SWIM has questions related to phlux's post:
-Can sodium carbonate be used in place of calcium hydroxide?
-How soluble is mescaline-HCl in ethanol?

The reason he asks about the ethanol solubility is because he was wondering if an ethanol-HCl solution could be used to precipitate mescaline-HCl directly out of acetone by adding a 2:1 solution of 95% ethanol and 38% HCl dropwise (likely somewhere around 20 drops depending on the expected yield). Or perhaps sulfuric acid?

Also, any news on precipitating mescaline-citrate using only acetone as the solvent?

SWIM first tried sodium carbonate in a cactus STB using powder cactus and had problems with it. It is not recommended unless no water is present. It doesn’t break down the mucilage like calcium hydroxide does. The mucilage makes it really hard to mix in the non-polar solvent unless it’s completely dried first. So, you can use sodium carbonate, but you’ll need to completely dry the cactus after adding the sodium carbonate, otherwise all the wet mucilage causes problems with yields by surrounding the mescaline with water soluble mucilage, and preventing the non-polar solvent from accessing a lot of the mescaline. It’s REALLY HARD TO MIX IT if it’s at all wet. It becomes a thick goo.

Calcium hydroxide works much better in a powder cactus STB because it breaks down the mucilage making it really easy to mix the cactus with the non-polar solvent. It’s a great trick. It actually works better than even sodium hydroxide.

I don’t know how soluble mescaline HCl is in ethanol. All I know that is documented is that it’s “practically insoluble in toluene and acetone, insoluble in isopropyl alcohol, diethyl ether.” SWIM never tested it’s solubility in isopropyl alcohol, ethanol, or diethyl ether. His own experience shows that mescaline HCl is insoluble in acetone, d-limonene, xylene, and DCM, while the freebase is soluble in acetone, d-limonene, xylene, and DCM.

no answers ?

You can freebase mescaline in a sodium carbonate paste, then pull directly with xylene or d-limonene, and then salt it out with dilute HCl. You don’t need acetone.

Another method is to just add hydrochloric acid to your mescaline fumarate until it gets to pH 3. That will convert mescaline fumarate into mescaline HCl and free up the fumaric acid. You dry it and you’re left with mescaline HCl and fumaric acid. Then wash it with acetone. The acetone will dissolve the fumaric acid, but not the mescaline HCl.

Another method is to create dry acetone with hydrochloric acid in it. To do that, add concentrated hydrochloride acid to your acetone and then dry the acetone with anhydrous magnesium sulfate. Then dissolve the mescaline fumarate in some acetone, and add your hydrochloric acid acetone solution, and mescaline HCl will precipitate out of the acetone because it’s insoluble in acetone. At least in theory that will happen. SWIM never tried that.

You can tell the difference between mescaline HCl and mescaline fumarate easily by adding acetone. Acetone dissolves mescaline fumarate but not mescaline HCl. So far two SWIMs have observed that mescaline fumarate is soluble in acetone.

This wouldn't really work. In practise magnesium sulphate would react with the hydrochloric acid to give Magnesium chloride and sulphuric acid.

And it is impossible to dissolve pure HCl (it is a gas) in acetone. SWIM has tried that.

Yeah, magnesium chloride will form. I forgot about that. You’ll need something like Drierite.

It's not impossible to have pure HCl in acetone. Even though it's a gas, it takes some time to escape. Even when in water it’s still a gas, you can see the fumes escape as soon as you open the container. As long as you use it before all the HCl gas escapes, you'll be fine. But it will react with the acetone if you cap it and leave it sitting around for a few hours.

Using ethanol-HCl to precipitate a salt-form out of acetone is a method sometimes used when purifying certain other substances (converting to freebase and then salting-out). SWIM's fairly certain it would work well unless mescaline-HCl happens to be quite soluble in ethanol, which still may not be a problem considering how little of it would be used.

It would go like this for about 1g of freebase:
-dissolve freebase mescaline in ~20mL of acetone
-prepare a 2:1 solution of everclear (95% ethanol) and muriatic acid (28%HCl)
-add 20 drops of your ethanol-HCl to 10mL of fresh acetone
-pour the two acetone solutions together and stir

This should immediately precipitate a salt that can easily be retrieved and dried, but SWIM is not able to test this method at the moment.

SWIM believes he once proposed this for harmaloids, but there was the problem of harmala-red.

Why isn't everybody doing this standard a/b extraction? It seems so obvious to me that this is the easyest way to get good results.

If everyone used the same techs forever, nothing would ever improve.

SWIM is attempting to make advancements in mescaline extraction techs and is making some discoveries that make those older techs obsolete.

SWIM tried that and many others, pretty much all the popular techs, and wasn't satisfied with the results or the techs used.

The fact that most of those techs use xylene is a big negative. Nobody likes xylene. A lot of people won’t attempt those techs because they hate the smell of xylene.

SWIM got far better yields using d-limonene and did a xylene versus d-limonene comparison and found that d-limonene pulls more mescaline than xylene does.

