Hi everyone! I am excited to have found this forum, it seems very active with really cool and humble people and great information.

The other day a friend of mine performed a crude salt extraction on syrian rue. He ground the seeds, soaked in vinegar, filtered, added salt, let crystals precipitate, filter, redissolved in vinegar and hot water, added salt, and was left with a pretty little brown pile.

Anyways, I have been looking all over the forums and have seen the question asked multiple times, but no one ever answered it. Is it safe to smoke harmala salts? Is it much more irritating than the freebase? If you can answer these questions, could you please include the why?

Thanks all.

Do NOT smoke the salts.
Why? You are burning up salt, personally don't know the metabolites, but someone else can tell you exactly why.

You need to convert them to freebase first.

https://wiki.dmt-nexus.m...Y_Harmaloid_Freebase_TEK

Ah, thanks for the quick response! Well, that would certainly explain why my friend's throat hurt the next day..

So let me try to get this straight - my friend needs to redissolve the salts into hot water, filter again, add ammonia, let it settle and then decant and filter?

Just wanted to check that he understands the process, this is his first extraction.
Is ammonia the only thing he can use? He has sodium carbonate that he was going to use for the tek detailed in The Tao of Rue, not sure if that will do the same thing as ammonia.

You can freebase them by adding a sufficient amount of lye in water, making it basic (not sure of the optimal pH for this), then dropping in the harmala salts. The link was the first I came up with from a quick search around the nexus, I suggest you perform a thorough one with these keywords in mind : how to freebase harmala.

Sodium carbonate should work as well (haven't done that myself, the search you will perform will definitely yield results of simple teks using sodium carbonate).

Good luck! And never ever smoke salts again, spread that word!

As a general guide, substances should be in their freebase form to be smoked, and in their salt form they are better to consume orally.

That being said, there are some exceptions and some other aspects related to this. For example, a lot of people smoke changa using caapi leaves which havent been freebased. The caapi leaves themselves contain harmalas in salt form (which exact salt is unknown), and yet they are successfully smoked.

Smoking certain alkaloids in certain salt forms may work because the energy from the lighter might be enough to simply dissociate the acid ions from the alkaloid. But we generally say to avoid this and only smoke freebase alkaloids because more often than not, smoking alkaloid salts won't be effective or might even be dangerous for the following reasons:

1- The salt form of the given alkaloid may have a too high boiling point
2- The alkaloid might break down during combustion instead of vaporizing
3- The combustion could generate irritating/toxic byproducts (for example when smoking fumarate alkaloids, it can lead to the formation of maleic anhydride, hence why we really don't ever recommend fumarates)

oh and, yeah, sodium carbonate works perfectly to freebase harmala salts. You can also read the harmala extraction and separation guide in our wiki for more info.

Neural and endlessness; thank you for helping him to understand the process more. He looked at a few different teks, but he wasn't entirely clear on the process. Some of the most basic terms are still confusing to him, but he is learning quickly.

Resurrecting this old thread instead of starting a new one on the same issue... and hopefully someone with better chemistry than me can answer this:

When making a 10X caapi ( by ethanol or IPA soak) aren't the alkaloids going to be in salt form ?
If they are indeed salts, wouldn't it make the 10X caapi route by definition ( and regardless dose ) less desirable than using fb harmalas?

Thanks much!