Edit: This thread has now turned into my journal for my first extraction using CIELO. The posts regarding this start here.

The CIELO tek calls for salting with citric acid.

How can we separate mescaline citrate from the other alkaloids?

When using vinegar you can wash with MEK. When using HCL you can wash with acetone and IPA.

Which alkaloids, why do you think they are there in the first place, and if they were, why remove them?

Also what evidence is there that the mentioned washes do anything?

There's always one form of column chromatography or another. Dry flash chromatography is both simple and effective for a lot of things.

On that note, you might as well test your crude mescaline citrate via TLC first, just to see if there really is any reason to bother trying a clean up.

Are you saying that the precipitated crystals are pure mescaline and do not contain other alkaloids?

My understanding is that cactus (and most other plants) do not just contain a single alkaloid but a mixture of different alkaloids.

I read through all 55 pages of 69ron's limonene/vinegar tek, as well as the 12 pages of his limonene/hcl tek.

In there, 69ron mentioned that the crystals contain a mixture of mescaline and non-mescaline alkaloids. If using HCL he said you can wash with acetone/IPA to leave pure mescaline. If using vinegar he said you can wash with cold MEK to leave pure mescaline. He further said that he evaporated the washed solvents and then tested the non-mescaline alkaloids, and that it felt much different than the mescaline. Multiple people in the post confirmed that they had similar experiences.

Have you actually worked with CIELO-precipitated mescaline citrate?

And have you read through the Ethyl acetate approach thread (all 23 pages)?

One analysis showed that it was possible to precipitate technically pure mescaline citrate, but this is likely to depend on the cactus used and variations in extraction technique.

Yes, this what we saw. Pulling with ethyl acetate and salting with citric is selective was selective to mescaline. No other alkaloids were noted in the benzyme's analysis. It is only one analysis, but that is the data we have so far.

Subjectively, and for what it's worth, the effects from the CIELO TEK matched those of know pure mescaline sulfate.

Did 69Ron ever have his product analyzed? I think he was going my subjective experience. It is possible that more alkaloids come through with a different TEK vs CIELO - I don't know.

Hi Loveall, do you think that 1) the non-mescaline alkaloids remain soluble in ethyl acetate, while mescaline citrate precipitates out; or 2) non-mescaline alkaloids are actually a tiny fraction of most cacti and won't significantly affect the results?

AFAIK 69ron went by subjective experience alone. But he showed that a wash of the HCL with acetone/IPA reduced the yield (same with washing vinegar precipitate with cold MEK). That would suggest multiple alkaloids with different solubility properties.



No I have not tried CIELO. I'm deciding between 69ron and CIELO. 69ron goes out of his way to mention purifying the precipitate because he thinks it contains a mixture of alkaloids. So I was confused because the CIELO tek doesn't mention it.

I'm only 3 pages into the ethyl acetate approach thread. After the 55 limonene thread my head is spinning. I did see the analysis you mentioned but I didn't know how to read/interpret the data. I will definitely finish the ethyl acetate approach thread by next week.

I have the same question for you as I asked Loveall: do you think the non-mescaline alkaloids remain dissolved in the ethyl acetate, or do you think the non-mescaline alkaloids are only a tiny fraction of total alkaloids?

Thanks guys.

I think that the non-mescaline alkaloids don't move into the ethyl acetate from the cactus lime paste, but that's just a guess.

Give the Cielo Tek a go, you won't regret it.

In classic A/B approaches, as is 69ron tek, salting out and crystalization are two independent steps.
CIELO allows to do both in one simple step.

Yeah that's pretty much hit. I've tested a bunch of extracts made in different ways from different pedro/pachanoi/peruvianus and they almost always contain exclusively mescaline, with the very occasional trace amount of 3,4-DMPEA.

A lot of that is summed up here: https://www.dmt-nexus.me...aspx?g=posts&t=71353



As linked above, you can see that only some analysis show other alkaloids, and they are generally in trace quantities.. Also, those are analysis of whole cact, not of extracts as typically done by underground chemists, which further select mescaline.




