a friend has a blackish chunk of yopo extract. when he heard somewhere that it is supposed to be amber colored he started worrying about it and would love his to be amber colored too. is there a way of removing impurities from it?

This has worked well:

* dry your extract completely. Then break it up into a fine powder.
* mix in a generous amount of acetone (available as a 100% pure solvent at most hardware stores) to soak up the bufotenine. Filter out the solids, evaporate your acetone to get a pretty good extract (about 75% calcium bufotenate).
* dissolve your extract in just enough 91% isopropyl alcohol to make a thick syrup.
* add 2 parts water. Filter out and SAVE the solids. The solids are your calcium bufotenate and the water should be discarded. Now you have nearly 90% pure calcium bufotenate.

Is that one from experience?

I haven't seen that one before.


Black, that's what a very impure Yopo extract looks like after it sits for several months.

I would crush it to a powder if possible and then dissolve it in acetone. Most of the impurities won't dissolve. Pour it through a cotton ball in a funnel (HDPE plastic, polypropylene plastic, glass, or metal should be used, other plastics might melt) to remove the solids that won't dissolve. That should give you an amber substance after the solvent evaporates.

Then add citric acid to the acetone (it should be pre-dissolved in acetone before use). Bufotenine citrate will precipitate out of the acetone (as well as a few other alkaloids). Keep adding more until precipitation stops. Wait an hour or so and all the bufotenine citrate will sink to the bottom and form one large mass of yellowish crystals. Pour off the acetone and discard it. The crystals will start absorbing water from the air and turn dark amber brown and sticky.

Then you need to freebase the bufotenine again by adding an equal amount of sodium carbonate, and a little water. It should be thick like syrup, not watery. Mix for about 5 minutes, it’s now freebase bufotenine (and some other alkaloids). Then mix in plenty of acetone and wait a minute for the water to settle to the bottom (it only settles to the bottom because sodium carbonate it in it and sodium carbonate is extremely insoluble in acetone). The acetone will be amber. Pour off the acetone being careful not to pour off the water and sodium carbonate at the bottom. Add more acetone, mix. Pour off the acetone. Repeat until the acetone is nearly clear. Evaporate the acetone to get nearly pure bufotenine (and some other alkaloids). The result is often light amber. You’ll never get pure bufotenine this way though because an amber alkaloid is always going to be present. I think it’s a beta-carboline.



Pure bufotenine is actually nearly white, almost colorless. Bufotenine from Yopo is extremely hard to purify.

SWIM has tried many tricks to get bufotenine from Yopo to crystallize, and none of them worked. The only time SWIM ever got pure bufotenine (almost completely white, and very slightly amber) is when he followed the method Jonathan Ott used found here: www.tacethno.com/info/bufotenine/pharmanopo.html

Unless you can get chloroform and ethyl acetate, don’t even bother. It doesn’t work with other solvents. SWIM tried. SWIM did it with DCM instead of chloroform thinking it would work because DCM is very similar to chloroform, but he ended up with a sticky dark amber mess. It was very potent, but could never be crystallized.

The amber material is extremely difficult to remove from the bufotenine. It’s an alkaloid of some kind. It’s insoluble in heptane and naphtha, but so is bufotenine according to SWIM’s tests. The first time SWIM tried to extract bufotenine in an A/B extraction he used naphtha, and almost nothing got extracted. The only time the extraction produced crystals was when the exactly solvent Ott used was used.

The amber junk is poorly soluble in chloroform but bufotenine is very soluble in it and that’s why the method Jonathan Ott used works. The amber material is extremely soluble in ethyl acetone, but bufotenine is not as soluble in it. The amber material is more water soluble than bufotenine is, and that’s why ethyl acetate is used to crystallize bufotenine in Ott’s method.

SWIM would really like to be able to purify bufotenine using a method that’s simpler than what Ott used. It’s hard to get hold of chloroform and ethyl acetate.

Yes, my friend didn't write that but he's followed it and gotten lovely results.
I've posted the entire tek a few times, I thought once here?
Maybe not.
I think I got it from Drugs Forum.

noman.. does it have to be isopropyl or can ethanol also be used?

my friend doesn't really need it to be pure crystals. he would be very happy about getting something amber colored. he doesn't trust black extracts.

he unfortunatly used a silver spoon to stir the solution once. after he took the spoon out of the solution it was shiny silver. before it was darkish oxidized silver. he thought he had used a stainless steel spoon until he pulled it out of the solution.

if he hadn't used the silver spoon he wouldn't have bothered purifying it further. he is afraid that some oxidized silver might be in there. that would surely not be healthy if smoked!

thanks a lot!

lorax can you please report on the results/effects when you get there? thanks.

what kind of filter did your friend use for this noman? a friend of mine has had great loss of substance in coffee filters.

flyboy - my friend hasn't tried it out yet. instead he just went about a new batch of 100g of colubrina seeds which he extracted. this time his product is dark dark dark yellow. looks black in the heap but spread out thin its amber in color. my friend will post a picture of it soon.