SWIM bought a ridiculous amount of uncommon legal enthobotanicals to bio-essay.

One of which was a very cheap pound of wormwood (Artemisia absinthium)


SWIM was reading the recipes, most of which were concentrating on the taste as opposed to the extraction.

SWIM found that the basic ingredient was thujone and it is very soluble in ethanol.

SWIM doesn`t have any pure ethanol but does have methanol.



SWIM`s theoretical extraction would go as follows:

Steep 50g of wormwood in 200ml of methanol for a week.

Filter off the wormwood then add 200ml boiling water to the methanol outside.

Once it has cooled below 60 C SWIM will boil it on the stovetop (fan on full blast, window wide open) until the brew is under 100ml

The remaining liquid will be transferred into a tray and baked at 200F, 95C until water is gone.

The goo/power/resin or whatever will be sealed and added to alcoholic drink and consumed as such.


SWIM's roomie will most likely try it first, starting very low.

4g worth of wormwood is supposed to produce very noticable effect

SWIM will start with 2-4% (1-2g worth) of the resultant mixture to be careful



Before SWIM tries this does anything seem off about the extraction?

Is assuming ethanol solubility = methanol solubility wrong?

Anyone tried this before, or something similar?


I look forward to thanking you guys!

SWIM is thinking this tek might not work, since ethanol when distilled maintains it's thujone, so would that mean that even letting the methanol slowly evaporate would carry off the thujone as well

SWIY doesn't have access even to high-proof liquor?

don't use methanol for extraction
use everclear, or better, make an absynth. it's great!
don't forget that thujone is quite poisonous

Thujone is believed to be neurotoxic and doesn't see why anyone would want to consume it except in the small doses its present in absinthe. Methanol is also toxic wouldn't recommend as solvent for this kind of procedure.

If you wanted to make some infusion though just take the wormwood and put it in strong ethanol filter and bam you have a tincture with thujone in it. Although I don't see the point in consuming it...

use everclear, you will get the nasty stuff, but in 4 days youll have 75 percent of all the potental thujone from your starting matiral, and in ten days youll have ALL the potential thujone-check out The Wormwood Society.org(i think i can post that cuz they dont sell anything)

this is probiblby a good place to drop this,
as some of us know, thujone in not a cannibaniod, or in any way interacts with that system.
thujone is potent gaba-a recpetor antagonist.
so it greatly increases the effects of alcohol,
also consider that thujuone is a potnetaiter, since GABA inhabition alows for more active neroun firing, you need to give them something to fire about

thats were all the diffrent herbal addatives come into play, which alone are no mery go round, but when combined create the circus picasso lived.

calmus for instance has the know, alpha-asarone, which converts into tma (or tma 2)in the body. however the amount used in dale pendall's popular recipe only calls for 1.8 gms (calmus also contains beta-asarone a known carcinogen, so swim only researchs the alpha in pure form, or if the calmus is picked fresh that day)

Angelica freshens the mind
motherwort opens the heart
saffron makes everything more diacety

s0 get creative, swim likes to make a bunch of single tinctures and make cocktails

SWIM just finished extraction and first bioassay.

He completely changed the extraction method after looking more into it's properties.

Turns out thujone is actually non-polar. It has a dielectric coefficient of 10 and XlogP of 2.40

SWIM figured he'd go out on a limb and try a naptha extraction.

20g of wormwood was soaked in warm/hot naptha and shaken every couple hours for a day.
When it was time to filter it SWIM heated the naptha mix via water bath.

He then quickly filtered the naptha through a coffee filter and used a double boiler to evaporate it.

The resulting substance was a dark green wormwood smelling gooey resin.

Bioessay:

Straight from SWIM's journal:
"0:13pm friday dec 4.

13 min ago took orally 5mg of wormwood extract (via heated naptha)
(not in the naptha! just orally popped)
It actually feels pretty active.

Tracers at least 20-30% more than usual.

Thoughts more profound and powerful. colors a bit brighter.

This may be 100% placebo, if it is I'll just take note that these effects can be from placebo.

I did take 450mg of kola, but that is barely even active at that dose, it may have potentiated it...

10:28pm currently I'm feeling a sligtly unpleasent buzz. slight sinus pain and lethargy."

SWIM didn't sleep very well that night, he did not have any problem getting to sleep but got very poor quality sleep and odd but not trippy dreams.

He thinks that it would work much better with alcohol,
he was planning on testing larger doses until slight effects were felt but from only 5-7mg of the resin he got significant effects. Nothing near placebo.

SWIM is pretty anxious to try the combination with alcohol. Since normal absinth has been tested to have only 5-20mg per litre this seems likely a good dose to start with.

I have heard the only real way to use wormwood is if you distill it... something happens when you distill it....

Some famous painters who went mad later on in their lives, where fond of absint.
Do you feel urges to cut of your own ears or other limbs yet?

They used lead in the stills which produced absinthe... all claims that absinthe "made people crazy" were due to this as well as the fact that alcohol makes people crazy.