I don't know if it's just me but I think more and more people come to Nexus because they experience trouble while using QT's DMT extraction guide. Of course that's not very surprising since it's listend under "SYNTHESIS & EXTRACTIONS #" on Erowid's DMT page (along with Noman/Yoda".

"Prevent not cure" is great quote/saying so therefore I belive QT's should be removed from Erowid and replaced with a better, newer TEK.

Noman already mentioned that he talked with them about this issue but "people like it because it has such nice pictures" so I think we need a critical beat/breakdown to persuade Erowid about the (in)efficiency of this method.

My first idea was to brainstorm pros and cons of this TEK which will be then further refined (nice fonts and stuffz) and forwarded to Erowid with some nice words (not mine so smooth talkers raise your hand).

My (very quick) take:

+
foreword
pictures
Overall design (it's not stunning but big bold fonts are always a stellar choice)

- (Chapter: remark)
*How to Extract DMT from Natural Sources
-Extraction from all the mentioned plants might not be feasible

*Preparing Plant Material
- "Mimosa hostilis root-bark is easily pulverized to a fine powder" : Dubious claim ? I though it was a consense that mimosa kills blenders for breakfast ?
- "Acidify Water to pH 2 : Unnecessarily low (2) pH
- "Muratic acid from pool shop (10ml 30% HCl-Reagent grade hydrochloric" : Some people experience problems with using (undiluted) HCl.

*Convert Alkaloids to Salts
- "Do not boil." - Debunked.
- "Allow the contents of the jar 24 hours to react the first time" : Inefficient step compared timewise to boiling.

*Filtration
-"A tea strainer" : Letting stuff settle and decant is superior (IMO).

*Collect 3 Extractions
- "Shake Jar B, 4 times a day, for 1 week". There is NO need for one week rumba shaking.
- "dispose of remaining root-bark". Zubrick died here. Twice.

*Defatting"
- "we defat the solution" : Not with mimosa. This is mentioned I believe other plants deserved/need more specific TEK's ergo no need.
- "Coleman fuel, VM&P naphtha, Zippo, or lighter fluid." : Particular products change and may include (or will in the future) rust inhibitors or other nasty stuff. MSDS reading plus evaporation test is superior.
- "Ether". Richard Pryor. 'nuff said.
- "Chloroform " : With no warnings (DCM is made evil though) one would think this is all good in the hood. Fail.
- "separatory funnel can be made by filling a Ziplock plastic baggie" : Some solvents and plastic "don't mix like two dicks and no bitch". Test is suggested but particles can be invisible or occure over time.

*Prepare to Basify
- 100ml warm naphtha : Isn't that an overkill for 30g ? I though it was 1g:1ml.

*Basify to pH 9
- "pH 9" :Too low pH value (for naptha).
- "Ammonium hydroxide is normally used" : Is it real son, is it really real son ?
- "Red Devil drain cleaner" : No longer on the market. Name droppin' does that sometimes.
- "average pH of the final basified solution in STEP 8 was ~10" : Whut ?
- pKa DMT is 8.68 (which would make this the ideal pH to extract at.) : Ghetto mathematics doesn't add up since at pH 9 only 67% of the alkaloid is freebase.

*Emulsions
- " emulsion will form" : Can be avoided/prevented/solved quicker.

*Final Alkaloid Extraction and Evaporation
- "try about the size of a pea" : A-a no you didn't !! (advise people to eyeball mg's)
- "Don't worry about weighing it. Smoke it 'til your high" : Yeah son smoke that cheeba cheeba, fuck 'em scales. You can't OD this it. I mean you can't right ? Riiiight ?

*Lab Notes from Previous DMT Extractions - I'm too tired to do this one. OK, just one.
Day 39 /Day 61/ Day 24 - 40 days and 40 nights and no less if you want to smoak da elf spize !

I wanted to be serious scientifical but I gave up around half way through. Eh.

Add on, off, in between, back, left, starboard...

Let's convince Erowid that this oldie ain't a goodie.

Great idea!! Ill see if this weekend I can help you out scrutinizing it thoroughly and then trying to contact erowid

This was the first extraction I did many years ago. One thing to note, however, is 1 g of DMT will not dissolve in 1 ml of naphtha. It takes much more naphtha to dissolve a gram, but I can't remember the precise measurement. The rest of the stuff you mentioned seems pretty accurate, though..

I believe he means 1ml per each gram of root bark. Not spice.

Actually, 1g of DMT can dissolve in very little amounts of naphtha, provided the naphtha is hot. I'm not sure about 1g/1ml however I've dissolved around 2g into 5mls...

