So as a community we have been experimenting with ionic strength in plant extractions. I've seen some positive results. People getting larger yields, acacia extracts going more smoothly, etc. Although, I feel like a lot of things are currently being over-looked with regards to this methodology.

I will do this by bullet-point to quantize the information and keep things on a intuitive level rather then overly hypothetical.

Increased yields:
Every extractor loves to see a 3% or a 2% yield especially when 1% will make someone pleased with the results. Real quick what is yield? In the case of a single solvent plant extractions it is whatever solutes migrate to the non-polar phase. IE: Whatever your naptha can pull. So if we are adding salt to an extraction and all of a sudden we are surpassing the 2% yield 'norm'(statistically more likely to be between 1% and 2%), what is the extra stuff? Simply put, the same theoretical reasoning why adding salt to an extraction may also be the reason why more junk would get pulled.

For example if I do an ethanol pull on 50g of plant material and get a 10g yield, that's a 20% yield. Why would I not be so thrilled about this? Largely because 8-9g of it is unwanted goop. Maybe some people prefer more goop for holistic or personal preference reasons, however it isn't really correct to compare goop yield to crystalline yield. I won't get into a purity discussion here though, because even if it's crystalline doesn't mean its impure, same goes for oils, etc.

Simple liquid-liquid extraction theory essentially says that many small volume extractions is better than one large one of the same total volume. Which is an important thing and used in every 'tek' I've seen. This relies on the solubility of the solute in the non-polar solvent and the solubility in water(in this case). As said before, DMT is not very soluble in water, and is most certainly soluble in many non-polar solvents. However, extractions are typically modeled as an 'exponential' function and the difference between pull #4 and pull #5 from a 0.1g digital scale's perspective is usually quiet small. Let alone pull #5 and pull #6. Essentially there shouldn't be much if any difference between adding salt to an extraction if a proper amount of pulls are done.

Less emulsions:
This is nothing new. People have been adding salt and extra lye to emulsified extractions for a very long time now. Infact most STB's require an amount of lye that is completely unnecessary(hundreds of grams where 10's of grams would suffice). Yes lye increases ionic strength just as much as sodium chloride does.

Increased solubility:
Freebase DMT is largely insoluble in water. It might not seem like it because it is kind of oily under some circumstances and has cohesive attractive forces to glass(sticks to glass). This is how the water crystallization tek works after-all.

Now to be fair, the water in a plant extraction does have other non-polars in it, such as proteins, fats and sugars and things which may slightly increase the solubility of say DMT in it. It is of my opinion that this wouldn't constitute too much of an effect. Maybe it does for acacia but I'm not entirely convinced just yet. In which case likely adding more water would give a similar result to adding more salt by diluting the concentration of the contaminants.

Suggestion:
Freebase DMT may not be very soluble in water however free-base mescaline most certainly is. It would seem to be advantageous to try salt techniques on mescaline extractions. Considerably more so than DMT.

That's just my 2 cents. I figured I'd make a thread to discuss this further as I've seen a lot of people trying to jump on the bandwagon with salt teks.

I have a question about the salt tek that I have been meaning to ask and I think this thread might be the right place but I certainly don't want to detract from your questions posed.

When the salt is added after the acid soak, is HCl being created as a by product of the mixing of the 2? I don't know how to do the a-b = c-d conversions properly since I am not a scientist.

If HCl is being created it seems like that might be a reason why yields are higher since HCl is a stronger acid than say citrus or acetic acids.

That is my layman perspective from what I have studied so far.

Hope this is in line with your original post

InMotion,

I'm about to do a mescaline extraction of San Pedro by Kash's Tek.

I'd be happy to do a side-by-side experiment.

Between which steps do you recommend adding the salt?



Thank You,
wearepeople

@Journeyman - no HCl is created. NaCl(salt), when solvated becomes Na+ and Cl- ions. Both ions are conjugates of strong bases(NaOH) and strong acids(HCl) and thus do not directly effect pH. From an ionic strength and activity coefficient perspective they might slightly change the pH in the 0.01 decimal range. In general there should be no drastic or expected pH changes. It was totally fine to ask that here, this thread may end up with a bit of theory tossing.

@WeArePeople - In Kash's tek I would try adding salt during the basification but before the pulls. If you choose to do the additional purification I would also suggest trying it there as well, after the base has been added. Not 100% sure why there isn't a suggestion to do multiple pulls in that section maybe it just worked out better that way however.

