Hi folks,

I dunno why nobody seems to be doing this? Acetone is all you need. Super simple.


I just tried putting 15g of san pedro powder into 50mL of warm acetone. Kept it warm and shake it up a few times over some hours. Let the powder settle.

Pour off the liquid from the powder and dehydrate it. You get a very potent little bit of goo. I smear it into lemonade and drink. I'm on it right now

Ugh, I hate acetone. Water is a little less toxic and smells way better. Just sayin...

lol yeah I love water too. cactus tea tho is yucky.

easiest way to consume cactus powder remains capsules.

but i have found that sometimes the digestion does not seem to work well enough and so the extract is more likely to work.

I'm not sure what salt form mescaline is in cactus. I also dont know if that form is very soluble in acetone. In freebase it would def be, so you could base it before.

Did you do an estimate yield from that goo based on potency after ingesting? Have you extracted in any other way from same cact to compare?

whatever salt form it is, yes it's soluble in acetone that is for sure.

my estimate yield is a bit tricky, but i'm doing another extraction so i'll have better figures...

all i can say is that i got 2 experiences out of the 2 pulls from 15g of pedro... 1 day after the next... my guess is that had i taken it all at once it would have been close to the potency of the actual pedro powder itself.

this is a new batch of pedro powder tho so i can't really tell you about it yet. but the last batch of pedro powder was 1% mesc and 1% other alks from what i could tell.

Any update on the second extraction, this sounds interesting. I may try this soon, I'm currently playing with cacti powder extraction.

Did you try putting the warm acetone in the freezer after the pull? Maybe something interesting crashes out (?)

The two experiences on 15 grams of Pedro material makes me skeptical. For me 30 grams is a very very mild experience, pretty much threshold. And isn't this the "metta molecule" guy? Lol. Maybe its a placebo effect.

Still, I have high hopes Loveall will have a simple effective cactus tek for us soon, with all the experiments lately. Personally I am leaning towards Pete666s cactus powder STB.

Thanks Tony, understood.

The claim was made so I did a test.

Added dry acetone to cacti powder in a jar. In a hot water bath the acetone was brought to a boil. That was filtered into a Pyrex dish and allowed to dry. The result was a deep dark green tar.

The tar was dissolved in water with NaOH and NaCl, followed by warm limonene pulls. The Limonene turned a dark green.

FASI was added to the Limonene. I was expecting nothing to happen since I always assumed that natural mescaline salts would be insoluble in boiling acetone. However, clouds formed 🤷‍♂️

An unexpected result. I'm not going to say it is mescaline (eg could be a concentrated impurity that is crashing). I was thinking I would observe no cloudiness and be able to dismiss the original claim in this thread, but that is not what happened.

Anyone else already do this hot acetone work that could shed some light here? Otherwise I'll keep on testing this path to see where it goes.

I would like to report that my second attempt was not very successful. I don't know why the first one seemed to be so efficient.

Thanks, did you warm it up by the same amount? If it does work, the temperature may be very important.

Also, was there a difference in the acetone age (it can absorb water over time unless kept over a drying agent). Did you control the acetone water content somehow?

I think I may try this next,

- Extract cactus powder with boiling/hoy dry acetone -> (Is the natural mescaline salt soluble in this?)
- Add fumaric acid powder to the acetone (~1g/100ml) -> Excess fumaric acid could help force out all the potential mescaline fumarate salts (common ion effect).
- Investigate the resulting precipitate

Could also be tested with boiling 99% IPA followed by adding ~3g/100ml of fumaric acid.

Citric acid could be tried too.

All this of course may not work at all.

I did warm it up... not sure exactly the same amount ... I think that it may have absorbed more water than the first time because I hadn't considered that issue and I was soaking it for longer.

A knowledgeable Nexus member insists it's the malate, which makes sense in terms of CAM metabolism in the cactus. There are several ways of testing this hypothesis, as well as the solubility of mescaline malate in acetone.

Dfz, could you please describe somehow these ways of testing?

One that most easily springs to mind would be:
Extract freebase mescaline into one of the usual nonpolar solvents and salt with malic acid (available from brewing supplies). Use the resulting mescaline malate to test it solubility in acetone and also as a reference standard for later use.

Then, if this works:(Here)

it should be possible to evaporate that plain water extract to dryness and pull from the residue with hot acetone. Titrating this with sulfuric acid could separate mescaline sulfate from the malic acid - but it would be prudent to check the solubility of malic acid in acetone first. Anyhow, after filtration the resulting liquid might possibly be a solution of malic acid in acetone, most likely with a bunch of other compounds, and with the assumption that both mescaline malate and malic acid are indeed soluble in acetone.

