It has a distinctive growth habit, with a straight spiny trunk topped by more-or-less spineless thinner branches.

[3] Above the trunk the plant has a crown of branching thinner stems, which may be entirely spineless or bear spines reduced to a few bristles.

[4] In 1920, Britton and Rose placed it in the genus Browningia, named for Webster E Browning (1869-1942), director of the Instituto Inglés, Santiago, Chile.

[6] The synthetic form of the last-named of these compounds has, since the 1970s, been manufactured as a designer drug of abuse and touted as MDMA - resulting in numerous hospitalisations and a number of fatalities.

[7][8][9][10] Based upon the discovery of the psychotropic effects of and subsequent use of such well-known hallucinogenic species as Lophophora williamsii and Echinopsis pachanoi by various groups of Native Americans, Echeverría & Niemeyer advance the very tentative hypothesis that B. candelaris might similarly have been investigated and employed by the original inhabitants of northern Chile: The occasional use of B. candelaris as source of hallucinogens may be suggested, given its presence along the route connecting the settlements in the Azapa Valley of Northern Chile with the Titicaca basin in the Bolivian altiplano, the site of the Tiwanaku state.