What, swimbo was the first one? Ha!
Swimbo can’t tell the yield cause he’s pulling from a highly concentrated bottle (frozen, pressed material, a lot of it). As a matter of fact he’s still pulling 4g each time. If there ever was a bulk method this ought to be it. Swimbo will try again with 400mg next time. Also he will recruit a fellow pschonaut to make sure its not just him going bonkers. He has definitely had 500mg of HCI b4, nothing like this.
Borderline hyperspace, cartoonland shit…newish territory after 20 years of tripping
It took a while to come on, just as usual, so not a particular fast absorption. He expected threshold effects since that was from a pull that wasn’t even sparkly needle crystals, just white powder. Boy, he was in for a surprise! He tried to ignore the effects initially but had to sit down eventually. There were iridescent metallic looking mandalas. Even pure gold colored stuff. Never seen anything like this before. When swimbo’s buddy showed up he said he couldn’t tell just by looking at him but his brains were hanging out for sure. LOL

Good idea with the hot acetone wash. Swim will try this to reX.

after more people have tried this we should write up a new CITLO tek!

👍🏻

should this be dry acetone for washing?
Can you clean Toluene the same way as EA?

Not sure if needs to be dry acetone. It is less likely to loose any product with dry acetone, so why not. I would use fresh acetone and evaporate to check for any loss of product.

I think so. A sodium carbonate or (for toluene only) NaOH water wash should remove any excess benzoic acid. You can check with a pH strip.

Heya. - Turns out there is a 40% loss when washing with acetone. Methanol and IPA dissolves most everything too. So does EA. No way 40% of this material is bad. Bummer, since there are some of those notorious solvent burbs swim wants to get rid of. Maybe Re-X is a better way to clean it up?

Any other progress on using this CITLO approach with cactus and some better method of cleaning the Toluene from the Benzoate?

oezti13's experience seems to hint at the fact that the mesc in the Benzoate form may be more bioavailable? That would certainly upset the usual dosage comparison of these other salts with the HCl 'standard' based only on chemical properties. Since redosing via 'recycling' is a thing with mescaline it's clear that a whole lot of it is not metabolised in the body first time round.

Anyone else try the Benzoate yet?

This suggests to me it would be worth looking at the specific metabolic effects of benzoic acid especially wrt mescaline, and/or how benzoate affects the excretion of mescaline.

IIRC, benzoate gets excreted as hippuric acid, which is formed by the combination of benzoic acid with glycine. Would this alteration of glycine levels in the CNS increase the effects of mescaline? Is ~300mg or so of benzoic acid/benzoate sufficient to have that effect though? A roughly similar proportion of it gets excreted as the glucuronide, after all.

In any case, it would be good to hear a few more reports with using mescaline benzoate, for sure.

Thanks DFZ. I have absolutely less than zero knowledge of metabolic effects!

But whether its increased bio-availability or some other form of metabolic 'amplification' via the benzoic acid oetzi13 was pretty sure that the effect was both real and substantial. My only experience with m.HCl is my own 'sanchez' attempts before I kinda gave up on that method a while back due to complexity. Loveall's CIELO rekindled my interest with a vengeance.

So, I am keen to test this Benzoate - I am very familiar with 300mg Citrate dose as I find it a really great 'enhancement' for a day out doing anything in the open air. It would be good to compare to 300mg Benzoate, which is apparenty ~74% of HCl vs Citrate's ~60%. I have also got some raw cactus material and m.citrate on hand as I am in the process of evaluating the alkaloid contents of my cactus garden.

Now, while I am comfortable following tek recipes, I do not have the underlying knowledge or confidence to branch out too far on my own so to speak. So let me propose two things and if someone with the requisite knowledge and experience wouldn't mind reading and suggesting improvements I would really appreciate.

Two ways I can see to make some m.Benzoate -

1. convert some existing m.citrate via a mini a/b route - quantities unknown here if someone could suggest? I guess I would be aiming to end up with a gram of m.benzoate here - or around 3 x300mg doses.
So: base some citrate crystals with NaOH solution and pull with Toluene then salt Toluene with Benzoic acid (or saturated Benzoic Acid/Toluene solution) to get m.benzoate crystals.

2. Start with cactus powder ala CIELO/CITLO and pull with Toluene and salt with benzoic saturated Touene or powder. (I have some dry Bridgesii powder of known 2-3% citrate yield, oetzi13 started with tea).

I am not quite sure of the modifications to CIELO required by (2), especially the paste phase - still with Lime or does it need NaOH/KOH?.