It's a good idea and I'm down but Zhah and I approached them with it before.
He had me rewrite the goddamned thing so that all they had to do was change the text where we told them to and they could keep the pictures up (if you need pictures to do an A/B on MHRB, you aren't ready IMO) and they still wouldn't go for it.
But lets give it another shot.

Yeah, what is the deal with Erowid? Such a wealth of information, but it looks like nothing's happened with the site for years.

I've contacted erowid before with serious concerns about QTs tek, requesting that they consider removing it, and at least put a prominent disclaimer on it. They emailed back asking me to detail the problems with it... so I did that (focusing more on practical issues of it not working, not so much on health and safety in retrospect) and they thanked me for giving them a heads up on the matter. Nothing happened.

I know that at least several people had contacted about it before I did, and I know that several people have contacted them since. Unfortunately they just don't seem to care. I get the feeling they won't do anything about it unless they're receiving dozens of complaints daily.

When I get home I'll see if I can dig up my email exchange with them and post my breakdown of the flaws in the tek.

Yeah, keep at them, boys. My first attempt at extraction (an epic fail) was using that tek. So glad I found this site and the Shroomery.

N.B.

erowid is a nice place to get dosage info, and subjective experiences; perhaps refs for outside sources

but yea, a lot of it is outdated.

r.i.p. erowid 1996-2003

Same here.
I gave them a proposal to revise my own tek and they just copy and pasted the proposal. It's a mess now.
Maybe they should just get rid of extractions and synths entirely and link to places like this one where people can go for some comprehensive interactive information.

Okay, I dug up the email. Two and a half years ago I was corresponding with Spoon on a different DMT-related subject and mentioned the flaws in QT and Yoda's teks, suggesting that they consider removing them (QT's tek especially) or placing a prominent disclaimer on them. It looks like they've since corrected the error that made QT's tek not work from step 8 onward (no nonpolar solvent would come in contact with a high-pH aqueous extract if you followed the directions to the letter). Other than that it's largely the same.

I did list a good handful of issues with QT's tek in my email (figuring that would be sufficient to get it removed or at least labelled with a "Do not use this tek" warning... apparently not), so in the interest of being entirely comprehensive, I've gone through and re-written my list of concerns. My issues with QT's tek as it stands today:

[Edited for organization... see post #15 below]

Thanks Entropy for the work, lets see if we can organize it all and again send to them.. Maybe we can all together send emails to them, or have trav speak officially in the name of dmt nexus or smt?

Sucks that they dont seem to care about it



Not to go too offtopic here but I doubt it, unless your naphtha had aromatics in it. When recrystallizing one needs around 30ml hot naphtha to dissolve 1g dmt, leaving impurities (+bit of actives) on the bottom. Doing a second wash on the impurities goo with another 5ml naphtha and freezing separately can yield more (not-as-clean) dmt. So I seriously cannot imagine 2g fitting in 5ml naphtha, even boiling..

I just edited the post to organize it into four categories. In order from most severe to least severe:
- Health & Safety Issues (unfortunately these were also the most numerous... following the tek as written is bad juju!)
- Technical Errors
- Practical Considerations
- Miscellaneous Gripes


Dear editors of Erowid,


Many of us at the DMT Nexus have some very serious concerns about the QT's DMT Extraction for Students. We know that some of our members have contacted you about it in the past, but their comments do not seem to have been meaningfully acted on. We know that with Erowid, harm reduction is a core value... we sympathize completely! It is because of this that we as a community feel compelled to impress on you the need for action to be taken regarding QT's tek.

Our largest concerns with QT's tek are related to health and safety. Throughout the tek, comments on safely handling chemicals are scant. If we've learned one thing, it's that people doing extractions by following a tek as though it's a recipe (without really understanding what they're doing, else they wouldn't need a tek) are not sticklers for proper handling and safety. The tek occasionally tell the extractor to "use proper safety precautions" but never gives any details on these. Safety goggles and gloves are listed under "Materials" but the tek never says when to use them, nor does it mention that you could accidentally blind yourself permanently if you neglect to use them. Further, no mention is made of the flammability of some of the solvents (like ether and naphtha) or of how one can handle them safely. The tek says to use warm naphtha, but fails to mention that warming it on the stove can easily lead to a solvent explosion, causing severe harm to the extractor and possibly starting a house fire (which could in turn lead to another "DMT Lab Busted!" headline in the papers when the firefighters come to put it out).