Ok, so they basically balance each other out. I had the old " lemon juice and salt makes a mild form of HCl" saying stuck in my head.

I am going to suggest to my girls to try the salt with a mesc. extraction as they used Kashs A/B last week (with one pull on the based mix) on 100g of old SanPedro powder (pachNOT) and got 200mg so all I have to do is repeat and add the salt now to see the difference.

@Inmotion Are saying to add the salt then add the base on the initial extraction? Is there any amount of time to let the salts sit and mix before adding the base?

@journeyman - The effects should be relatively instantaneous(very fast). The idea is basically this, freebase mescaline is pretty soluble in water. So it takes a good deal of pulls to get the majority of it. This come from a "partition coefficient"(or k value) which is essentially the ratio a compound is soluble in a non-polar solvent(usually octanol) and its solubility in water. Sometimes these are put on a logarithmic scale to make the numbers smaller to conceptualize and called a Logp.

To make is short and simple add the base then add the salt, mix it up a bit then do pulls. I can't really say that this will be far superior to a traditional solvent extraction but I can say it might save a little bit on solvent.

I do understand the solubility/affinity of the mesc.alk to the water but was just unsure if the salt needed to sit for a period of time.

I will base and then salt. When the girls used kasks tek last week they only did one pull off the basified mix so I will have them repeat the same process and see the results from that. THEN go back and do more pulls to see what is left, if any.

I was going to ask Kash about only doing one pull but never got around to it and life events kept them from trying multi-pulls.

I have a feeling that with the pachNOT strain that the 2 pulls wont yield much but it is worth the effort any way just to see.

The girls are going to be busy tomorrow

This photo is from my girls tek work today so far.

Each jar has 3x100ml pulls of toluene and they have been washed already with 100ml distilled water and HCl added down to a pH of 4.

Left jar was with the salt added.
Right jar is the control.

Not sure if you can see it in this photo but the salted jar on the left is defiantly greener from the first toluene pull and after washing with the H20/HCl. It did take more HCl to get down to pH of 4 on the salted jar too. On their last Kashs A/B mesc. tek work that meant more alks.

We will see what the girls have to say in the morning when they call me with the totals

Here is the tek that the girls used on this test. I love these girls for their ability to learn and adapt.

Each jar/batch was the same except for the addition of the salt. Stainless steele pots and glass jars were used.

73g SanPedro Powder (pachNOT.cali.strain shipped to us)
1 liter distilled water
20g ascorbic acid
Boiled on high for 10min
1 more liter distilled water was added to pot
Hard simmer for 1hr45min
Reduced to 500ml
Transfered to glass jar
Rinsed cooking pot with 200ml distilled water
Transfered to glass jar
Total each jar was 700ml
Both jars placed in a hot bath in sink
Added Lye 50g
Stirred with glass rod for 15mins
No pH check
Added 30g no.iodine.salt to 1 jar
Stirred for 5min
3x100ml pulls with toluene
pH check on each jar after pulls.
Control pH was 11.5 (pKa +1.94)
Salt added jar was 11.35 (pKa +1.79)
(expecting lighter total from salt added jar)
1 Wash/pull of 100ml distilled water and HCl acid used to pH of 4.

SEE PHOTOS
Evap.plate for salt added looks like sheets of ice. no sandy/shoreline effect (crystals scrape up waxy)
Evap.plate for control looks like sandy beach shoreline/waves (crystals scrape up more fluffy)

SEE PHOTOS
Total from cheap.pachNOT.strain...they only have a 0.00g digital scale, not a 0.000
Salt added: 0.08 (darker color)
Control: 0.09 (lighter color)


Our lay people conclusions are:
Salting brings over more oils/fats/etc with the alks. (see jar photos above)
If oils have goodies then we use salt now for sure. (acacia people)
We expected to see less yield on this test due to pH / pKa difference between jars.
We suspect yields to be the same with or without salt for mesc.alks if the pH was the same.
Crystals are defiantly different on evap.plates. (see photos)
We have seen the pH drop before on acacia work after adding salt
(get a digital pH pen to see exact diff. and add more lye/base when using salt)


Waiting to see WeArePeople report now

Not much more to report. The girls hope that you enjoy their werk. They are taking me to the forest for a day picking mushroom. Enjoy Spring!

