I've been looking for proton NMR spectra for mesc the last few days, and in the course of searching around I looked through the Shulgin Index and found the entry for mesc. The Shulgin Index really is a beautiful book, made with equal portions of blood, sweat, and tears I am sure. But while I was looking through this opus, it dawned on me that this was compiled by a chemist who "grew up" in a world where casual use of an NMR was virtually unheard of. NMR is now perhaps the most powerful tool in the entire arsenal of the synthetic organic chemist, in my humble opinion, and while I appreciate the large amount of refrence mass specs included in the Shulgin Index, I don't really find them all that useful.

Don't worry, we're getting close to the point of all this here...

I really need a refrence scan of a proton nmr for mesc. I'm having a hell of a time messing around with solvents, trying to take a decent TLC without getting my ass rung up. I was going to run a column on some dirty stuff I have laying around, but I couldn't find a good solvent system in the time I had available to me.

I DID however, manage to rinse some dirty stuff with acetone, filter it and rotovap it down. I then managed to throw some in CDCl3 and grab a quick 1H. Maybe not my best judgement looking back now, but hey it was a dirty extract and doesn't scream 2-(3,4,5-trimethoxyphenyl)ethanamine , so yeah...i dunno

Anyway, does anyone know where a good refrence scan is located at for comparison???

Anyone know a good solvent system to run a column on mesc*hcl with?


Thanks for reading, I haven't posted in a while, but figured this was the place to turn. Many thanks to all who make this place hummm, I've learned quite a bit from this site over the years.

most grateful,
-the yeti

Here's the 1H spectra of mescaline (taken from Hallucinogens - A forensic drug handbook).



There's no information on the book on what solvent was it used, if deuterated chloroform or what... Maybe its in the publication I cant find, which I write further down this post

You can also use the program ChemDraw to predict both 1H and 13C NMR spectra of different molecules, and usually its quite accurate. Here is the prediction for Mescaline:



Indeed NMR is very good for characterization of molecules, but it's not of too much use for identifying minor compounds that are together with other much more abundant molecules, unless you isolate it, at least that is my understanding of it. When I gave to a friend some jungle spice to NMR, the only thing that really showed up was DMT, there was nothing else identifiable, but as you can see in the mimosa/jungle spice analysis thread, with GC-MS (or even TLC) one could clearly see other minor alkaloids. So for people doing forensic analysis where they also want to identify minor compounds without doing column work, or general analysis on plant mixtures and so on, I can see why Shulgin would focus on GC-MS.

In any case you can check our WIKI, I have uploaded already this NMR for mescaline in the Mescaline Analysis subsection

Btw, other potential publications I cant really find but that should have mescaline NMR information is:

Spectrometric forensic chemistry of hallucinogenic drugs. S. W. Bellman, J. W. Turczan and T. C. Kram, J. Forens. Sci., 1970, 15, 261

and there's another one referenced in the book I took the image above from, but I cant even find the full reference name, must be in japanese:

Ono, M. (1970) Nippon Hoigaku Zasshi, 33, p. 339