Cleaning:

As a consumer of GBL in my early days I can totally relate to 'solvent burps' and would like to avoid that as far as possible (aside from any other inherent toxicity issues).

oetzi13 mentioned he lost like 40% with acetone wash. If he got the 'burps' before doing that I reckon cleaning would nevertheless be a valuable step. Loveall however mentioned evaporating the acetone to see if anything dissolved in it (I don't think oetzi13 did that). Would that evap 'return' most of the lost 40%? Surely it had to go into the acetone, right? Would the remaining traces of Toluene survive this cleaning and evap and return too as it takes forever to evap?

Any advice or recommendations on the above before I dive in? TIA

Nice work Oetzi!!! Very cool discovery.

Can you tell us a little more about your starting material? You just used the juice from frozen and pressed cacti? Do you think that pulls most of the alkaloids? It would certainly seem effective!

Congrats

Also I see that Benzoic acid is not that soluble in cold water, does that mean Mescaline Benzoate will possess similar properties? Or does it not work like that?

Mescaline benzoate is not very soluble in water (it's less soluble than m. sulphate) and it seems to be quite soluble in ethanol, IPA and even acetone. It really has some similar properties to benzoic acid.
Does it means that it is more lipophilic and therefore more bioavailable?

So no washing of crystals with these solvents.
Dissolving in (warm) ethanol or acetone and evaporating it again should be enough to get rid off toluene.

I still have no direct experience with m. benzoate (this is going to change in near future ), so I can not comment on its higher activity.



Yes, you can use same lime paste as in CIELO, just extract with toluene instead of ethyl acetate. Don't forget to filter your solvent before addition of benzoic acid.

If you can crystallise directly from water then there should be very little need to use even Acetone. When I’m crystallising mescaline sulfate to extremely high purity I just dissolve in boiling water at a high concentration (1g-
/p10ml) then let it crystallise at room temperature. It happens fast and you can either pour off the remaining water to get rid of any solvent or evaporate it further to precipitate more mescaline, just make sure not to evaporate all the way, discard the last little bit of water as this has all the impurities (and some mescaline but the increase in purity and quality of crystal is worth the loss)

Two days ago I tried 50 mg of mescaline benzoate just to test its strenght. It is hard to say from such a small amount, but it really seemed a bit stronger than other salt forms. I would need more tests to confirm anything, but am going to play with this salt more.

Regarding crystalization: we have to develop proper procedure for it. Results from my preliminary experiments suggest that more than 20ml per gram is needed to dissolve it in water.

Hey Doubledog. I'm curious about the process to get benzoate. I tried over a week ago but failed miserably. Essentially I just followed the CIELO tek with 100g powder but with Toluene instead of Ethyl Acetate. The results were a golden coloured solvent but no response after adding the acid whatsoever. The acid eventually all dissolved but nothing has precipitated. The solvent is as clear as ever.

Any idea what could have gone wrong. 100g of the very same powder produced 3.65% yield of citrate.

The failure was so complete I don't know where to begin troubleshooting.

I've done a test of the CIELO powder with Toluene and nothing precipitated for me either. Also got a yellow pull by the way.

After adding NaOH to the whole thing, the next Toluene pulls became green and I got precipitation after salting. But the paste becomes a solid clump with NaOH, not sure how good the yields will be. Edit: precipitation was gunky not xtaline, not recommended.

Also, I believe BW recommended xtalizing in the freezer. Mescaline Benzoate could be slightly soluble in Toluene at room temperature (?).

The situation seems similar to DMT, were naphtha needs the plant to be broken down by NaOH to get to the alkaloids of interest if doing a STB drytek. Edit: this is not correct. Mescaline is extracted, but the effectiveness/time needed is unkown.

Interesting results, both of you.

I made my benzoate by converting it from sulphate via mini A/B using xylene. And I used just 90ml (or even less) of solvent for 1g of mescaline. Maybe important info is that this xylene was already used in many previous extraction, it wasn't new.
Also oetzi prepared quite a lot of benzoate from relatively small amount of solvent.
You probably used a lot more solvent for just slightly more mescaline, so it seems a concentration could be important.

In another extraction I extracted CIELO cactus lime paste with xylene (resulting in golden coloured solvent) and salted it with sulphuric acid, and got great result. This means to me that xylene or toluene can extract freebase from the wet paste quite well and benzoate salt behaviour is the issue.

Maybe we need to reach some concentration or ratio of freebase to solvent to crystalize m. benzoate properly. This concentration is probably difficult to reach, because extracting of wet paste needs lot of solvent.

Edit:
This would mean that benzoate have to be prepared in more steps involving salting out firstly with water soluble acid, so it would be more complicated process.

