I have just emerged from a trip using 0.79g of powdered leaf. Compared to the trip of two days' ago,

1. the onset was slower (14' vs 11'
2. duration was longer (1H28' vs 32'
3. the trip was mellower, and
4. I surfaced and submerged about 5 or 6 times between 55' and 1H28'



physics envy may be correct. The amount of salvinorin for both trips was the same, but it felt like the release of salvinorin in the starch powder was faster, and the concentration was higher for a shorter period of time.

I preferred the trip using powdered leaf to the enhanced corn starch powder trip.

I can think of only two situations that warrant the extra trouble of preparing the enhanced powder.

1. Someone wants to quid salvia, but really objects to the bitter flavour. The enhanced corn starch powder is less bitter than the equivalent amount of leaf.

2. Someone who is resistant to salvinorin, cannot trip even after quidding large amounts of salvia leaf, and does not want to smoke.

edit: Maybe there is a third category:

3. Someone who wants to experience intense salvia trips without smoking! But that is not for me....

I used 3 pulls of acetone, probably 25ml + 15ml + 15ml = 55ml

Hi Zebbie, do you think the IPA is an obsolete step now?

Was this a powder that also had a few drops of glycerin and vinegar or just pure leaf?

I tested 0.2g of my cornstarch batch prepared on July 31 last night. If I got all of the salvinorin out of my leaf, it should have been equal to a 1.0g quid. However, it was about equal to a 0.5-0.6g quid. I need a 0.75g quid to get where I like to be on Salvia...so I was a bit shy of that.

It took about 10-12 minutes to start and lasted a bit over an hour.

From my two experiences with the cornstarch powder, I can't really say if there was any degradation or not. It may very well be that I only extracted about half of the salvinorin from my 5g of leaf in the first place. Although my first .6g enhanced powder test was very intense and long lasting, I really can't say whether it was equal to 3g leaf or 1.5-2g leaf as I've never used more than 2g leaf...and it was very similar.

To test, I could do a new 5g extraction onto 1g cornstarch, then immediately test .2g of the resulting powder to compare to last night's experience.



To clarify, do you mean compared to ground leaf + glycerin + vinegar?

I can say I have enjoyed the change from plain leaf to ground leaf powder in general - both with and without cornstarch. It's easier to swallow everything once I'm done chewing if I want to vocalize, or play didgeridoo, or lie on my back.

It all depends on your requirements.

The powder made with the acetone-only extract was lighter in colour, and less bitter than the powder made with acetone/IPA. I think the acetone/IPA powder makes for a stronger trip than the acetone-only powder. But I base that belief on 2 trips with acetone/IPA and one trip with acetone-only powder. I need to repeat these trips many, many times before I can lay my hand on my heart, and declare one to be better than the other.

The few tests I have done were all subjective tests, and their interpretation may have been influenced by my personal bias and expectations. So I cannot be dogmatic about anything I say on this thread, because I could be proved wrong, either by myself, or someone else!

100% agree. Such is the nature of salvia experiments . We do our best to report what we get.

Thanks for all your work Zebbie / physics envy

You're right Zebbie about the redundancy of testing, time will tell.
Thanks for all your efforts and sharing so far
I keep lurking.

Correct, it was powdered leaf with glycerin and vinegar


Correct. The solvent extraction/corn starch route seems to be a lot of extra effort for people like you and me, who do not need mega doses of leaf to start tripping.

I timed myself today. I spend 10 minutes to prepare the powder. This includes about 4 minutes of grinding. The rest of the time is to assemble the equipment, weighing, scraping, adding liquids etc.

The corn starch extraction takes about 2 hours from start to finish. And Madam complains about the odour!


Acetone is a good solvent for salvinorin. But acetone may not be sufficiently polar to extract the "transporters". So even though your powder has lots of salvinorin, there may be insufficient auxiliary material to move it into your bloodstream. Do you have any 91% IPA? It may be worth extracting with both solvents.