Besides lacking comments on safe handling of chemicals, the tek also repeatedly makes suggestions which, if followed, would result in the final product being tainted with toxic contaminants. Several of the varieties of naphtha named in the tek have been known to contain non-volatile contaminants (particularly anti-rusting agents). The tek also recommends using a ziplock bag as a makeshift separatory funnel... aside from the high probability of spilling caustic materials everywhere, this is strongly inadvisable because ziplock bags are not made from a grade of plastic suitable for holding naphtha or other nonpolar solvents. A quick test may show that the solvent doesn't eat through the plastic, but that doesn't mean it's not leaching toxic plasticizers from it. And since the tek recommends collecting the product by evaporation (and includes no information on further purification), any and all toxic contaminants from the solvent and from the ziplock bag will end up in that final product. One final note from a harm-reduction standpoint: Recommending that people not weigh their doses is simply irresponsible; sure, you won't have a toxic overdose of DMT (though you might from those contaminants!), but it is much safer to work with a known dose to learn how your body reacts to the substance.

Aside from these very important safety considerations, the tek also includes a substantial amount of information which is simply not correct. Some of this is incorrect chemical terminology, which in the grand scheme of things is not terribly serious. But there are also some substantial errors regarding what methods are and are not effective when extracting from Mimosa hostilis root bark. Time and time again, people have come to the DMT Nexus or other web forums because they were following QT's tek and it either didn't work or they ran into serious issues trying to follow it. Using ammonia (as the tek alludes to) will only result in really nasty emulsions, it simply can't raise the pH high enough for a extraction on Mimosa hostilis root bark. Even using lye, the tek does not recommend a high enough pH. A pH of 9 simply won't cut it; you'll again end up with a nasty emulsion. What's worse, the tek treats emulsions as though they were inevitable and tells the extractor not to be concerned if they take several days to resolve. Under proper conditions, an emulsion (if one forms at all) should resolve in a matter of minutes.

There are a handful of other issues with the tek being wasteful of resources and occasionally nonsensical; at one point QT tells the extractor to discard the volumes of naphtha which would contain DMT! But our most serious concerns are for the health and safety of any would-be extractors who presume that QT's tek is safe to follow because Erowid is, in general, a trustworthy source of information.

Below you will find a complete list of the problems we have found with QT's tek. In light of these issues, we hope that you will strongly consider removing QT's tek from Erowid. If it is not removed, we feel that in the interest of public safety, it should contain a large, prominent, strongly-worded warning that following the tek as it is written could lead to serious bodily harm, that it may not successfully extract DMT, and that even if some DMT is obtained there is a strong possibility of it being contaminated with toxic substances.



A complete list of our grievances regarding QT's tek:

Health & Safety

• The tek recommends using hydrochloric acid without appropriate guidance on safe handling. Admittedly they mention other acids, but HCl is the one specifically recommended. Weaker acids like citric acid and vinegar are preferable alternatives because they can be handled more safely and are readily available at grocery stores.
  
• While the tek mentions the health hazards of working with DCM, it fails to note the flammability hazards of naphtha and ether. It likewise does not mention the intoxication hazards from the fumes which necessitate minimizing contact and using them in a well-ventilated (and spark-free) area.
  
• The tek describes a method for obtaining ether from starting fluid. This method will generally not obtain pure ether. Unless the extractor has a good working knowledge of chemistry and has consulted the MSDS on the starter fluid, this could very easily lead to very unhealthy contaminants. This issue especially needs to be addressed.
  
• The tek specifically mentions Coleman fuel, Zippo lighter fluid, and Ronsonol. All have been reported to contain non-volatile contaminants. Particularly since the tek instructs the extractor to obtain the final product by evaporation, this also seriously needs to be addressed to prevent people from unwittingly smoking harmful contaminants.
  
• No health & safety warnings on proper handling of chloroform.
  
• Ziplock bags as separatory funnels? What the fuck?! Ziplock bags are not HDPE2. They also contain plasticizers which would likely leach into naphtha, and since the naphtha is being evaporated these plasticizers will end up in the extracted DMT. He does suggest making sure your solvent won't melt the bag, but this ignores the fact that it may leach harmful contaminants.
  
• The tek calls for "warm naphtha" on multiple occasions, but makes no mention of how to go about warming it. If an unwary extractor were to heat it on the stove, they could easily find themselves with a fireball in their face!
  
• Insufficient safety warnings with regards to lye. "Take proper precautions" is not very good advice. Teks should tell the extractor what the proper precautions are (especially the necessity of wearing goggles and gloves to prevent blindness and chemical burns, and having an acid on-hand to neutralize any possible spills).
  
• The tek recommends obtaining the DMT by evaporating the naphtha. Before the age of freeze-precipitation this might have been excusable, if not for the fact that many of QT's recommended varieties of naphtha include non-volatile contaminants, and he suggests employing non-HDPE2 plastics. Considering the processes recommended in the tek, any DMT obtained by evaporation is reasonably likely to be tainted with harmful contaminants and is not safe to consume.
  
