Mescaline salts are very interesting. In particular, the sulfate salt 2(MescalineH)SO4 is soluble in hot water, but only slight soluble in cold water. Also, some people have reported that they can extract the natural salt with warm IPA. These extractions result in active resins after drying from what I have read, please correct me if this is wrong.

Mescaline HCl has low solubility in cold 99% IPA/Acetone (some discussion here).

The difference salt behavior is interesting. Why couldn't one pull these natural (more soluble?) MescalineH+ salts in acetone/IPA, then introduce the SO4-- or Cl- ions to see if things crash?

Someone must have tried doing a 99% or 91% IPA pull followed by cold and/or adding HCl. Do the actives crash in this case? I've searched the nexus and the net for this discussion but haven't found it (sometimes people don't report on negative results though).

The case of a warm acetone acetone pull followed by adding and SO4-- is a little more tricky, has anyone worked on this? A relatively neutral SO4-- salt would need to be added with water (to keep pH stable and avoid the more soluble and more acidic (MescalineH)HSO4). Water needs to be added with the salt because as far as I know there are no SO4-- salts soluble in acetone. Also, care must be taken to stay in the one phase region of the acetone/water/salt terniary system (sometimes represented by a gibbs triangle).

It would go something like this for acetone,

1) Extract cactus powder with warm acetone
2) Add X% water to the acetone extract so it can receive neutral SO4-- ions
3) Slowly add Y% salt solution (MgSO4 or (NH4)2SO4) and see if Mescaline sulfate clouds form in cold conditions.

X% and Y% are determined by the gibbs triangle for example. I can't find this triangle for the acetone/water/(MgSO4 or (NH4)2SO4) systems (if anyone can find it I would appreciate it). One can do tests with plain water/acetone and salt solutions. Want to add the max salt without clouds forming or layers separating.

I found the Gibbs triangle for IPA/water/NaCl, but since we could use HCl to test for precious there that is not as interesting. It does suggest that X% = 30 and Y% = 5 (or even Y=15%) would work (keeping the solution safely in the single phase region towards the bottom left as the salt solution is added) but one could be more aggressive (see image below)

Any thoughts? Seems like if this worked out would have been discussed already (?)

Active full spectrum resins can be achieved by using nothing more than water. IPA isnt even needed for that. Its just a matter of making a tea and then reducing it down slowly until the water evaporates off. Care must be taken not to char the resin. But besides that, its a very simple process.

I'm sure you are already aware of that, but for clarity's sake I wanted to point it out.

All the best with your experiments.

For sure. With only water the strategy would be to overload the water with SO4-- salt ions such as from epson salt. In that test, a lot of stuff crashed out and result was gunky. Not sure where the actives went, but it they crashed it would be a faster way to get to the water resin (by decanting/filtering most of the water instead of evaporating it) and it would be more pure (since not everything crashes). One could get fancy and track what crashes at different salt concentrations, maybe that could help isolate the goodies if they do crash at some point. I may try that one day, or maybe someone else can give it a shot.

Cheers

Please excuse my ignorance of chemistry, but what would be the purpose of adding epsom salt? Would it be to isolate the mescaline out of the resin?

It would be added to the water after extracting and before drying. Ideally with pH~6 (+/-1). The increase in SO4-- ions in solution would cause lower solubility sulfate salts to crash. Stuff such as a proteinH+ (that's why higher pH is better cause you'll have more proteins that are not positive) or stuff such as alkaloidH+. Ammonium sulfate is even more soluble than Epson and it could saturate the solution with SO4+ ions even more. Harmala manske is a good example where Cl- are added to the solution by adding NaCl to precipitate the HarmalaH+.

Essentially, by adding Epson to the extracted water before evaporating we would be hoping to form the resin inside the water itself as a goo precipitate (crashing a lot of X+ species in solution as a sulfate salt). Ammonium sulfate may be a good choice to do tests on also.

I see. Thanks for explaining that to me. So the goal is for something purer than what a simple water extraction could produce. It sounds quite challenging. Much success Loveall.

Ok, found the Gibbs triangle for the acetone/ammonium sulfate/water system.

Looks like after a warm acetone extraction, one would need to dilute the acetone all they way down to 35% (ugh), them add drops of 25% ammonium sulfate solution. Risk of no mescaline sulfate crashing because of all the water that needs to be added, would need to be in a cold environment to have a chance, but with that much water the system may freeze in the freezer.

Still looking for the Magnesium Sulfate/Water/Acetone Gibbs triangle.

Here is another system that could be checked for Mescaline HCl crashing after a warm acetone extract: CaCl2/Acetone/Water. Based on the diagram the test would be to dilute the atetone to 70% and start adding 20% CaCl2 drops, all should stay in one phase, something may crash when cold.

Ok, one more. Water, acetone, NaCl. Sorry that the different sources keep on moving the axis around. ~75% acetone solution should be able to absorb 20% NaCl drops.

Boy, i wish i knew something about chemistry here but I don't. All I know of is this thread, but it probably isn't the same at all.

Well, the pH can change the phase diagram for acetone/water/NaCl, with an increased separation region and longer tie lines between water and acetone for higher pH as Benzyme explains.

However for what we are musing about here, we want to have acetone/water that accepts as many SO4-- ions as possible without separating and we need to keep the pH ~ 6 to form the salt we want, so Benzyme's thread does not apply directly here as I understand it.

I think I just learned that MgSO4, acetone and water do not separate (hence why the system could not be found). That may be good news. It could be a way to introduce SO4 ions to try to crash a mescaline sulfate from a cleaned up solution.