So maybe you have read my crying tears at the CIELO thread about wasting 3 cacti. But now with what I had remained from the last cacti I was at least able to use the *product* for some tests. Because of that I have some cool information I hope! Will post it in the CIELO thread.

But regarding the Mes Benzoate:

Yes it does not form from toluene! I still really believe toluene extracts quite nicely, but then no precipitation. Even evaporating the toluene so far did not give any crystals. Because I always used an excess of benzoic acid, upon evaporation I will just get nice benzoic acid crystals, which are mixed with like small amounts of mesc (because I used benzoic acid in excess obviously).
Using just a 1:1 of benzoic acid to mesc is not possible, because I dont know the amount of mesc obviously So the only option would be: first evaporating all the toluene, check the weight of freebase oil, then dissolve again in toluene and just add 1:1 of benzoic acid, then evaporate to dryness. Way too complicated ... so I guess toluene cannot be used reliably?

Also just for info same situation if you dry the toluene after extracting.

I now ordered d-limonene. I have the feeling it might precipitate as mesc benzoate from limonene ...

Reason is maybe that toluene has way too much pi-bonds and therefore quite great molecular interactions with the benzoate anion. So it will not drop from solution? Not even in freezer.

Limonene on the other hand has nearly no double bonds, but still that 1 which it has makes it still a reasonable solvent, like right inbetween toluene and naphtha. So I really think limonene would be the way to go to get mesc benzoate.



And that is what I anyways want to ask:

Of course citric acid is over the counter and benzoic acid not ...

But with citric acid the water content seems so important and while so many of you have great results, I am really sad to have failed now 3x in a row with something that is not so easily accessible.

Therefore I think the benzoate salt is more failproof. To form it you just make it 100 % dry and add benzoic acid - voila! That is even more safe, because here there is no random factor involved. The only question would be now which solvent can drop it, if ethyl acetate and toluene is not good and I think it could be limonene.

Because of that maybe benzoic acid is not easily accessible, but if it would work then I'm pretty sure success rate of forming crystals would be 100 % after just pouring benzoic acid into the limonene. Ordered it now, but dont want to harvest just 4th cactus in a row, my plan originally was to try the TEK 1x and keep the rest for 1-2 years growing xD

Cheers

Hey guys. Thanks for the responses. Failure is always kinda hard but also its the way we learn!

So, following Loveall's remark about the freezing I poured all my golden liquid into a lab bottle and put in the freezer. It seals nicely so no toluene smelling frozen food! Anyway, pulled it out this morning and although much condensation was hiding the contents there was very obviously a lot of whitish/clear stuff all over the bottle! At first I thought - ice.

But on filtering I got a lot of the 'ice' loosened into the filter to dry. There was also a considerable amount still on the sides of the bottle. The key thing though - it didn't melt! it was not ice. Win! But what is it? Benzoic acid? maybe. Looks kinda chonky, not a soft springy bed of CIELO needles for sure.

Anyway, still drying (toluene not EA...) but I snagged me a snowflake and added a drop of marquis. Bam! That familiar orange color.

Now I got my hopes up. The amount of crystals is concomitant with the yield I would have expected from this powder.

Maybe precipitation from CITLO is (partly) just a temperature issue? This would suggest.


Your instincts are bang on target Loveall.

What you say? I'm kinda excited by the marquis reaction - obviously says nothing about purity but maybe we can go from here with input from you chemistry geniuses?

Check the pics - 8 days of golden nothing precipitated (room temp 2-20°C), the crystals in filter (still kinda wet), the residual crystals in the lab bottle (it was tilted in the freezer) and finally the marquis reaction.

I'm feeling seriously good about this! I thought all was lost. Score 1 for NEVER THROW ANYTHING AWAY

*Edit: Hey twighlight - sorry I missed your post in my excitement, but maybe this changes some of your ideas and potential with #4? Maybe CITLO and benzoate is more accessible than we thought? Dunno. I failed last time with DMT and limonene, suspect mine is old and useless so I cannot test. But now I reckon / hope we underestimated toluene and just need to tweak the methodology.

I just got similar results to Merkin but with xylene after the freezer (white xtals - second picture). I edited my previous post also.

However, yields where very low for me after several 10 minute pulls (CIXLO).

I left the next xylene pull for several days in contact with the paste. It kept on getting darker (see image below comparing 3 minute pulls on the left to 5 day pull). Paste does not clump up over time like it does with EA.

Salting the 5 day pull, I could see some cloudiness already at room temp. Hoping for a bunch of xtals in the freezer and decent yields.

Merkin, how are your yields with Toluene?

How did did you extract the CIELO paste with Xylene? Did you do 3 minute pulls or longer pulls? How was your yield?