Because d-limonene extracts mescaline better than xylene does, isn't toxic like xylene, and doesn't stink up the house like xylene does, I can’t see why someone would want to go back to using one of those old obsolete techs based on xylene.

An STB is better actually for cactus.

The problem with using an A/B with mescaline is that freebase mescaline is quite soluble in water. That’s why he’s still getting more from his pulls after 15 pulls. The freebase mescaline is holding tight to the water layer and only small amounts will go into the non-polar layer. Who wants to do 15 pulls! That's insane. That’s why SWIM now does STBs only with cactus. You get much more with far less pulls.

If you do an STB by freebasing the cactus and drying the powdered cactus, then there’s no water to hold the mescaline, so the mescaline goes directly into the non-polar solvent. So less pulls are needed. You can get pretty much all the mescaline with 4 pulls of d-limonene, even less pulls if you use large quantities of solvent.

XLogP3 data for some psychedelic alkaloids
0.7 Mescaline
1.2 Bufotenine
1.5 5-MeO-DMT
1.6 LSA
2.1 Psilocin
2.5 DMT
3.0 LSD

Of all of these alkaloids, mescaline is the most water soluble and LSD is the least water soluble. The XLogP3 of mescaline is 0.7. That's HIGHLY WATER SOLUBLE compared to other psychedelic alkaloids. It's even more water soluble than bufotenine! That’s why A/B techs are extremely inefficient and require many pulls with the non-polar solvent. At least 10 or more pulls are needed to get most of it out of the water layer!

Use an STB. Don't give the mescaline any water to be attracted to and you'll get better yields with far less pulls. If there’s water present, the mescaline will be reluctant to leave the water and only a small percentage of it will leave for each non-polar solvent pull. If there’s no water, then the mescaline has no where to go but the non-polar solvent, so you get better yields.

In an STB, you don't want to use heat to dry the cactus after adding base, but if you don’t want to wait for it dry naturally, then only use enough water to make the base active, and no more. That way there's very little free water for the mescaline to hang out in. In this case it's best to use calcium hydroxide as the base and lots of it because it doesn't need much water to be effective and it breaks down the cactus mucilage making the STB very effective.

SWIMs imaginary friend has also noticed this when doing A/B. One needs to make the pH super high and pull many times its not very practical.



Agreed, however acetone is useful to clean out the brown acidic residues that form after drying off the water when making mescaline HCl. It dissolves everything but the mescaline HCl (and some other trace alkaloids).

SWIM is discovering these things only recently. It would be a good idea to make a do’s and don’ts thread about mescaline extraction.

Recently SWIM has been doing a lot of experiments with mescaline extraction and found out he was doing many things wrong in the past that caused him to get poor yields.

When doing an A/B mescaline loves water, so you need to do many pulls. The typical 3 pull rule does not apply. You need about 10 or more because mescaline is very water soluble. This is one mistake SWIM made many times that resulted in poor yields.

When doing an A/B never wash your non-polar layer with alkaline water. No matter how alkaline the water is, mescaline is still soluble in it! Water washes will wash away the mescaline. This is the main thing SWIM was doing wrong in his A/B extractions that led to poor yields in the past.

An STB at the start is always better than an A/B because there’s no water for the mescaline to be attracted to.



Yes. Acetone really helps clean up the mescaline HCl at the end. The “the brown acidic residues” it cleans up are not hydrochloric acid like I’ve read elsewhere on other forums. Hydrochloric acid is not brown. It cannot turn brown. The brown stuff is plant extractives that you don’t really want. They can prevent the mescaline HCl from drying completely. But they can be left in if you don’t mind brown colored impure mescaline. In some cases there are active alkaloids present in the brown gunk that the acetone washes away, as with an achuma extraction, so you might want to leave the brown gunk there in some cases.

okay so swim chucked out his cactus ex bottle because he was getting tired of doing pulls - it was still yeilding about 50mg per pull - after about 13 pulls - swim doesnt want to do it again this way - the pulls get tiring - he did a stb then pulled with xylene and then salted out with hcl - how can swim edit his tek to require less pulls. ?

Can someone who understands the process write up a dry STB tek that uses a NP solvent like Xylene or Toluene rather than D-Limonene. Can d-limonene be subsituted with petro solvents?

Also if someone can explain the salting out in more detail I would appreciate it.

Thanks!

You can substitute xylene for d-limonene in pretty much every tech there is, and visa versa.

Cool, thanks 69ron.

Is there anythang that can help with the major jaw clenching that swim gets with mescaline?
His jaw fells like he was tweeking the next day cause he clenches his jaw so tight for the whole trip. Any good advice?

concentrate on relaxing your jaw muscles...massage them if you have to...and perhaps have a few pieces of gum..SWIM use to have awful problems with jaw clenching from MDMA..but if you concentrate on relaxing the muscles..and massage them..it works great...

also arnica gel works great for sore muscles