Does anyone know whether Sodium Carbonate could be sucessfully used for an STB extraction on finely powdered MHRB? I know it can be used for A/B extracts, but I haven't seen any STB teks that didn't involve Lye.

I've read that STB requires a pH higher than what Sodium Carbonate can achieve, but I haven't seen anyone actually test that.

Someone should test it out and see.

Calcium hydroxide works for an STB tech with some modifications.

DMT is likely present in the bark as DMT tannate. That would require a strong base to freebase it. Sodium carbonate might not work but calcium hydroxide and sodium hydroxide will. Both calcium hydroxide and sodium hydroxide are commonly used to freebase alkaloid tannates.

It's worth a try. It would work for sure if the DMT was first converted to DMT citrate or DMT acetate.

If it doesn't work, then take the bark and acidify it with citric acid ot vinegar, and then do the STB tech on it with sodium carbonate and it will work to some degree for sure. Sodium carbonate can freebase DMT citrate and DMT acetate without a problem. But it might not be able to freebase DMT tannate which is likely the form of DMT in the root bark because the bark is high in tannins. Bark high in tannins pretty much always has alkaloids present as tannate salts. By adding citric acid or vinegar first, you convert the DMT tannate into DMT citrate or DMT acetate. That way sodium carbonate can do its magic for sure.

SWIM wants to try that; to dissolve a big amount of sodium carbonate (200g/litre), do an stb and then use acetone as the non-polar solvent. Acetone will float on top of a very ionic solution partially absorbing some water)

I don't think it is a strong enough base to do the job. STB use lye because of its screamingly high pH. Dissolving the cell walls it one of the reasons a STB works so well. I doubt Sodium Carbonate can do this as efficiently.

How about cell walls breaking due the high osmotic pressure of the solution (if too much sodium carbonate is used? Cell walls are water-permeable so it is possible (at least in theory!) to attack them in this way. And it may actually help, since for a NaOH based STB one would dissolve 20-40grams of lye per litre of water, whereas the STB SWIM is thinking of with sodium carbonate might require something like 100-200g/litre.

OK, SWIM got convinced to just give it a try, someone has to do it and report back instead of theorising!

an A/B extraction using sodium carbonate and naptha as an NP had very bad yields no matter how saturated w base. Apparently DCM may work better but i have no knowledge of that w sod carb. So a STB w naptha and sod carb im guessing would be awful.

SWIM always extracts DMT using sodium carbonate and gets great yields using it. But SWIM always converts DMT into DMT citrate or some other similar salt before hand. He never attempts to extract the natural DMT salt from the plant if he’s planning to use sodium carbonate. Who knows what form of salt DMT is present as. It’s probably DMT tannate because most root barks high in tannins contain alkaloids as tannate salts. I don’t think you can freebase a tannate salt using sodium hydroxide.

You'd likely need to acidify your bark first with a stronger acid than tannic acid, so that you create an alkaloid salt that sodium carbonate can freebase. If you soaked the bark in vinegar first, that would decompose DMT tannate into DMT acetate and tannic acid. Then sodium carbonate will have no problem freebasing the DMT acetate. But without doing that and just doing a straight STB tech with sodium carbonate, I think it wouldn't work even if you used DCM as the non-polar solvent.

I don’t recommend using DCM as the non-polar solvent in an STB tech. It will pull too much stuff out of the bark. You’re better off sticking to naphtha, hexane, or heptane when doing an STB tech.

If you don’t want to use an extremely dangerous base like sodium hydroxide which can easily scar you for life or make you blind, you can use calcium hydroxide instead. Calium hydroxide is many times safer and works for an STB tech, but you need to mix in one part calcium hydroxide to one part powdered bark and add only a little bit of water to form a paste-like material. Mix it a while, let it sit overnight, and then extract with naphtha, hexane, or heptane. It works quite well, but it needs to sit overnight. If you get any wet calcium hydroxide on your hand it won’t burn unless you leave it there for many hours. Wet Sodium hydroxide, on the other hand will burn you immediately and leave a scar if you don’t get it off right away.

I gave it a second thought however; cell wall components (cellulose, lignins, isodityrosines) actually make one of the hardest materials ever made by living organisms. No matter how amazing it sounds, SWIM thinks that a sodium carbonate STB (pH ~12) is not as evasive as pH of >13 and cell walls can endure osmotic pressure pretty damn well!

I'l add this the acid used was phosphoric acid which i hear is a strong bond. I really dont think that would have much affect. Remember this experiment used naptha and ron above uses a sophlet and DCM i believe when usin sodium carbonate. When using NAPTHA this is how it went after acid stage it was based to 9.5 or so and the color was a mix of grey and the original mimosa color. 3 pulls done nettin nothing. More sodium carb was added to ph of 10.5 or so which turned the color to the familiar black, 3 pulls done netting about 200 mg from a half pound of bark. Frustrated a shitload of sodium carbonate was added and 3 more pulls done...the last pulled wasnt precisely weighd but the guess would be another 200 300 mg was pulled. Altogether 400 to 500 mg from a half pound of mimosa is horrible. Yield with same bark using straight to base was 1.5 grams per half pound.

Interesting note the first 200 mg pulled was the whitest sweetest smelling stuff ever. It smelled like the mimosa it came from and dry did not have that familiar smell of dmt but a sweet mimosa smell. Upon burning it it did smell like good ole dmt tho and worked very nice. idk how much lye affects the smell in any way but was interesting note.