Ask any questions. Photos say alot.

Jar photo above.
Left jar with salt added. Darker
Right jar control. Lighter

Below
Photo 1: Evap.plate with salt added. Ice sheet formations.
Photo 2: Evap.plate control. Sandy beach formations.
Photo 3: Dry alks with salt added. Darker.
Photo 4: Dry alks control. Lighter.

Before we go to the forest the girls want me to ask why the salted added evap.plate looks like ice formations compared to the normal sandy beach formations?

They think it is oils/fats etc. (best guess)

The girls want to say THANK YOU to InMotion for the help to push for this test!

Thanks for any help

First of all journeymann I would like to thank you and the girls for all of their hard work! This is incredibly interesting. There appears to be a slightly different color of the products which doesn't tell us much. The other difference being the evaporated formations.

Quick question about your experimental design. Was the cactii used for both tests the same plant source? As in was the cactus used for the salt test the same cactus used for the non-salt test?

It is pretty clear in this case that adding salt didn't improve over-all yield at all. There was a slight variation in pH but only by 0.15 units. At pH ~11.35 and ~11.50 the majority of the species are freebase so this variation seems minimal(the theoretical difference is around 0.10%). If anything it appears to have afforded a 'dirtier' product with a lower overall yield. Looks can be deceiving but it seems there's no real benefit to adding salt to mescaline extractions either.

Now if mescaline is notably soluble in water, and dmt is only very slightly so(about ~100 times more soluble in octanol then mescaline), of what potential benefit is adding salt to DMT extractions?

Yes, InMotion. The cactus powder was from the same jar. They wanted to use 100g for each jar but only 146g was left so it was split to 73g each.

The color differences seem to be more greenish (chlorphyll?) and a bit more yellowish in the "salt added" jar of toluene pulls before and after the HCl/H20 pulls. The jar with the 'salt added' might be misconstrued as lime-aide and the control looks more like weak lemon aide. The differences are more obvious with the nake eye to me too when I went to their house to pick them up this morning.

The end product photos are a bit deceiving too. The control is not as dark as the photo, actually almost all white and the 'salt added' product is a bit lighter than the photo too. With the eye you can see the contrast between the 2 piles of crystals. The salt added is a beautiful tan and the control is between pure white and the tan of the 'salt added' crystals.

The statement about 'oils having more goodies' and using salt in the conclusion is that from our limited understanding working with acacia is that more red/yellow/orange is NNT NMT and DMT etc. (goodies) The more the better was my personal thinking.

They read my report before I got to their house and stated that maybe it wasn't so smart of a statement for me to make seeing that one of your biggest proposals was about DMT work. They shook their heads and said it is a good thing I am handsome because sometimes the things that come out of my mouth are not so well thought out!!!! I LOVE THEM FOR THEIR HONESTY and HUMOR!!! LOL

DMT people, my girlfriends and I are not scientists. My statement in my conclusion about getting more goodies from salt is not proven under this test. It was only my personal opinion as a student made from the fact that the 'salt added' jar in this test was more 'green' and I assumed that if I was getting more oil from cactus that a person would get more oils from DMT work too. Please only use this test as a Mesceline test and not conclusive evidence of DMT work.

InMotion, that last paragraph was from the girls and that was their way of saying your are welcome and thanks for your patience with my inconclusive statements! They are a good balance for me.

https://www.dmt-nexus.me...;t=35224&find=unread


Hope this will help add some info to the discussion.

yields yields yields, 1% 2% 3%? these numbers are arbitrary without some reliable constant to compare it to. Like... some actual data?

This side by side with mescaline was a great idea! Excellent work.
Very useful experiment, considering mescaline freebase's solubility in water. Effectively proving/disproving the principle behind how effective the 'salt tek' really is.

It seems suggestive to me that the salt allowed extraction of other products, besides the alkaloids.


It would be useful if we could actually find out WHAT is being pulled from the salted DMT extraction. It just needs to be tested.

@ancotar -
Your first series of experiments showed that adding excess NaOH gave a better yield by breaking down the bark more fully(with extra time). That's to be expected.

Now your second experiment.
First trial: only let it sit for 30 minutes got a 1% yield. No salt added.
Second trial: 60 minutes with salt added. Nearly 2%.
Third trial: repeat of trial 2 with consistent results (+1 for ionic strength)
Fourth trial: No salt 60 minute sit 1.2%-1.3%

Then your third experiment you added 70g of salt and 70g of sodium hydroxide and got over 2% with a slightly yellow product.

