Hello everyone A few questions here from a mescaline noob...

The title says it all. I just finished up Lucid Lemonade's extraction tek on 100 grams of powdered cactus, substituting xylene for the specified sunflower oil. After boiling/evaporating the vinegar (which was used to salt out the alkaloids from the xylene, in accordance with the tek), I am left with a small amount of smelly orange goo/resin.

What am I to do with this (what, exactly, is it)? It simply will not dry up or crystalize. Is this what the tek was supposed to yield? Can I eat this stuff? And would painstakingly evaporating the xylene - - yield anything crystalline?

Thanks so much for all the help!

(Next time, I think I'm just gonna chow down on some cactus....)

Boiling vinegar destroys its salt structure, you need to not use so much heat when using vinegar, luckily mesc FB is pretty heat resistant. FB mesc is oil (what you may have). Add hcl/ fumaric acid solution to your goo to dissolve goo then filter + Evap + clean , hcl and fumarates are safe to dry with moderate heat

There are ways to turn it into glass like crystal acetates, but the goo is the basic product of those teks. It requires more manipulation to make something more impressive.

mew thinks he freebased the acetates via heat as he said "boiling"... in either case adding a stronger acidic solution and filtering + evap + clean would yield a nice xtal product too.

@ zapped17

this table indicates the pka of acids

pKa - Acid
-8.0 - Hydrochloric Acid
1.27 - Oxalic acid
2.15 - Phosphoric acid
2.98 - L-Tartaric acid
3.03 - Fumaric Acid
3.15 - Citric acid
3.40 - DL-Malic acid
3.86 - L-(+)-Lactic acid
4.20 - Ascorbic acid
4.75 - Acetic acid

as you can see acetic acid is the weakest, by using any acid with a lower pka the previous alkaloid salt structure can be converted to the lower pka acid. or something like that...

my apologies if i didnt understand this correctly, someone will brains will probably see this soon enough to verify or deny my understanding

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetic_acid
Boiling point of acetic acid:


It is rather heat stable, you can lower the pH of a solution of it by boiling, some evaporates with the water, but most does not.

There are a few myths about that online, like the idea that boiling (an aqueous solution of acetic acid )causes it to evaporate away, that isn't true. Likewise boiling vinegar does not degrade or alter the acetic acid.

Unless I am wrong, i'm going off of the data and personal experience.

Boiling off the acetic acid may have reduced your yeild, but it should definitly still be active mesc acetate. It definitly didnt freebase it lol.

Clean that stuff up with a recrystallization. Add some acetone to it and mix well with heating, then add drops of water mixing while hot until everything dissolves. Once its all dissolved, remove from heat and put it in the freezer. If everything went right it will give you nice crystals.

@ albert

when he said boiling i didnt assume he meant the highest heat was 212 f, considering the do it at home chemists lingo, boiling might include using conduction heating at 350 degrees or more, yea itll boil a solution, but it will also freebase your mesc acetate. as such i dont consider acetetic salts heat stable in the context of entheogenic extractions, but that is entirely objective. considering hcl and fumaric, you can hit em with that heat easy

@kash

didnt realize acetate could be re-x'd that way thanks for the tip! could you post a pic?

@ kash, that never worked for me w/ acetate, pics?

Thanks for all the help guys...I think I'm on the right track now (fingers crossed).

I basically followed Mew"s advice: "Added fumaric acid solution to your goo to dissolve goo then filter + Evap + clean."

I'm on the the final step of cleansing, evaporating the acetone. The acetone is leaving behind a slightly orange/brownish chalky colored powder.

Is this it!?!? I suppose this chalky stuff is what mescaline fumarate/hcl looks like (rather than the waxy jungle-spice-like crystals, which is acetate.)

I havent tried this but I would assume it should work just fine since mesc acetate is insoluble in acetone/MEK like any other salt.. Thats why in 69ron's tek he washes the end product with cold MEK, becuase it doesnt dissolve mesc acetate. Long as the solution is just at its saturation point it should precip when cooled. Too much water, however, nothing will happen.

I would be able to give it a go soon and post pics but the three types currently in progress are fumarate, hcl, and sulfate. Plan to re-x them all. Will try a re-x with acetate soon for sure you have me curious now dg.

""@ kash, that never worked for me w/ acetate, pics?""

I just tried this last night at Kash's advice. I took 575 Mg of a gooey red mescaline acetate, covered with practically dry acetone and put into a hot water bath. I then added almost boiling water drop wise until it dissolved, might have added a little much water, everything dissolved but only briefly then a powder sort of fell right out into the bottom right in front of me. I put it into the freezer, now I can see some small crystal specs on the side of the jar, some floating precipitate, and the powder on the bottom.
So I would have to say it appears to be working. Ill update my thread later tonight when I decant/filter/siphon and I know more or less what I'm looking at, though it will be this weekend before I can bio assay.

^ not sure about the powder that fell out, should be needles...
maybe should have filtered out the powder before allowing crystals to form??

lots of flawed work there....

Ive been evaporating on low heat with a sort of double boiler. As it reduces more and more powder falls out. I add a little exes acetone to the now red precipitate free solvent and placed back in the freezer. Nothing else has precipitated for the roughly four hours it has been chilling.

Never know.. Maybe acetate crystals arent needle shaped. Different salts often take on different shapes. And it doesnt matter if 69ron had some flawed work, doesnt change the fact that mesc acetate is not soluble in MEK lol.

@Frusciante - So did you filter out the mystery maybe mescaline powder and its drying now? And then you added more acetone and your chilling the residual red solution? Im alittle confused about your wording.

I let the powder crash out without filtering, put the jar in the freezer, left for maybe 24 hours.

Some precipitate was floating, some on the bottom,
some on the sides of the jar, "Mystery Powder"

I siphoned off the red colored solvent through a filter with a medicine dropper.

I put the mystery powder in a glass butter dish and waited until it no longer smelled of acetone, I then put the butter dish on top of some paper towels in a skillet with some water and set the stove to low heat. Now as the water slowly steams off more crystals are falling out.

I added acetone to the now red solution to make any left over mescaline less soluble, then put it back in the freezer to watch for more precipitates, which as of yet nothing new has crashed after four hours.

Now what I am hoping is that the mystery powder is my Mescaline, and the red oil is plant oils and other alkaloids as well.( which are still active and should be evaporated and stored I believe).

Ahh so you filtered out the powder and are trying to dry it more on a plate thats heating in a hot water bath? Cool. What color are they and do they taste bitter? How much do they weigh? Any chance you can link a photo?

It's pretty bitter. Will post a pic when It's dry.

@ zapped

i hope you added alot of fumaric solution as fumaric acid isnt very soluble in water, meaning less acid for conversion of the acetates->fumarates

personally id put everything youve done (acetic goo + fumaric liquid) and splash a couple mls of hcl solution on it and mix it thoroughly, that way when it evaps excess hcl goes away and when you do a dry acetone wash everything else gets washed out too. fumarates a bit trickier, but you may have better luck

I did that - minus the addition of the hcl - and followed up with an acetone wash. I used copious amounts of acetone, and there was a large amount of white fumaric precipitate that settled to the bottom of the acetone solution (this was discarded after decanting and filtering). Now all the acetone has evaporated off, leaving behind a tannish powder - similar in consistency to naptha-pulled dmt. So...

Is this mescaline (fumarate)? There's a little over a gram worth of it (I used 100 g peruvian torch cactus powder initially, btw.) Obviously, a proportion of the yield is fumaric acid and other impurities - how significant a proportion might I estimate (i.e., crap : mescaline)?

Thanks again to all of you