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Xylene: Is washing product with Acetone necessary? Options
 
wearepeople
#1 Posted : 5/21/2013 2:04:38 PM

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Hello All,

First off, I am not a chemist. Therefore, I'm entirely open to correction.

I'm concerned about the health and safety of those who use Xylene. Specifically, I'm concerned that people are pulling with Xylene and not taking appropriate steps to either wash with Acetone or salt out with FASA.


After Having ChemisTryptaMan review my extraction procedure, he sent the following in a PM:

ChemisTryptaMan wrote:
I also forgot to mention something I saw in your own method that I wanted to warn you about, and that's xylene. Xylene is an aromatic ring with some methyl groups on it. DMT is a larger double ringed aromatic with an aliphatic tail on it with a polar end. The "aromatic" term simply means the pi electrons(the ones that make the double bonds) actually flow freely within the rings of these aromatic portions of the molecules.

For xylene this is the ring and for DMT it is the two rings. These types of molecules have a special type of interaction that is essentially a hydrophobic interaction, but it causes them to stack up. This means that even when you think you have gotten all the xylene out of your product, it still likely has quite a bit. It is these interactions that cause xylene to take so long to evap even under fan. This is also true for all solvents, but not to the same extent as xylene due to these rather strong interactions.

Now the only reason this is such a big deal is that the base pairs of a DNA strand are essentially all stacked up in this exact same way, since the nucleic acids are also aromatic(only the "steps" in the center of the chain though). Xylene, benzene, and toluene are all notorious for finding their way into the spaces between the steps, inserting itself into the stack of aromatic rings. This is known to be a primary source of mutations that lead to the big C word.

I would advice that you get your full spectrum by doing a defat and fully evapping to get the jungle that isn't soluble in naphtha. Using the heavier naphtha for this defat will make a difference in how much of the jungle you recover. I just wanted to warn you about this because it is a serious risk to work with xylene. Even breathing in the vapors from it can be deadly. It causes mutations to many of the sites in squeezes into.


So I was pretty scared about using Xylene and started asking around in chat. Both Snozzleberry and Endlessness advised that product pulled with xylene be washed with Acetone to remove traces of Xylene. They also advised that FASA works with Xylene.

Endlessness explained, Xylene can leave a thin film trapping other xylene molecules beneath it. Essentially, by washing it with Acetone, it helps evaporate nearly all of the Xylene. From what I understand, Xylene is a "heavy" hydrocarbon where Acetone is a "light" hydrocarbon. Because they are similar, like dissolves like. The Acetone dissolves the Xylene into itself and rapidly/cleanly evaporates because it is a "lighter" hydrocarbon.

Is that explanation correct?

Thank You for Reading,
Wearepeople
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Good quality Syrian rue (Peganum harmala) for an incredible price!
 
wearepeople
#2 Posted : 5/21/2013 2:14:14 PM

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In the FASA Sticky, Entropymancer and Infindibulum explain how FASA works with Xylene:

Entropymancer wrote:

FASA Method Precipition From Xylene - No More Need to Evaporate!

But new methods of extracting spice without using lye or hydrocarbon solvents wasn't the only developement this inspired. Some intrepid experimenters also discovered that FASA can also be used to precipitate DMT out of some other solvents besides acetone! This was initially discovered with xylene (again, posted by Infundibulum):

Infundibulum wrote:
a) first xylene pull (coloured piss yellow) goes in an appropriate container.

b) FASA was added dropwise, xylene became cloudy due to the salted alkaloids. One cannot put too much FASA.

c) solutions was left overnite at room temperature allowing for the alkaloid-fumarate to sediment. Now one got them out of the xylene without the need to evaporate it!

d) Xylene was siphoned off and washed with plenty of water. This was done because this xylene had traces of acetone and fumaric acid that one does not really want. Water washed away fumaric acid and acetone, leaving back clean xylene (plus the yellowy plant oils that dissolved into it). This xylene was used for the second pull etc etc. By this approach one knows when to stop pulling since at some point there will be no alkaloids in the xylene to be salted out. it took SWIM 7 100ml xylene pulls to exhaust 240g MHRB.

e) fumarate alkaloids were washed 3 times with some acetone to remove any residual xylene and oily impurities.

f) Then they were dried in the oven at 70 Celsius until pretty hard.


This is a great developement! It circumvents the tedious process of evaporating xylene. Since the "jungle spice" alkaloids seems to precipitate as the fumarate as well, this will save jungle spice extractors a lot of time. And from an economic standpoint, this allows the same batch of xylene to be re-used repeatedly for subsequent pulls. If I ever get around to extracting another batch of spice, I'll probably use xylene for all my pulls.

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benzyme
#3 Posted : 5/21/2013 3:05:08 PM

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The term is called "intercalation", it may occur with aromatic molecules, but carcinogenicity is something that typically takes a long time to develop....I've said it many times.

I wouldn't be too concerned, unless you do this for a living, after a few decades. I've known professors who've basically washed their hands with benzene for 20 years, and they haven't developed extra thumbs yet.

that being said, I'd suggest salting out of xylene, since the free base alkaloids are so soluble in it. it's up to you if you'd rather wash with acetone.
"Nothing is true, everything is permitted." ~ hassan i sabbah
"Experiments are the only means of attaining knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." -Max Planck
 
 
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