This would be subject to confirmatory tests such as TLC and presumptive colour reagents.

Another approach would be to treat the plain water cactus extract with Ca(OH)2, dry, pull mescaline with a solvent - acetone? - dry the lime residue then treat it with sulfuric acid to liberate crude malic acid. Purify the malic acid with recrystallisation, perhaps taking advantage of different solubilities in different solvents.

Was this from a different batch of dried cactus? It seems a bit odd, otherwise, that damp acetone should make a difference considering M malate is said to be soluble in both.

Dealing with living organisms as we are, all sorts of variables come into play. For example, many plants esterify the hydroxy group of malic acid with caffeic acid to make caffeoylmalic acid. Something like this may also happen in cacti, I'll have to check the literature [and, though Trout's Cactus Chemistry mentions caffeic acid but once, a number of ferulic acid derivatives are listed - ferulic acid being a methylated derivative of caffeic acid]. [This article: https://www.researchgate...olism_pathways_in_plants shows how these things tie together somewhat.]

A caffeoylmalate would exhibit a different solubility profile and will likely interact with metal cations to a greater extent than plain malate; A caffeoylmalate complexed to, e.g., calcium or magnesium would quite possibly exhibit a lower solubility in acetone than plain malate would.

One advantage, therefore, of acid boils is that it would circumvent this particular variable, should it be the case.

Thanks, DWFZ that's interesting stuff.

Based on my earlier test, I'm thinking that it is possible for the natural salt to go into boiling acetone (the temperature may be important, simply "warm" may not be reliable enough). I tried to see if anything crashed after cooling the acetone and got some cloudiness but I could not catch it in a filter. However, after drying the acetone pull and redesolving in water to do the usual aquous-base/Limonene/FASA, candidate Mescaline powder is recovered which is positive with Marquis. But like I said before, I'm not certain yet that it is Mescaline.

I wonder what would happen if we added HCl to the hot acetone pull before cooling. I assume the (less soluble?) MescalineHCl salt would crash and be able to be filtered out. Pulling raw cacti powder with boiling acetone, adding HCl, and recovering Mescaline salt precipitate sounds too good to be true though 🙃

I'm not sure sulfuric acid would work, since the solution would be very acidic and the salt (MescalineH)HSO4 could form, instead of the ideal 2(MescalineH)SO4.

It may also be interesting to add fumaric acid near saturation (1g/100ml) and cool to room temperature. Or even malic acid too (that acid is very soluble in acetone) to see if we can take advantage of the common ion effect.

Further evidence of caffeic acid, present at 10% in juice of Opuntia sp. fruit:
https://www.researchgate...ORPYRIFOS_IN_ALBINO_RATS
So at least some cacti produce caffeic acid, at least sometimes (it's a pretty ubiquitous molecule in the plant world).

Loveall - thanks for the feedback. I like the idea of potential common-ion salting out of Mesc malate! Glad you can confirm malic acid's high solubility in acetone. In that respect it becomes more useful than fumaric acid, which is a bit of a pain to dissolve in anything much. Being able to get a higher concentration of malic acid will increase the chances of salting out occurring, surely.

I'd be cautious of mixing HCl with boiling acetone for too long, self-condensation might occur. A review of the literature would inform in this respect too, of course.

I'm not sure if this is worth anything, but earlier today I mixed about 40 ml of warm acetone into 10g of resin for 20 minutes and after decanting have placed it in the freezer with no signs of precipitation after 5 hours. I am wanting to try this again tomorrow but with a warmer pull as loveall has stated. The resin was made just from a tea.

Yeah, that's interesting. I think I'm going to do something similar (but starting with cacti powder) and add HCl to the cold acetone. I may also try adding malic acid to the acetone too.

I cleaned up the precipitate observed in in the post above with a mini A/B.

The amount obtained was decreased by a lot, indicating most of the original precipitate was impurities. The remaining amount of cleaned powder is miniscule. It did have an orange reaction with Marquis, but the amount is insubstantial for boiling acetone to be practical.

The OP did not dry the acetone before hand. Perhaps the presence of water helped him.

I'm not going to pursue boiling acetone further for pulls, as adding water to the acetone seems like a can of worms. It may be more practical to simply extract with plain water, then add the acetone to remove impurities (which was worked on the nexus before).

I also tried boiling 99% IPA, got a measurable quantity from that (more than with dry acetone) but yield seem low (was also orange under Marquis).

I think extracting with these solvents alone is a dead end based in my personal results. If anything dry acetone could be a pre-clean (unless I did something wrong).