OFFICIAL NAMES: Mescaline, peyote

STREET NAMES: Buttons, cactus buttons, cactus head, Aztec, chief, big chief, mesc, mescal, mezc, moon, topi, blue cap

DRUG CLASSIFICATIONS: Schedule I, hallucinogen

Overview

Mescaline is said to be the oldest known hallucinogenic drug. Before drugs were manufactured in a lab, cooked up in someone's basement, or stolen from a medicine cabinet for illegal and abusive use, they were found in plants. Often, drugs in plants were discovered quite accidentally.

Foraging for food, early humans used trial and error to determine which plants were edible and, unfortunately, which were deadly. However, some plants that were neither food nor poison had another entirely surprising effect. These plants produced an intoxicated, or drunken, state or caused the user to have visions or hear voices of people who were not there. To the ancients, these waking dreams (which are called hallucinations—distortions of...