• The tek acknowledges that the product will be impure, but provides no information on purifying the product. It explicitly seems to recommend consuming it, impurities and all.
  
• "Don't worry about weighing it." Bad advice, plain and simple.

Technical Errors

• Incorrect terminology in step 3. You're not converting the DMT to a salt; it's already a salt in the plant material. And of course the ions dissociate when salts dissolve. The step might be more appropriately titled "Dissolving DMT cations in water" or at least "Dissolving salts of DMT".
  
• Incorrect terminology in step 8. We are not unhooking the DMT salts (remember they're in solution, so they aren't really hooked together at all). We are deprotonating the DMT cations to generate the free base.
  
• Suggests that ammonia is typically used to basify and that this tek's use of lye is a departure from the norm... but ammonia is not an effective base for MHRB. All you'll get is an awful emulsion.
  
• Recommended pH after adding the base is too low. pH 9 is not good enough. With MHRB in particular there are serious emulsion issues at pH 9... but even ignoring that, pH 9 is only 0.32 above the pKa of DMT... not terribly efficient.
  
• The tek states that it is ideal to extract an alkaloid at its pKa. This not necessarily true. At its pKa, half of the alkaloid is protonated and the other half unprotonated. In ideal conditions (i.e. assuming infinite solubility in the nonpolar extraction solvent) this is sufficient since Le Châtelier's principle is on your side... but unless there are instability-related complications or other factors to account for, it's better to have the vast majority of the alkaloid in the desired form (in this case unprotonated). Especially with MHRB, where emulsions are a crucial issue.
  
• The tek acts as though emulsions are inevitable, that you should not be concerned if these take several days to resolve, and that it's near-miraculous for an emulsions to resolve in less than an hour. This is insanity. Emulsions can be prevented by ensuring sufficiently high pH and mixing gently (rather than shaking as QT suggests). The addition of plain salt may be employed as a further preventative measure.
  
• The tek suggests that the final product may contain "hydroxide". Hydroxide is not a molecule, it's an ion. It is possible that the product could contain sodium hydroxide or other hydroxide salts, but neither of the recommended methods for eliminating the "hydroxide" would actually help at all if the product actually were contaminated with sodium hydroxide or another hydroxide salt.

Practical Issues

• Unnecessarily low pH for step 2. While pH 2 won't hurt anything, it's a waste of materials.
  
• Ridiculously long times recommended for the aqueous acidic extraction. QT recommend 24 hours for the first soak, and a whole week for subsequent soaks. Really, simmering 15-30 minutes three times will get just about all the DMT out of the bark and into solution. No need to spend two weeks; this step can be done in two hours or better.
  
• Recommends defatting even though the tek is designed for use with MHRB. MHRB is not a fatty material. This is a waste of solvent and time.
  
• Step 7 tells us to add warm naphtha to the acidic MHRB extract and shake it for 5 minutes before adding lye. What is that possibly going to accomplish?
  
• The tek says to repeat steps 7-9 two more times. In step 8, we added 5g of lye to the mix. Do we repeat that too, adding more lye each time? Of course, that extra lye isn't going to hurt... on the contrary, it will likely bring the pH up into a more practical range than QT recommends. But why is the tek suggesting that we add more base prior to each extraction with nonpolar solvent, instead of adding all that we're going to use at one time? I suspect it's just an artifact of poor phrasing.
  
• Uses way too much naphtha for extractions. The tek calls for 100 ml per pull for 30 g bark. About one tenth of that would be sufficient.
  
• In "Lab notes" under step 6, QT suggests that we are saving the naphtha from the defatting process, but discarding the DMT-laden naphtha from the later steps. Why would we want to save the (practically non-existent) fats from MHRB but throw away the DMT?
  
• "You will know when DMT is in the final product by the smell." This is a seriously concerning statement. DMT is supposed to be the final product, not merely be contained in it.
  
• Outdated info: The tek suggests using Red Devil lye. Red Devil lye was discontinued roughly five years ago.
  
• The three sets of "lab notes" from QT's extraction record that the extractions took 24 days, 39 days, and 61 days. Yikes! A quick and effective acid/base extraction can be completely finished in 24 hours (and that includes time for freeze-precipitations); a big, leisurely (and frankly unnecessarily long) extraction is still done in a week. From a legal standpoint, it seems prudent to complete the extraction as quickly as possible so that (if worse comes to worst) the extractor is only on the hook for possession of a controlled substance and not manufacture.
  