I wonder if you would get that same yield by using pulls with maybe 5mL more solvent or an extra pull however. No mention was made of how much time there was inbetween pulls either which is an important factor. Maybe it was left out due to the copying and pasting of the experimental procedure.

Good stuff thanks for reporting your results!


Another "new member"(I suspect a puppet account for reasons I won't go into yet)
Posted here: https://www.dmt-nexus.me...&m=459672#post459672
Interestingly by even using maximum salt concentrations they never achieved 2.0%? Granted they only did 2 pulls and used toluene instead. Even with using carbonate ion which has a -2 charge(higher ionic strength than table salt).

From previous experience I have gotten greater then 1.3% yield(the highest yeild in that persons post) doing an a/b using toluene with 'minimum ion' concentrations(went to pH 12-13 and stopped and used only a few splashes of acid for the boils). I believe I did three pulls of 50mL solvent however, rather then 2 of 175(which the poster did). That was sloppy too, there was a spill, and ran out of solvent to do more pulls.

I'm actually quite suspect of this persons findings though, due to the numbers given and how they seem very hrmm not natural. For example the highest yielding number has an extra decimal of precision and is an odd number, and the other four are flat even without that decimal. Could be a typo but there are other reasons why I am skeptical that I won't go into...

From criticism #1 in OP:
Still we don't know if what is being pulled is all desire-able materials(namely DMT and NMT) or if other contaminants may find their way into the nonpolar solvent(which appears might be the case with journeymann's girl's mescaline extraction. And in ketogenics post he mentions his solvent being darker for saltier concentrations.

Also another criticism:
All of the experimenters so far appear to be evaporating their solvent and not freeze precipitating which is likely a more selective technique for crashing out mostly DMT.

So is the limiting factor here really ionic strength? Or maybe it has more to do with number of pulls and volume of solvent, how long an STB sat, how much it was agitated, how warm the STB was while it sat, etc... You know the typical stuff that effects STB yields.

I'm happy to see these experimental reports surface but still I'm not seeing anything too conclusive just yet.

Kind of hard to do that when we can't use this site for a "Meet Up" location, eh?

don't need it.
all you need is access to, or [remotely] someone who has access to, an NMR or mass spec.

No problem!

Just glad I can actually contribute what little I can! I have to admit though that the varied times in my experiment don't really do it justice as it doesn't tell the whole story.

What I would like to do, and soon once i get moved in to my new place, is run this same experiment, but use the same time formulas for each (e.g. instead of a 30 minutes soak on one and 60 minutes on others, keep with the 60 minutes soaks across the board).

I feel that will paint a more accurate picture for the trials I was running.

Thanks for bringing this up again InMo! I love reading everyones thoughts and opinions on this!

EDIT: Sorry! I meant to answer your earlier question about time between pulls! During the pulling process, I would add the naphtha, and mix with the soup for a minute to two minutes and then use my seperatory funnel to separate bark mixture from naphtha.

The process all in all for each pull I would say is between 15 - 20 minutes each pull.

InMotion,
I was just sitting here pondering this mes.alk.salt tek and was wondering.

Was it really a fair test of the ionic strength of the salt to push the mesc.alks to the toluene due to the fact that the lye was there too?

Meaning, would it be a fairer test if jar a had lye and jar b had salt only or salt with a different base.

I don't feel that the results that I got were conclusive evidence with the test that the girls did and that there is a lot of room for experimentation to be done yet with this.

If someone were to try salt only and didnt get many mesc.alks they could always go back and lye/base to get the remainder.

The girls and I are nolonger doing extrctn.werk at the moment but thought this might be an interesting test if someone were wanting to give it a go.

Just putting this back out there for the sake of learning and experimentation.

Cheers

Well, its going to make a huge difference if you don't use lye, and went salt only. Really the only thing that is going to prevent you from extracting the mescaline is the pH, not the ionic strength.

I'm just trying to understand what your saying.... We should test the salt tek without lye, since the lye, being extremely ionic already, makes it obsolete?

If you wanted to of course, just for experimentation. A better idea would be to take freebase mescaline, and test its solubility in both de-ionized water, and salt saturated water. But, i don't see how this would tell us anything we don't already know.