Hi all,

SWIM will be giving pharmahuasca another go this weekend and has a question regarding smoking the harmalas he has which have been extracted from a quarter pound of syrian rue. SWIM is an amateur kitchen chemist at best, but he thinks he did a fairly decent job of getting the harmalas out without too much else. When drying the approximately 3 grams of harmala sludge, it smelled a bit like vinegar, but nothing too intense. After drying it, it didn't have much a smell at all. He tasted the extract and it seemed to taste almost exactly like the professionally extracted harmalas he's had, but he tasted an extremely slight taste of the salt that he used to precipitate the harmalas. SWIM's question is this, do you think it's safe to smoke the harmalas that he's extracted? Would the very small amount of salt left in the harmalas be harmful to smoke? Should SWIM dissolve the harmalas in a very small amount of water, allow the harmalas to settle and then decant the water? Any information that could be provided would be greatly appreciated.

On a somewhat different note, SWIM was delighted to find a relatively cheap and easy to obtain source of d-limonene yesterday. SWIM came home to a wonderful citrusy aroma last night. He discovered that his girlfriend had purchased an air freshener. Upon observation, SWIM noticed that the sole ingredient in this air freshener was oil from orange peels (d-limonene). On a per volume basis, this stuff is cheaper than the quarts of d-limonene you could buy elsewhere and it's nice to be able to purchase it 7 oz at a time rather than having to get a quart or more. SWIM woke up this morning to see almost all of the d-limonene evaporated and saw a beautiful dark red/orange resin left behind (which smelled of both DMT and oranges). Anyway, I'm not sure how much more information on this source I'm allowed to provide on the forum, but if anyone is interested, send me a PM and I'll let them know.

I would recommend converting the harmala hcl's you have to freebase before smoking them. I've never tried smoking harmala hcl, and its prob much smoother and more efficient as the freebase. Its a rather easy tek, as long as you have sodium carbonate or can make some. Just dissolve your hcl's in water, filter out what does not dissolve, add basic water to the solution until it stops clouding.

Let it fully settle out, then pour off through a filter and wash 1x with distilled water, or suck up most of the water out of the jar, then add more to wash the sodium carbonate out. After washing a few times, i corner all the alkaloids in my jar, and turn it slowly so they don't move, but the water does. If you are careful, you can suck up %99 of the water by getting it on the other side of the jar as your alkaloids, then pipetting it out. Then you just let them dry in the jar, scrape, and your done.

If you do this, and then want to convert some back to hcl's, they will most likely come out cleaner than they were before. Its as easy as dissolving the freebase in vinegar, heating it up and adding salt, then filtering.

For me, all it takes is like 10-30mg of extracted freebase to really feel its affects, not sure what the doses are for smoalked/vaped hcl's though.

Thanks for the advise, Day Tripper. Do you think the potency SWIM would gain by converting to freebase would be worth the yield he'd lose doing the conversion? For some reason, I had assumed that the precipitate that he had extracted was already a freebase rather than an hcl. I guess my chemistry knowledge is less than I thought. Are HCLs harder on one's stomach and more nausea inducing than freebase? Do you think the small amount of nacl in his yield will cause problems when smoking? The tek you provided seems simple enough and I assume SWIM can just bake some baking soda to make the sodium carbonate, but I'm not sure if he'll have enough time to do this before SWIM's intended trip on Friday morning. Thanks again for your advice.