• The tek is written for MHRB with lye as the base and naphtha as the non-polar solvent, yet it acts as though it would be just as effective for phalaris grasses with chloroform as the solvent. Unfortunately different factors need to be taken into account for different plants and solvents. Getting clean DMT out of phalaris grasses in particular is a massive chore and would require its own specialized tek.

Miscellaneous Gripes

• Measuring pH with beets and cabbage? Seriously? That's pretty ghetto. Litmus papers and pH monitors are pretty cheap if you care to measure the pH. (Of course with MHRB it's not necassary; a dash of acid is fine for the initial extraction, and MHRB provides its own handy color-changing reaction when enough base has been added)
  
• Typos. At least six times, the tek refers to "naptha". Should one really trust extraction advice from a person who cannot correctly spell their solvent?

Thank you again for your consideration.


Sincerely,
The people of the DMT Nexus

Okay, just edited it one more time to include a draft for a letter to erowid that (I hope) impresses our concerns while remaining civil in its tone. It has not been sent; I wouldn't presume to speak on behalf of the Nexus without consultation or review.

What do you all think? Can anyone spot any more errors or issues in QT's tek that aren't on the list? Should the email be phrased on behalf of the DMT Nexus, or would it be more effective phrased on behalf of "a concerned member of the DMT Nexus"?

The only profanity I've left in is

Frankly I think it's appropriate to emphasize the point, but it could be changed to

Great work Entropymancer! Thanks for putting all this together so concisely and respectfully.

Perhaps we should suggest an alternative. If their issue with our current teks are their lack of photos, I would be more than willing to throw together some pics. In fact, I am working on a very simple, layperson's style tek, "JBArk's bark EX tek" and I was going to include, as well as clear photographs of the process, detailed safety, chemistry (to the best of my abilities) and more detailed procedural notes in colour highlighted boxes that would be optional to read, so that the basic steps could be followed without necessarily having to read the extra material.

I would love to finish the tek, post it here and have feedback to fine tune it to something worthy of the nexus, and then, with the approval and blessings of all here, we could submit it as a nexus approved tek.

What do you think?

If not, I could just do pics of an existing tek, but the idea of a jointly produced tek seems more appealing.

JBArk

Yeah, if they're keeping that hunk-o-junk tek because it has pretty pictures (complete with typos in the images :lol, we should probably offer to provide a pictorial tek to replace it with.

Personally I'm opposed to pictorial teks. I mean, come on... it's a simple A/B, what do you need pictures for? The clear stuff on top is the naphtha, the slippery black stuff on the bottom is the alkaline aqueous phase. It ain't rocket science. But if they need a safe traditional A/B tek for MHRB with lye and naphtha, complete with pretty pictures, we can make that happen. From the teks in the FAQ, Vovin's fits the bill (though it could do without the defat), or we could throw some pics into Marsofold's (and take out that pesky ammonia wash, possibly replace it with a carbonate wash, and add notes on recrystallization).

My simple STB pictorial has cleaning methods and pictures, if they want a tek that works.. https://www.dmt-nexus.me....aspx?g=posts&t=6619 It has proven pretty easy for idiots to follow, but it does use a large amount, rather than just give general ideas. The letter looks awesome, and hopefully elicits a proper response this time. It took a lot of fucking around and reading to actually make QT's extraction work when I tried it. Luckily I had a bit of an understanding behind what was happening by the time I attempted it, from learning to extract cactus, previously.

JBark's idea of a maybe a joint tek with a compilation of possibilities with ratios, and alternatives might be ideal, but getting photos of every possibility might just make it very confusing. A simple up to date A/B pictorial might be a good idea with ratios, and with lists of possible ingredients that could be substituted, in the event someone is having trouble finding some specific ones..

Entropymancer's ideas seem to be the easiest to implement, with the least amount of hassle.

Entropymancer thank you for your contribution. My attempt looks pale in comparison.

Since Erowid is already hosting a good STB TEK (Noman), I believe we should offer an A/B in exchange. Drytek is viable but that can mark limonene like meth did NaOH therefore I'm against that idea.

From the TEK's available it's either Vovin's or "jointly produced tek". I always like to complicate, argue and create (something) so A/B jointly TEK FTW for this hippo.

Community spirit at work once again. Thank you for being a part of it peepz.

Fantastic job, Entropymancer. I do believe you have covered every single item that was/is objectionable and stated both fairly and completely, the rationale for change or wholesale omission of this tek from Erowid.

Just one typo that I noticed: You wrote "The tek suggests that the final product may contain "hydroxide". Hydroxide is not da molecule..." I think you meant to type just "a" not "da".

Best regards,

N.B.