I will do another extraction as well. On my first experiment, I started with acetone, and finished with 91%IPA. This time, I want to start with brandy (about 40% ethanol), then end with acetone. The reason:

Brandy is practically a non-solvent for salvinorin. So starting with brandy means that the leaf cells are saturated with brandy. The brandy will remove the polar material, but not the salvinorin. The final acetone wash will remove the bulk of the salvinorin. Very little will be lost to the interior of the leaf.

If you start the extraction with warm acetone, most of the salvinorin dissolves, and soaks into the empty leaf cells. You have to rely on diffusion to get it out again. This takes time. In practice, it means that some of the salvinorin is lost.

Yes. When I did my first extraction, I tried to mirror your extraction by using two acetone pulls, then one 91% IPA pull. I also have 99% IPA on hand, but would probably just redo the original extraction for testing.




I'll give this a try again as well, but will probably just use a coffee grinder and see if I still get as deep as expected.

Sorry if I caused a misunderstanding. I only use the coffee grinder for solvent extractions. I only use the mortar and pestle for powdering leaf with glycerin and vinegar.

And my apologies for confusion as well. I meant to say for my next ground leaf + glycerin and vinegar trial, I would try substituting a coffee grinder for some of the manual grinding of the leaf prior to adding glycerin and vinegar and see if there was any noticeable loss of salvinorin effects due to the grinder.

Ah! Now I can contribute, because that is exactly how I did my first experiments.

A coffee grinder relies on kinetic energy to fracture brittle coffee beans. It can break up dry salvia leaf, and will knock off the trichomes. The trichomes are so small that they move around in the current of air inside the mill at more or less the same speed that the blades are rotating. So the net impact forces are very low. I don't think a coffee grinder is capable of breaking apart the trichomes to release the contents. You still need your molars (or a mortar and pestle) to rupture the trichomes.

The other problem I discovered when grinding leaf in a coffee grinder is that the powder segregates easily. If you grind say 5 g of leaf, and put it into a container, the tiny trichomes migrate to the bottom of the container. (Very similar to what happens when you store ground cannabis bud, actually!) When you take a 0.8g dose from the top, you are taking ground leaf low in trichomes, resulting in a weaker trip.

A third problem is that you need a minimum amount of material in the coffee grinder. Trying to grind 0.8g of leaf is difficult, and you need a toothbrush to scrape it all out again! So I don't even bother pre-grinding the leaf before I put it into my mortar.

But our situations may differ. My vendor sells crushed dry leaf, very uniform soft small flakes that are easy to grind further in my mortar. You might have to deal with whole leaf, in which case a coffee grinder makes sense.

Not quite sure what the emphasis on trichomes is all about.

Salvinorin A can be easily extracted from salvia leaf without grinding the leaves at all. 1-3 minutes in 0 degrees F acetone will remove virtually all of the Salvinorin A from lightly crushed leaves.

Hi Girbran!

In this particular case, we are not discussing an extraction. We are grinding plain leaf into powder, then adding some glycerin and vinegar, then quidding that mixture directly.

Thanks for the experience report! I'll skip the grinder

Hi physics envy, this is Zebbie's extraction thread with Tone and IPA
The other one is about powdering leaf to succumb.

Hey Jees!

Well...I will admit that I forgot Zebbie's original thread was in the Welcome area and I hadn't checked it in weeks.

I'm not sure that it would have been less confusing to respond to Zebbie's post #41 above in a different thread, but I do see that this conversation has diverged a bit from its original intent and I could have clarified that better in my response to Gibran. Sorry to all for the confusion!

Not all that bad, it's the same subject of Salvia D that tends to mix up the 2 threads.

Time for a trip. I am testing the stability of enhanced powder stored in the freezer.

Age of powder: 1 week
Amount: 200 mg

That was the most bizarre trip. Not the content, the speed!

6' Waves of warmth
9' tripping
28' trip over
33' end of afterglow

Very fast onset, very short trip. It was almost identical to the one last week (post #39).



Tune in to Radio Nexus every Saturday for another exciting trip report!

So the freezing prevented it from turning dull

One could consider the combination of extract on powdered leaf, combining the 2 methods to whatever ratio of choice. Could the powdered leaf substitute the starch? I realize the leaf is spongy compared to starch but would it work nonetheless? I suppose it does.