Here is this particular musing:

- Filtered cactus water tea
- Add acetone to precipitate gunk from water
- Add MgSO4 to try to precipitate Mescaline Sulfate (and possibly other unwanted stuff)

I think this may be worth a try someday. Cheers.

One more to consider: malic acid.

Soluble in both water and acetone, musing would be to introduce it to water/acetone and hope for mescaline malate to crash.

I thought mescaline is naturally in malate form. How would adding malic acid help?

By adding excess malic acid you would have a bunch of malate- ions. That excess could push the mescaline malate out of solution. Presence of acetone could help since the mescaline malate salt is presumably not soluble in acetone, but malic acid is.

Even if the natural mescaline salt is not malate, the effect is still the same. If we can flood the solution with a lot of ions, salts of lower solubility that share those ions and "could form" will crash. It doesn't matter if you introduced those ions as salts in the first place.

For example, if you mix CaCl2 and NaOH you'll have a mix of 4 different ions (Ca++, Cl-, Na+, OH-). The 4 ions can for 4 types of ionic compounds (the original two, plus NaCl and Ca(OH)2). It turns out that of all these, Ca(OH)2 has lower solubility than the rest, so that will begin to crash first as the others are added.

Malate seems like a possible candidate to look into a priority because we know how to get a "relatively clean" tea with water after adding acetone, and since malic acid is soluble in both, we can try to bomb that solution with it. The more acetone, the less soluble the mescaline salt should be, but malic acid solubility shouldn't be affected.

For example, we already tried straight MgSO4 into water and too much gunky stuff crashes out. It's almost like drying the water 🙃. MgSO4 is not soluble in acetone, so it may not be as useful as malic acid for the cleaned up solution that has acetone added, but who knows: the SO4-- ion is special for mescaline in water (low solubility when cold). Putting an acetone/water/mescalineSalt/MgSO4 extract in the freezer may do something interesting.

We are kind of playing with ideas for fun. It's unlikely that any will work (as you can see from recent posts, many don't). We are after an easy process. This would be, make tea, clean it with acetone, and add malic acid to force mescaline malate to crash.

If you want an easy process that works, base cacti powder to a paste with minimal water (e.g. ratio of 4:12:1 for cacti-powder:water:Ca(OH)2, throw in some NaCl (~20% of water added), pull with warm limonene (lots of paste stirring, if limonene disapears into paste, heat/cool/add more limonene - eventually the paste clumps and frees most of the limonene), add FASI (give the clouds time to form and at least a day to settle, this takes time; check for new clouds with more FASA after settling), decant and wash the mescaline fumarate that crashes with dry acetone. Pretty easy process that others developed and that is knowm to work (it's also what I usually do when not playing around). The spent Limonene/IPA/fumaric can be washed with water a few times (separate the layers) and re-used. Cheers.

Thanks for the explanation loveall.

I am going to try adding MgSO4 as you have outlined below, and am asking guidance for the best possible procedure to follow.

I have some resin lying around that I will dissolve in minimal amounts of water, add acetone to precipitate gunk, then decant the acetone and add MgSO4 in hopes of precipitating the mescaline. Should I heat the acetone when pulling and when adding MgSO4? Is there a range that you could give me for the amount of MgSO4 to add to say a foot worth of resin/tea?

Also, I find this quite interesting to skip the evaporating bit of a tea:

Could I maybe try crashing this and then somehow cleaning up with acetone and adding MgSO4 again to precipitate mainly (hopefully) mescaline?

Adding MgSO4 is just an idea we are playing with and testing. It probably won't work as you want.

If you want to experiment with the resin and are OK with losing it then you can try.

You may not be able to decant the acetone as it will likely mix with the water completely.

After adding the acetone and precipitating the gunk, you can dry the acetone/water. That should give a pretty clean resin. Have you seen phulx's thread?

Thanks for jumping in, just don't want you to lose anything precious 🙂

Yes, that's worth a try with the earlier disclaimer (it very well could not work). To paraphrase,

1) Concentrated cati tea (or resin back in water)
2) Add MgSO4 (say, 30%), collect precipitate in filter. Sidenote: Are you aware of the filter squeeze method? You sandwich the folded filter in paper towels and squeeze the MgSO4 water out. This is done by many when precipitating harmala HCl salts using NaCl.
3) Dry precipitate and wash with acetone
4) Repeat 1)-3)

Note that for 4) you could also dissolve in water, add acetone and remove gunk. Or better yet, do that first and start with phlux's super resin before testing MgSO4 in steps 1-4.

Putting it all together:

1) Concentrated cacti tea
2) Add acetone slowly until crashing stops
3) Remove gunk.
4) Add MgSO4 slowly, at some point it stops dissolving we want to avoid that.
5) Stuff should crash at room temp, collect, dry and wash with acetone.
6) Where is the product? If it is in what crashes out of 5 would be interesting to see what we have at that point. If it does not crash in 5) you can try to freeze it (may have MgSO4 crash too). If it doesn't crash at all, you would need to evap, base in new water, and pull with a solvent to separate the mescaline from the MgSO4 salt.

Cheers

Are we certain that each mescaline containing cactus species produces the same unknown mescaline salt, or that any individual cactus species is incapable of producing multiple salt forms?

I'm not sure, and I don't know.

I have done more tests with warm 99% IPA and warm acetone. I got a very small ammount form the 99% IPA (traces really), and even less from acetone. Standard process (base/Limonene/FASI) after those attempts gave the usual mescaline bulk.