So sorry to bother you all with this, but that's what you get for being smarter than me

A lot of people seem to think that making a tincture is simply putting some herbs in a jar of solvent, letting them steep, filter, and ready!

However, we all know that not every solvent x is a good extractor of substance y...

Some info on the internet states that you should use a solvent with 50% alcohol content, because the water also pulls stuff into the extraction...

However, this way one might pull unwanted substances or destroy the wanted ones...

Plus, the recipes given by mainstream herbalists might not aim at the same results or effects that we are looking for...

So, I would like this thread to become a source of information where "teks" can be posted on the making of specific tinctures, what solvents to use, steeping times, what amount of the tincture to use etc...

Why my interest in this subject?

First of all, tinctures have a much longer shelf life than herbs (fresh or dried) which seems like a good idea, since some of the herbs we use in our changa blends are delivered by the ounce, while only a few hundred mg. might be needed in a batch of changa...

Secondly, some herbs might be quite harsh to smoke, and a tincture could possibly deliver their desired effect in a much smoother fashion...

Third: tinctures might make it easier to dose and evenly distribute a herb into a changa blend, diluted in the case of stuff you want to use very little of, or concentrated if you like to use more of it than physically possible with dried herb (a gram can only contain 1000 mg, right?)

In conclusion: having a number of tinctures/liquid extracts of which one could add one or more drops to the solvent that is used for the changa-making seems to me like an interesting idea, allowing for a blend that is easy on the lungs without having to compromise the amount of "actives"... (e.g. dosing a mullein/spearmint mix with passionflower, lotus, calea, damiana, caapi tinctures/liquid extracts)

There is already a lot of info on "10:1 caapi", so how about the rest?

peace

And the caapi extract info you said we have a lot of, is in a way misinformation IMHO.

People use IPA to soak caapi but IPA is a very bad solvent for harmalas, so people are probably leaving a lot of alkaloids behind. IPA is not good to dissolve freebase harmalas, even worse to dissolve different harmala salts. So I suggest to people wanting to concentrate harmalas, to either do a full extraction, or do water soak instead of IPA, or use methanol (but careful its poisonous, make sure to evaporate it all before consuming), or ethanol which is somewhere bettween IPA and methanol in terms of harmala dissolving.

I think for whoever soaks up caapi with one of those solvents, they should afterwards try to do an extraction (boiling in acidified water , filtering, basing) to see if any harmalas have been left behind.

Another thing to take in account is, how effective is it to smoke alkaloid salts? We know that in general, smoking alkaloid salts is usually inneffective or plain irritating/toxic (in the case of smoking fumarates for example). AFAIK nobody knows what salt form the alkaloids are in caapi, maybe tannates, maybe oxalates ? So we dont know how well those smoke, we just know some people smoke it and claim its active.. But how do we know how effective it is, and how safe it is? Until we know more, I´d avoid smoking these concentrated caapi leaves, unless one adds freebase harmalas, which is probably better/more efficient/safer.

This would be a different case, of course, if one was makign the tincture to consume orally, in that case just soaking in any of the appropriate solvents and consuming the tincture without freebasing, would work fine.

Thank you endlessness for this clarification on the caapi extracts...

Regarding passionflower, this was posted somewhere else by MelCat regarding passionflower...

"First thing is since passion flower is such a weak source of an MAOI, you'd have to use a lot of material so you'd want to defat that as much as possible.

From what I understand, harmalas are very insoluble in acetone, so I would first soak the plant matter in that a few times to get out any excess fat and chrorophyll. I would then soak the plant matter in some methanol for awhile to make the 10x extract. I'd do at least 2 methanol pulls, each at least 2 weeks."

I have no methanol, so I hope this works with ethanol as well, but I can't see why it wouldn't...

Before we know how to extract, we need to know what compounds we´re after (and what potentially unwanted compounds we want to avoid).

What passiflora species would you plan on extracting?

I´d take a look at nen´s thread here : https://www.dmt-nexus.me...aspx?g=posts&t=26892

It seems some passifloras might have harmalas, but some of those harmalas are not good MAO-A inhibitors. This paper says that Passiflora incarnata has 0.00935 mg/g harmine, meaning you´d need 200g passiflora incarnata or 20g of caerulea to get 2mg of harmine, which might be enough to have some small effects when smoking one dose. For oral activation, if we take those numbers to be true, you´d need like 20kgs passiflora for orally activating DMT with Passiflora incarnata, or 2kgs of caerulea. Harmol does not have significant MAO-A activity, not sure about other potentially present harmalas such as harmane, would have to check literature. Anyways nen quotes some other amounts for these plants but I haven´t checked the sources yet (hultin, gracie and zarkov)

But passifloras also have some flavonoids which may contribute to MAO-A action. Maybe some of them are wanted, but maybe others not. Vitexin is found in passifloras, but it may also cause the swelling of the thyreoid gland according to publications linked in wikipedia, which isn´t something wanted.

Regarding solubility, while acetone defat might work to clear non-harmala substances, it could dissolve some of these flavonoids (at least taking as a base this publication), so it might not be what you want to do.

So yeah, I´d first look the exact species you want to use, review nen´s thread to see the substances found in it, google to find their activities and solubilities, and then you´d have a better idea on what to do or what not to do.

The main active ingredients of Passiflora are:

Flavonoids: quercetol, kaempferol, apigenin, luteolin;
C-heteroside: vitexin, saponaroside, schaftoside, isoschaftoside, isovitexin, isoorientin.
Phytosterols: sitosterol, stigmasterol;
maltol;

Traces of cyanogenic heterosides: ginocardina.

Traces of essential oil with a composition little studied.

Dry drug must contain at least 0.3% (Pharmacopoeia Helvetica) or 0.4% (German Pharmacopoeia) of flavonoids expressed as hyperoside, or at least 0.8% of flavonoids in vitexin (E.S.C.O.P.)

The presence of harmaline, frequently indicated, has not been properly confirmed.

Source: http://www.medicinalplan...ssiflora-passion-flower/

I think it might take quite a while and a fair bit of effort before I'll have the faintest clue of what any of this means... If these are all actives I may be getting more than I bargained for in this quest for knowledge - might as well find some simpler stuff to start with, and leave this plant alone for a while...

I was just trying to find out what a "C-heteroside" is...not much relevant info showed up so far, but I am by now thoroughly convinced that this is way beyond me...

So adding the liquid extract I have to my changa is not a good idea, and I should dose it orally... For my changa I should get that rusty old molecule-printer out of the basement and set it to "freebase harmaline"?
(I believe I read somewhere that harmine isn't active when smoked/vaped?)