In order to give the appropriate support for all users who start testing their plant extracts or drugs in general for harm reduction or research, we are starting this subforum.

For those that are not already chemists and dont have access to this material, the TLC kits are available as linked here.

Feel free to post any questions you might have regarding the testing process.

Also ideally we would have people posting threads with pictures of their testing plates so that we can help interpret results as well as build a database of results.

Good luck on your experiments!

Hi Endlessness

A quick question on testing:

I want to test some 5-meo-dmt I have.
What's the best test kit to get for this, what reagents do I need?

Will I be able to test percentage purity too?

Many thanks

TLC kits is definitely better than just reagents because it will help you see if there are impurities from synthesis or whatever in your product.

If you dont want to get a TLC kit, then reagents you should get are Ehrlich and Hofmann reagents. Ehrlich it will turn dark purple, and hofmann it should change to green quite fast, within the first 30 secs, while DMT for example is a lighter pinker shade with ehrlich, and it turns yellow with hofmann and only after over a couple of mins it turns green.

Many thanks, Endlessness :-)

I just got some tlc plates, uv lamp, capillary tubes and the most important: some cacti that i suspect of containing mescalin.
But i can't get any methanol!i got Ammonia solution, but methanol is really hard to get here. Ate there any other eulents i can use? What about Ethanol? Or plain water, maybe with vinegar? As i thought could work as it is used also to extract?

What % ammonia do you have? What kind of TLC plates you have? What reagents (like marquis, mecke etc) do you have to confirm the identity of the spots?

Yeah you can use a variety of other eluents, you could use ethanol:ammonia, but ideally you'll need to have a standard of mescaline (or a known mesc-containing cact) to compare it to, and be really sure you have mescaline.

That being said, specifically in the case of cact, I think this is a bit more straightforward since at least AFAIK there arent any common compounds in innactive cacti that will give you false positives with reagents, so if your cact has one clear spot only and it turns the right colors with the reagents, you're very likely good to go.

BTW did you check out this thread? It has links to the reagent reactions and other relevant TLC info.

Please post back your results!

unfortunately, i dont know the % anymore for sure, but i think 10%.

I have one San Pedro from a reliable source, so that will be my reference.

6 other nice cacti, maybe peruvian, were laying in a giveawaybox out in the streets one freezing winter evening. I had to rescue them :-)

I have merck s.g. 60 f254 aluminium plates.

So to understand the process: the Ammonia will basify the mescalinacetat from the sample spot and then the ethanol or methanol will start to transport it. is this right?

would it work with acid eluents too?

Is it better to use a water/acid extract concentrate or plain concentraited cacti juce for the sample spot?

I have some reagents, so confirming the spots will be possible.

here are the results of my first plate.
All cacti had a pretty similar profile, see fotos.

(sorry for the bad quality, i'll get a better camera next time!)

UV-B 365nm


UV-C 254nm


visual light


How I proceeded:
I cut a small sample from each cactus, squashed and boiled it up in a spoon with some water / vinegar. The resulting slimy liquid was used for the sample spots.

As eluent i used a mix of 4 parts 96% Ethanol and one part 10(?)% amonia solution.

All samples showed a spot at 254nm (not visible at 365nm) that seemed to be mescalin and another half-moon shaped spot just below, visible as dark spot at 254nm and bright blue at 365nm. don't know what that is.

I did some reagent tests on the spots (unfortunately the reagents are ~two years old) and the only strange thing i noticed was that with liebermann it instandly turned black at the suspected mescalin spot but then slowly fainted to red and disapeered after some minutes. is this normal?

Hey!

A few things.. Did you add the known san pedro in one of those lanes, to compare? If so, and it appeared the same, that's a good sign. Were all the reactions the same in all cact?

Also, can you please describe (or video) the other reactions apart from Lieberman? Lieberman does turn black with mescaline. Its been a while since I tested mescaline, cant remember if on the plates the black from that reaction disappeared. Did you try Marquis too? Did it turn clearly orange/red?

Did you read the thread I linked earlier? In there, I put the reaction database link, you can use for comparison.

Another idea when results are inconclusive, you can try doing a small drytek extraction on small amounts that cact just to see if it shows better on the plate. And/or you can play around with concentration of the sample too, try it more and also less concentrated, you may see better what's there.

Thanks for sharing the results!

The San Pedro is the firest sample from left.
Marquis and Mecke both matched for Mescalin. As i wrote before, the only strange thing i noticed was that libermann turned first black (thats OK for mescalin) but then slowly faded to red and disapperared. Wonder if s.o. else noticed that before, as I didn't find any record of this reaction in the www.