Unless those claims are backed up by some sort of analytical method, take them with a grain (or ton) of salt. "Similar experiences" from "multiple people" does not eliminate the possibility of self-suggestion, and are not evidence of actual difference in alkaloid content.

Oh, that is really interesting. It seems that these other alkaloids having a material effect are perhaps a myth.

How do you guys prefer to powder your cacti?

Some people like to cut the cactus horizontally into cucumber stars. Others prefer cutting vertically into snakes like mentioned in the sticky.

I've read some people like to freeze and thaw multiple times to "break down the cell walls". Is the point of this to just make it easier to cut? Is it necessary?

I have a food dehydrator and blender ready.

In addition, does anyone use white material? Or do you just stick with the green material?

All I would say is, if you are cutting it up (as in stripping spines, white pulp and wax layer) then cucumber stars are easier to strip down just to get the green layer, IMO.

Although its more time consuming I would recommend putting in the effort to just cut out the green layer. I found when doing an extraction using Celio Tek my yields dropped from 3.6% (for memory) when using the green layer only, down to 1.2% when using wax, spines and green layer (inner pulp removed). If you do the green layer only it'll reduce waste on materials used such as EA.

That's just my 2 cents.

I'm not saying there is absolutely no chance of cactus/extracts with higher amounts of other alkaloids but for the most part with those mentioned species this is not demonstrated AFAIK.




I've mostly worked with fresh cact, just cut into small pieces and pressure cook them. If no pressure cooker, you can try mixing freeze and thawing cycles and boiling. Then doing A/B and salting whatever way you prefer. If you want to work with dry tek then thin stars in food dehydrator and then powder it when dry, is prob the way. There are many legitimate ways to go about this.

I'm not aware of side by side comparisons to show with more evidence which ones are more effective, but if you are sensible about it, it should work well.

Good luck

Drying in a food dehydrator is probably the most straightforward way to go if you want to use CIELO or limonene tek. I use a Vitamix to powderize my dried cactus chips.

Do you separate the green layer from the wax layer and from the white layer or do you keep them together for the extraction?

K. Trout has done an exemplary job of collating data in his work, The Cactus Alkaloids. That should give some direction towards understanding what kind of parameters you might be operating with when understanding the selectivity of the CIELO extraction.

By digging a bit deeper into the scientific literature you'll find some more detailed studies, by Ogunbodede or Agurell for example, where multiple examples of the same species are compared side-by-side. References to some of these papers can be found in the relevant areas of the forum, perhaps in the cactus analysis thread IIRC. Here's a great summary by Endlessness that showed up after a little digging around.

It does make me wonder whether ethyl acetate selectively extracts mescaline while leaving behind the isoquinoline alkaloids, and also what the results might be with a DMPEA-rich specimen. Of all the accessory alkaloids, it could be said that DMPEA is the one chemically the most like mescaline, not counting 'lophophine' - homomyristicylamine - which has only ever been detected in trace amounts. DMPEA usually only shows up in trace amounts too, so it would be perhaps unusual if you ever were to recover any significant amount of it.

It seems to me that it would take water based extraction of whole living cuttings, preferrably extracted with just enough heat to maintain a gentle boil for long periods of time, in order to capture and preserve the majority of actives in the cactus material. In reality it would probably take numerous such extractions from various specimens of each of the active species of Trichocereus cactus to gain a decent understanding of what is in there. We should do it. Plenty of chemists and growers on this forum. It would be good to bring some clarity to this matter once and for all. Would it not be possible to analyze such tea to uncover all of the actives contained? Strong preference should be given to material collected from large, mature plants in order to get a fair representation of what these cacti are actually capable of.

At what temperature and for how long do you guys put your cacti in the food dehydrator? I'm thinking 95F (the lowest) just to be on the safe side.

Do you really need to pull off the outer waxy skin? I spent a very long time doing this, and after weighting the skin it was only about 10g wet for 1/2 of a 18" cactus. For the second half I kept the skin on. I'm going to try two extractions, one with skin and one without, to see if it makes a difference.

I also removed the cores plus a few millimeters of white. I'm going to do a third extraction on just these core/white pieces and see what happens.