Hello!

Recently I made 2 extracts of wormwood in my soxhlet. The first was 12g of wormwood extracted with acetone for around 3 hours, then evaporated on a Petri dish. What left was 0,5g of solid dark green tarry residue that I mixed with 0,7g tobacco to produce a 10x extract.

The second was with 32g of wormwood extracted with 97% ethanol for about 7 hours, then evaporated on a Petri dish. What left was a dark greenish oily goo, after 1 day of evaporating it hasn't solidified much yet. Initially I thought of mixing it with tobacco too but if it won't get more solid I don't know how will I weight it and how much tobacco I need to use.

And anyway I'm not sure if this is the right way to smoke it (mixed with tobacco). I tried to smoke the first extract in a small glass pipe. I became very sleepy, after I closed my eyes dreams were coming quite intensively even before I felt to sleep. I'm not sure if it was just because it was late, it might have been placebo.

Has anyone tried to smoke wormwood or wormwood extract? Any advise?

I'm not even sure if a 10x extract is strong or weak...

Google search brought up at least 1 page of results on smoking.
Some reports from erowid, other forums, etc.
Read through some of those & see if you can't find any solid info.

I'd say you should still take it slow with an extract of unknown potency (variations in alkaloid content can dramatically effect the strength of your extract).
Study up as much as you can & take the time to work with your extract.
I'm interested in seeing how this plays out though
Post your results.

And anyway I'm not sure if this is the right way to smoke it (mixed with tobacco). I tried to smoke the first extract in a small glass pipe. I became very sleepy, after I closed my eyes dreams were coming quite intensively even before I felt to sleep. I'm not sure if it was just because it was late, it might have been placebo.

Has anyone tried to smoke wormwood or wormwood extract? Any advise?

I'm not even sure if a 10x extract is strong or weak...[/quote]

Sounds like you may have discovered a new ..[dream supliment].. if dreams came on that quickly?!

I would still be cautious..

Wormwood indeed has somewhat of a steep dosage curve and interesting effect. However this plant can be dangerous. Absinthe is good source but I do highly encourage safe use with that fairy liquid.. she might lead one astray.. it's a wild experience. I've smoked salvia officinalis that has small amounts of thujone, which is a constituent that is also in absinthe. It can lead to very toxic effects if enough wormwood or thujone is smoked or extracted.

How do your extracts smell? I've not tried smoking it but strong wormwood tea has an odd effect that I've not yet developed the vocabulary to describe - mostly due to the intensely bitter taste making repeat experiments unappealing. Furthermore, I foolishly combined it with smoking a synthetic cannabinoid blend and got the equivalent of a hyperslap

I may yet try this. (I tend to drink my ethanolic extracts of wormwood )

From what I gather, that green fairy liquid should keep your hands as soft as your face

I did not see a warning sign in that commercial for highly flammable contents.

"This is how my dreams were. Just wizzing by"

dreams

I did a second try with my extracts. Firstly I mixed the alcohol extract with a little tobacco and weighted it, then, knowing how much I added ended up with a 6,7x extract. It was a sticky mass of dark greenish tobacco now, I filled my little glass pipe with it and start smoking. It was hard to inhale because of its consistency, and with the fire it started to clog the pipe even more. So the first conclusion is that with alcohol extract this method of smoking isn't good. Next time I should use a bong maybe?

But the smoke itself was pretty pleasant, but I guess there was no effects at all. I felt some "buzz" but it was rather tobacco because I don't smoke. And I had one beer too.

So I decided to mix the two extracts and try another pipe. It clogged it too and again I needed to make huge effort to inhale the fumes. This time the smoke was less pleasant, distinctly harsher.

I guess I didn't feel anything too. If I did though, this stuff must be very mild then... I'm still left with some 5 g of it and I'll be trying it more. It's written here and there that wormwood seem to have a synergetic effect to alcohol and MJ. We'll see...



Do You mean that it's so hard to dose it because eg. one pipe can leave You with nothing and two may be too much? If You smoked S.O., then what was Your experience?

I've not smoked wormwood.. only salvia officinalis which has small amounts of thujone and other compounds.. a very small amount exists in absinthe (which is alcoholic wormwood and other various herbs / spices). The liquid is quite potent and needs to be carefully taken and mixed with cold water which infuses into misty substance.

Traditional absinthe with sugar cube / waterfall method. Milky, fairy, wormwoody goodness.

I've made a tincture once, and it smelled realy nice. Just like the plant itself smells quite nice. The bitterness of it is very off putting though. And it's a lingering sort of bitterness as well.

The smell is hard to exactly describe. A bit like fresh cardamom. The smell makes you expect something like that as well, or maybe an anise sort of taste. But yuck no. One of the most bitter things i've ever tasted.

I adore the scent of wormwood - altough I'd say it lacks the sweet note of cardamom, along with the tropical warmth that the spice seems to carry. In contrast, wormwood carries a more "northern" freshness, along with - unsurprisingly - that conifer note (thujone is named after the conifer genus, Thuja, indeed). I keep a silver wormwood in my garden which is supposedly a low-thujone variety (var. argentifolia) although it appears to maintain broadly the same aroma profile as the wild/feral specimens I've encountered - but maybe they're all escaped argentifoliae as well

As far as extracts go, my plant has taken several years to become established and has only really taken off this past summer, so I'm eagerly awaiting next yearks growth to finally see what this specimen has to offer.

Cool! Wormwood is a highly medicinal plant... I take it just about every day for Babesia symptoms (night sweats, fatigue, malaise), and it's definitely got a spirit to it.

BTW guys the safety concerns regarding thujone are not actually substantiated. Absinthe is dangerous because it's alcohol. Maybe thujone, when it's isolated, can be harmful, but when in the whole plant material or even in a full-spectrum extract it should not be a concern.

Indeed, the absinthe scare that led to it being banned was driven in large part by jealous vintners whose profits were under threat. Of course, any popular trend of regular consumption of strong spirits is going to be a public health issue. While there may have been unscrupulous manufacturers of ersatz product containing dangerously toxic adulterants, it should still be recognised that at least some of the ingredients of absinthe besides the alcohol are well capable of causing adverse effects.

While I've not managed to locate any of the studies that claim absinthe, along with other alcoholic extracts of wormwood, will cause "severe brain damage" if consumed for any significant length of time, I will note two things here: firstly that absinthe recipes commonly contained hyssop, the essential oil of which is known to be capable of causing convulsions; and secondly, I personly know someone who was hospitalised with convulsions after drinking what was clearly too much Czech absinthe. However, from what I've experienced of Czech absinthe it has always included either a large amount of wormwood in the finishing process or, possibly, wasn't even distilled - it was always shockingly bitter.

Either way, this strongly suggests to me that a non-volatile lipophilic terpenoid may be responsible for the adverse neurological effects since the established toxicity for thujone, when compared with its actual content in vintage absinthes, would mean that you'd succumb to alcohol toxicity before (or at least, in the process of) ingesting a sufficient dose of thujone for it to have harmful effects.

We can't discount the possibility of synergestic adverse effects either but in any case I would still advise extreme caution if contemplating experimentation involving whole alcoholic extracts of wormwood. The odds seem rather to be stacked against it having a positive outcome - at least take a thorough look into the scientific literature (including French and German). However, wormwood tea is considered to be safe.