Anyone want to enlighten me on how to make a good reagents? One thats safe and cheap and can detect compounds out of plant extracts. My plan is to make extracts out of every wild plant I can find and post the reagent results.

A widely used reagent is Marquis and I would advice you to buy that ready as it is since it involves some nasty chemicals.

This is a nice site for that: http://bunkpolice.org/


Though do know a VERY important thing about reagents:

One reagent can tell you if your substance is NOT what you think it is, but it can NEVER tell you for sure what your substance actually IS.

There are several chemicals that react the same way to a reagent and will make the same coloring, so if you have a certain coloring there will be a wide range of chemicals to choose from that is causing that coloration.

To reiterate: One reagent can show you that your MDMA is actually no MDMA at all, but it can never tell you for sure that your MDMA is really MDMA, it can only hint at it and further tests are advised.


Kind regards,

The Traveler

As Traveler said, the best is to use different reagents to have a better idea what substance you might have. Check my signature for colorimetric reagent test results. A few reagents of use are: Ehrlich, marquis, mecke and mandellin.

If the substance you are testing is actually a mix of substance, it will make things hard or impossible to know with simple reagents, then you would need to test with something like TLC to be able to separate the different components.

In the link in my signature you have more suppliers of these reagents.

As mentioned above, reagents aren't particularly effective for detecting DMT in plant samples. However, if there is a lot in a whole plant extract, or if you do full extraction and get a fairly pure compound, ehrlich seems to do a pretty good job of detecting DMT. I would recommend full scale extractions to as pure an extract as possible and testing with ehrlich over marquis, mecke, p-DMAB-TS, etc... (though these are helpful for follow up testing) for best DMT detection results.