Simple water extraction works so well, you have to wonder, is there even a need to improve upon it by resorting to an alternate solvent? The beauty of water extraction is that the volume can be reduced all the way down to almost no water left remaining: this being a dry resin. Or a shot glass sized portion of tea. Both are easy to produce, and no chemicals are needed, just water. The main downside is that the product is full spectrum, but at that point acetone might make sense if you were so inclined. But water is the way to go. It is very easy, safe, and effective. Just reduce it down to the concentration you want. I usually end up drinking somewhere from 8 to 16 ounces of tea as a single dose. Concentrating it down more than that usually gives me stomach problems, so I just drink the extra liquid instead. I've always used live cuttings. I find that boiling the tea for at least 12 hours produces the best results. Its very effective and strong.

No doubt that water extractions are extremely easy and effective, but it all depends on what you are after. I would like to have a simple method to extract mescaline so that I can tell the mescaline content of my individual cacti.

Also, is it really true that you would be pulling "full-spectrum" with water? I thought, based on this thread, that the other alkaloids are in such minuscule amounts that they do not have any effect at all.

The water will pull out other alkaloids that are in the cactus, as well as some mucilage and impurities. The role of secondary alkaloids is not that well understood with these cacti. However people consistently report different effects from different species of Trichocereus and even from different clones within a species. And this has been my experience as well. So there is probably some role played by the secondary alkaloids that is not well understood at this point.

But regardless of whether or not one wishes to isolate just the mescaline, I would imagine that water based extraction should be the starting point. I know very little about chemistry, so perhaps I am mispeaking here. But why not allow the water to effectively pull a full spectrum extract, then reduce it down to the desired concentration, and then clean it up and isolate further using acetone or some other solvent? It just seems like water extraction should be the starting point, since it works so well and is extremely safe.

Water extraction is great, but in my experience does not work with powdered cactus.

I'm pretty sure other people have found a way to make it work. But if not, then thats just another reason to use cuttings instead of powder. The primary use for powder seems to be capsules, when cuttings arent available or affordable. Live cuttings are superior though, since they can so easily be brewed into tea, and you actually know what you're working with, instead of relying on the good faith on an incense vendor.

The issue that I have right now, and something to be thought of in the future for when this inevitably arises, is that my cacti are speckled with black rot. It is too tedious to pick this stuff out but If I were to throw it out it would be a waste of a decent bit of cactus. It would be nice to know if there is a way to extract from it without having anything toxic come through. Other than that, I don't think boiling works bad at all. If we had a good, easy, efficient, extraction though, that would be nice.

Sounds like they need less water if there is rot like that. Why not stop watering until the rot heals and scabs over? It should only take a few weeks. Then you can make tea with those cacti without having to cut anything out. The scab tissue will get filtered out of the tea at the end, just like the clear skin and the spines. It shouldnt affect the final tea at all.

But this would only make sense to do if the rot is "speckled" over the surface as you describe. Rot that is deep into the cactus is a different matter.

Look at the bottom of this bridgesii. I planted that cutting last fall. It broke off from a larger bridgesii during a storm with lots of rain and wind. It ended up getting that black rot blistering on the surface of the cactus. But I didnt give it any water until this spring, and the rot all healed up and scabbed over. When it is healed like that it is fine to use for tea.

It makes sense that the OP had water in her/his acetone when she/he got a positive bioassay. In this post there is a paper that describes how to separate alkaloids and proteins using ~ 85% aqueous acetone* (chilled). The OP may have had less water, but he heated his acetone.

When using dry acetone, I got no product of consequence.

A little bit of water (and lack of water) could explain the different results in this thread.

Interestingly, an aqueous acetone extract could be an alternative/complementary to ethanol extraction. It should be free of proteins for one.

Cheers.

*How I estimated 85% acetone. The paper used 5 volumes of acetone on fresh cacti. Assuming cacti volume is ~93% water, the acetone by volume is 1-93/593 ~ 85%.

It would be very surprising if mescaline salts could be extracted with dry acetone or isopropanol.
Even pure ethanol is not very good solvent for this purpose.

Why using something suitable for extraction of freebase to extract the salt?

IMO something more polar is needed, so at least some water has to be there to dissolve the salts.
90% ethanol, IPA or acetone would be better.

Dry acetone could be maybe used to extract cactus powder made alkaline (ethanol surely could be used this way)

Yeah, regarding the natural mesclaine salt and acetone that is the conclusion we have reached so far based on results in this thread. To summarize:

1) Dry acetone does not extract mescaline salt from the plant, even when boiling.
2) In the literature 85% chilled acetone was used to extract alkaloids and leave proteins behind. They were checking how radioactive tyrosine was being used by the cacti to make proteins vs alkaloids.

In short, cold 85% acetone may help give a cleaner extract.

I am running an experiment now:

1) 75.5 % everclear extract (5x). Chill in freezer and filter.
2) Dry and pickup product in a little water, decant/filter.
3) Add 5 volumes of chilled acetone -> gunk is crashing 🙂

I think the dried filtrate from step 3 should be cleaner than the usual ethanol/water resin (steps 1 and 2 can be done in reverse order as you have noted doubledog) and which is already pretty concentrated.

IMO Most of the gunk will be left behind in step 2 and step 3 will only slightly improve concentration of the product.
I recommend to add warm acetone to warm water solution and then slowly cool it.
But be carefull, with too high % of semipolar solvent there could be crystalization within gunk layer.

Once I did something very similar as you plan, except using Ipa instead of acetone and very high ratio of IPA to water.
After freezing, there were long needles (some 5 cm long) of crystals mixed with crashed gunk.
Seemed that crystalization is possible, but not good separation.