Hi guys,

I am excited to try my first hand at a mescaline extraction soon. I chose 69ron's tek since it seems well reputed, fairly easy for a layman with basic chemistry knowledge, and is foodsafe as a bonus (though not entirely in my case, as I would like to opt for the HCl route). I still have a few questions to ask, and some assumptions I would like to see verified by the knowledgeable people of the Nexus before I can confidently get to work

1. Diluting HCl



I will be working with 32% HCl, so I figure this is what I need to do to make 100ml of 10% HCl solution:

32% / 10% = 3.2 (dilution factor)

100ml / 3.2 = 31.25

So then I use 31.25ml of HCl 32% and fill up with water until 100ml is reached, and I will end up with 100ml of 10% HCl solution, is that correct?

2. Salting and evaporating

Instead of using the numbers in the tek, I will do this:



I will also be air evapping the product in a dish, probably with a fan. I have never evaporated HCl before, does it create harmful vapors and/or is it odorous? I would like to be able to do this inside, but I don't know how safe this is?

2. Cleaning up the goodies

The tek says to do a few Acetone and IPA washes to clean up the extract. I have read that the acetone dissolves most if not nearly any and all non-mescaline alkaloids, so does this mean that even after getting the HCl ratio too low and pulling more junk, this also gets cleaned up easily by the acetone, always leaving you with a high purity end result?
If so, wouldn't it be better to use a lower pH solution to purposefully grab more alkaloids (both mesc and non-mesc), and then simply wash the end product with acetone, and if needed evap the acetone for the non-mesc alkaloids? Or is it not that simple?

The tek doesn't call for recrystallization, but say one would like to do so anyway.
Would you follow the standard "dissolve in hot solvent, cool down slowly and freeze precip" method, and what solvent would be ideal for re-x-ing mesc HCl?

To do the pH 6.6 thing, add 2 - 3 drops of your 32% HCl to 200 mL water. Use more extractions to be sure of maximum extraction if you're that concerned about it. IME it's not really worth a ton of messing about for 1 mg extra alkaloid.

If you're not bothered about getting only pure mesc, go ahead and use the 1.67% solution. To make this, dilute 1.5625 mL 32% HCl to a volume of 30 mL with water. It's not necessary to dilute your acid twice

I asked some of these questions at one point, here. I haven't successfully done the extraction yet, but I'll share what others told me. What species of cactus are you using?

Evaporating a very dilute HCl solution should be fine. There's only couple of drops of HCl in the solution, I was told not to worry about the vapors.

When you have your end product, IPA will wash some of the non-mescaline alkaloids away, and acetone will wash some more of them away. But they will not completely wash away every trace of non-mescaline. If you want pure mescaline, it is probably best to shoot for as clean of an extract as you can, then the IPA and acetone washes will clean it up a bit more. If you're really a purist, you can look into re-x techniques for mescaline. I'm not positive if the MEK clean-up described by 69ron would work for mescaline HCl as well as acetate, but I don't see why it wouldn't. Here is a re-x tek for mescaline HCl that I came across on Mycotopia, which looks pretty promising. Kash's tek describes a re-x procedure for mescaline HCl as well.

Good luck to you! I hope your extraction goes well. Let us know how it works and what your yield comes out to be!

Thanks a lot for the replies guys
I was originally going for 32% HCl because for some reason I just could not find a cheap 10% solution. I just stumbled across a local shop that sells it for a ridiculously low price, so no need for diluting in the end. Still good to know of course!



As this is my first go at a mescaline extraction, I think I will follow the tek as closely as possible and hopefully get a >70% pure product after being done with the acetone and ipa washes. Since the extraction itself seems so easy on paper, I was just wondering how difficult it was to recrystallize if at some point I did want to grow some beautiful crystals
Thanks for the links, I'm going to read up on this more.
I guess I'm really just shooting for an extract that is pure enough to dose relatively accurately using a mg scale. The tek states to yield around 70-95% purity, so that won't be a problem.

I've been reading up on this extraction for a long long time now, and I'm terribly excited to finally get to work

It's probably going to take a few more weeks though, I'm waiting for the holiday madness to settle down a bit first. I will definitely post my results afterwards.



Two more things I was wondering:

- Do you heat the d-limonene as is usually done with other solvents before adding it to the wet cactus/calcium hydroxide mix? I have never seen this mentioned when people talk about this tek..

- I have read a post on another forum that before each limo pull you should add calcium hydroxide to the cactus mix again:



The tek itself says to only add it once, before the first pull. It does seem logical to add more before each pull though, but I haven't seen anyone bring this up.

I don't think heating the d-limonene is necessary. As far as I know, temperature does not have a significant effect on the solubility of mescaline in d-limonene. It might even alter the viscosity making it more difficult for the d-limo to separate, but I'm not certain. I'd say for your first time just follow the tek to the letter, so if it doesn't say to heat the d-limo then don't heat it.

I personally have never heard of adding more calcium hydroxide between each d-limo pull, but I suppose it makes sense. I'm not sure it's imperative, but I don't see how it could hurt. The only time I ever experimented with this tek, after the first or second pull the d-limo was getting difficult to recover, so I had to add sodium carbonate to get it to separate.

That was what I was thinking as well. I'll stick with the tek.



Did you re-use the same d-limo for each pull? Maybe it got too saturated with junk from the cactus mix, which caused it to form emulsions?

I'll have to look into re-distilling d-limonene. A lot of it is required for a single extraction, and it's by far the most expensive solvent I have ever bought (which is a well-known fact around here, of course). I spent around 130 bucks for 3 liters of it. I don't have much choice anyway as there are hardly any sources that sell reliably pure limo, and the ones that do are all based in the US, so I always have to pay exorbitant shipping costs that are more than double the price of the limo itself. I have tried looking for a European source, but it's never quite clear if what they are selling is what I need. Most of it is referred to as "orange oil" or "citrus oil", without further explanations. Usually there isn't even a mention of terpenes at all, let alone d-limonene. I just bit the bullet and paid up.
I guess if after my initial extraction I want to get serious about this, I'm going to have to invest in a good distillation setup to re-use it.

Naw I used fresh d-limo for each pull. Perhaps I was being a little overenthusiastic about stirring, but sometimes it just gets all emulsified and the cactus goop doesn't want to let go. A couple spoonfuls of sodium carbonate works wonders for releasing the d-limo from the cactus slop. But make sure you don't use too much water when you mix your cactus/lime paste. If you do, the d-limo will get completely caught up in the cactus layer and sodium carbonate will not separate it.

Yea, unfortunately d-limo is expensive, especially so if you have to ship it overseas I would imagine. I'm not certain on whether or not d-limo can be restored by distillation. I know it doesn't evaporate clean. You could also try putting your used (probably now yellow) d-limo in a jar, adding some fresh distilled water, giving it a good shake, and then separating the d-limo to be saved. It won't clean all the junk out of it, but it might clean it enough to get a couple more uses out of it. I have looked into distillation set-ups in the past, and I have seen them for a relatively reasonable price.