Sodium carbonate is a strong enough base to freebase DMT phosphate. But DMT is not that soluble in naphtha and using lots of sodium hydroxide and heat forces the DMT into the naphtha. Even with ice cold DCM, a pH of 9.5 is fine because DMT is very highly soluble in DCM. That's why you can freeze precipitate in naphtha, but not in DCM. It's all about DMT's solvent solubility. If you use a solvent that DMT loves like DCM or chloroform, even pH 8.0 will work pretty well. But with something like naphtha, which DMT is very poorly soluble in, you need some extra force to get the DMT into the naphtha, so people use both heat and high amounts of sodium hydroxide. These two tricks used together work quite well. Just by adding large amounts of sodium hydroxide, this causes heat which aids the DMT in going into the naphtha.

When you extract with sodium carbonate instead of sodium hydroxide and you use naphtha in an A/B extraction, you need to add heat. Sodium carbonate does not generate the heat needed to help the DMT go into the naphtha, while sodium hydroxide does. Also, it seems DMT is more soluble in carbonates than in hydroxides, so that’s also a factor. But again, if DCM is used, none of that matters because DMT loves DCM, even ice cold DCM.

SWIM has used DCM and sodium carbonate for a long time now and gets yields that rival those of others on this forum form all DMT containing plants even when doing the extractions manually without a Soxhlet (but the Soxhlet is best). So, you can get excellent yields with sodium carbonate, as long as you use DCM or something similar and NOT naphtha.

SWIM can get better yields using sodium carbonate at pH 9.5 with ice cold DCM than by using sodium hydroxide at pH 13.5 and hot naphtha. They KEY is using a solvent that DMT is highly soluble in like DCM.

It makes no sense to use sodium hydroxide and naphtha to extract DMT. First of, sodium hydroxide is extremely dangerous, secondly, DMT is very poorly soluble in naphtha, thirdly, naphtha is highly flammable. Why people insist on using naphtha and sodium hydroxide is beyond me. It’s far safer to use DCM and sodium carbonate, and with that combination you get better yields. DCM is not flammable, DMT is highly soluble in DCM, and sodium carbonate is not so dangerous.

For best results:

* use heptane only to freeze precipitate DMT.
* use DCM or chloroform to extract DMT.

When using DCM I recommend the following safer bases:

* sodium carbonate (works just as good as sodium hydroxide)
* calcium hydroxide (requires special techs though)

DCM can be a little tricky to get out here in the real world, ron.
When my friend does, he'll surely test out what you're saying though.
In his opinion though - NO, an STB won't work using sodium carbonate or calcium hydroxide as the base.
In his experience, no heat is necessary to get DMT to dissolve into naptha. It is less soluable but not insoluable in room temperature naptha. By the time NP is added in the STB he uses, the solution is barely warm.

Please see my posts about where to get it OTC. It’s easy to get in most countries. If you’re in the US or Mexico it’s very easy to get. If you like, PM me and I can tell you where to get it nearly pure OTC online, mixed only with alcohol.



He’ll be happy with the results I’m sure.



He must not have tried SWIM’s altered STB tech with calcium hydroxide. That does work. He’s done it many times in the past.

SWIM never tried an STB tech with sodium carbonate so he can’t comment there.



Yes, It will dissolve in room temperature naphtha, but much more dissolves in warm naphtha and very little in ice cold naphtha. Those are facts that many on this forum already know. There’s no argument there.



But it is warm, unless you waited a few hours afterwards. If the naphtha is warm it holds much more DMT than room temperature naphtha does. This is a fact. When you add sodium hydroxide to water, heat is always released. The water can get boiling hot if enough sodium hydroxide is added. This is fact. But sodium carbonate doesn’t produce any heat when added to water, so it will never make the naphtha warm. That alone will cause a decrease is DMT solubility in naphtha, but will have almost no effect on the solubility of DMT in DCM.

Once your friend tries DCM out, maybe he can post the solubility numbers of DMT in naphtha versus DMT in DCM. My guess, based on SWIM's experience, is that DMT is over 100 times more soluble in DCM than naphtha.

hey ron, swim is going to try DCM for his next batch.. his first batch was an STB with naoh and VM&P nap and it went OK, but after much research it looks like carbonate + dcm in a sep funnel is a more sane way to go (he found a sep funnel with a glass stopcock as it seemed like dcm would not jive with a plastic valve...is that right?).

would it be enough to soak the mhrb powder in 1:1 vinegar:water at room temp stirring occasionally (how long of a soak do you think it would take? an hour or 2? ,30 minutes of constant stirring?) he understands this would change the salts to a form that carbonate can freebase.
swim then plans to basify the vinegar/mhrb soln with carbonate without filtering as he plans to freeze precip in hexane at the end.. does DCM pull enough extra stuff out of the bark that a rextal would not clean it enough?

the idea is to keep the # of vessels involved to a minimum for cleanup purposes. if you think rextal would not be enough, how about 2 naptha defats on the acidified bark soln before basification?

thanks for your insights. swim would very much like to use these less volatile ingredients but wants to make sure everything checks out first.

I have tried sodium carbonate STB, but have not succeeded. STB doesn't work with Na2Co3. I have almost ruined a batch of MHRB, but finally I've added NaOH and managed to pull a fair amount of spice.

Any tech that is sodium carbonate based that uses naphtha or heptane and water will give you very crappy results. You'll need to use DCM, chloroform, diethyl ether, or something else that DMT is more soluble in if you're going to use sodium carbonate. If you're using naphtha or heptane, you'll need to use sodium hydroxide or possibly potassium hydroxide.

SWIM wants to use Xylene to go the FASA route. So is DCM a better solvent to use then if going the FASA route?