LSD, which remains illegal, to mitigate the damage to nature. However, “if people want to grow things, I really don’t have a problem with that,” Troy said. “That would help the destruction of these different natural areas to slow down.”
He’s working to support Indigenous communities that serve as “original plant stewards” through benefit honoring, the practice of individuals, medical and psychedelic companies donating percentages of their incomes to create land trusts, build conservation infrastructure for sacred plants and more.
“Maybe, one day”
North of the Colorado line, in Cheyenne, 34-year-old Joshua Church grows San Pedro cacti, which occupy a sentimental place in his heart.
In 2019, he proposed to his now-wife at the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Afterward, they visited their first cactus nursery, and spent about $400 on the spiny plants.
Two years later, their daughter was born with a natural green thumb. Church called her “very much involved, even only at 2 years old.”
He estimates that around 80% of San Pedro cacti cultivators grow them because of their love for the plant. “While some of the people that have been growing for years and years, they do partake” in mescaline, propagating them solely for that reason is considered “more of a newbie thing,” Church said.
He sells boxes made up of San Pedro cacti, succulents and other cactus variations – “collector’s items” – which average in price between $95 to $120 per box.
He’s turned down would-be customers who’ve tried to buy his cacti specifically for mescaline. “That’s not really the purposes of why I grow,” Church said.
Although he’s never taken mescaline, he’s not against it. “Maybe, one day, I will try that.”
