Anyone have experience using any type of cooking oils as nonpolar solvents?
Morning glory seeds are the entheogen of interest; a simple polar/nonpolar.

Main questions:
Are certain cooking oils more or less polar than others?
Is there a certain polarity that would be best for the nonpolar stage?

Random chemist: "Detergent is both polar and non-polar. It breaks the oil up into tiny droplets and forms something called an emulsion. This is how soap works."
There's a lot of talk about soap-like glycosides in the seeds. Although there's a lot of debate on whether cyanogenic glycosides are in the seeds, the soap-like substance that forms from a simple CWE is definitely real. Ideas?

Another random bit of info: http://www.purifry.co.uk/cooking-oil/polar-content
"vegetable oil is naturally non-polar in nature, but as the oil degrades through oxidation, polymerisation and hydrolysis the polar content increases"

how would you retrieve the actives from the oil?

You salt out, using an acid. Theoretically, I guess, you could try gassing out as well, but that could be kinda messy (I would imagine).

I've done this, and a number of other people have also reported success using cooking oils as the NPS (see dreamer042's hippy salad oil tek, Lucid Lemonade's tek, and others). Try searching the forum (using google can help) to find the relevant threads

I was assuming the oil is supposed to soak up the non-actives, it would be a replacement to pet ether or naphtha.


Thank you for the suggestions, about to go read them now. Could you elaborate on salting out? Or point me somewhere to educate myself.

It is a replacement for the standard hydrocarbon NPS, which pull the actives (when your starting material has been basified).




From the Nexian Handbook

For solvents that don't freeze precipitate and that you'd rather not evap (or that don't evap entirely, like limonene or cooking oil), salting the alkaloids out and then collecting and/or converting them to freebase is a pretty straightforward route.

Thanks for the replies, that info will probably be used in the future with all of the phalaris grass growing around me, although at this moment SWIM is particularly interested in LSA rather than DMT. Not sure if that was unclear or something.

Sorry, slipped my mind when I saw Parshivik's question and switched to dmt.

I would assume that you could swap it as you propose to remove the inactives before going doing the cwe.

random chemists use terms like "amphipathic" and "micelles", and would use a solvent like ethyl acetate,
not cooking oil.

SWIM is going to get cooking oil tomorrow to give this a shot, hopefully before then someone can suggest which cooking oil would be best/most nonpolar. If not then she will probably just get canola, I'll report how it goes.

i don't think it really matters too terribly what kind of oil...

results inconclusive; she used very little veggie oil and the resulting cwe was very dark, produced mild nausea with mild effects, need to do again with more oil, seed, and time soaking in water.

I don't know too much about lsa but wouldnt using IPA be easier than attempting a cooking oil tek? Or are you just trying to keep it food-safe?

If you mean isopropyl alcohol that would be an option for the polar stage, but possibly a bad idea if cooking oil is used as it might make it impossible to fully evaporate. And yes, this is to keep everything food safe, a much better option than naphtha.

Swim has informed me that the canola oil method worked, she used a ratio of 1/2 pound MG to 1/2 gal canola oil. Then she used orange juice for a CWE. She drank 3/4 of the product(She already knew that the seeds she had were very weak!!) and had somewhat strong effects, but nothing too crazy. Mild nausea was experienced for about 2 hours, but digestion could have been slowed by fasting most of the day. She also says she thinks the nausea she got was from tiny seed particles as filtration was near impossible.

Swim would suggest people use canola/cooking oil as a NP solvent for many reasons that are pretty obvious. Also distilled water is probably a better choice than everclear for the P solvent since it's much cheaper, and wont harm your health . The only reason for everclear is fast evaporation, about 5x faster than water, but the difference can be made up for by having a 5x larger surface area for example.

Ive been told Hot sunflower oil is great at collecting alkaloids but its messy trying to seperate it the oil is so thick and seems to encase the alkaloid salts that are sandwiched between the water and oil.

It does have potential as they collect the alkaloids very efficiently.

there's no real advantage to using distilled water for an extraction.
nobody "swim"s anymore, and a great majority of our members know how to handle chemicals,
and get consumable end products. there are far better alternatives to cooking oil, it's a matter
of understanding chemicals, not fearing them, and having some common sense.

SWIY will never get anything this clean using cooking oil.

Most of what your saying is right, but the majority of people who try LSA don't go through the whole process of doing acid base extractions. Try searching other forums for suggestions/methods for consuming LSA and you'll find that most don't know what the fuck they are talking about, and suggest simple CWEs or P/NP with naptha, petroleum ether, and other carcinogenic/toxic chemicals. Canola oil is only $5 a gallon. Distilled water is $1 a gallon. Everclear is usually around 15-25$ a fifth. The majority of this forum's users may be intelligent enough and know what they are doing when it comes to chemicals, but that can't be said so surely about everybody else.

say the hobby was biology.. would you spend 2 cents for a plastic
butterknife to dissect a frog, or 15 dollars for a scalpel?

CWE isn't efficient because it doesn't separate ergopeptines,
neither does everclear.

cooking oil?
c'mon.

If it's just a matter of preference to use "food-safe" chemicals and the end goal is to "get high", then by all means,
use flaxseed oil, olive oil, or patchouli. none of the common oils
have more selectivity for ergolines than others.

I agree with benz here.

Personally, i like to do a ipa polar pull on the lysergamide seeds, then wash that with a nps. You can use limo, a number of plant oils, hydrocarbons, whatever. The point being, it gives a fairly pure product, and you use a minute amount of nps to wash your end product with after evaporating the alcohol you pulled from the seeds with.

IMHO, the whole pre wash with a nps, then extract the lysergamides is a poor way to extract. Better to use a dry alcohol that wont degrade the alkaloids like water does, at least much, much less, then wash with a bit of nps after evaporating your alcohol pulls.

Its a much easier way to go about it imho.

And IPA is safe, just get 99% and check the msds. Or better yet dry ethanol, or denatured ethanol with a clean msds (IE something that doesn't leave a reside, and the only denaturants are volatile).

I think limo would work better as a nps as well, if you want to be 100% food safe. But heptane, and a vac purge afterwards to get any remaining solvent out of your end product works just as well, and is just as safe, even without a vac purge.

Non food safe solvents are not a danger to your health, so long as you check the msds, and know how to use them. I don't like the idea of a tek the uses food safe solvents because people are inable to learn how to extract properly, and could end up with a contaminated product using non-food safe solvents in the extraction.

Those people need to learn how to extract, rather than being lazy and paranoid and being afraid of solvents because they refuse to learn the principles of extraction.

d-limo would be an interesting one. it has similar polarity and structure to toluene and xylene.
certainly more structurally similar to ergolines than cooking oil is,
and you know the ol' saying in chemistry..."like dissolves like."