So here are the chemicals SWIM has.

Ch2Cl2, 100% HNO3, HCl, NaOH, Citric Acid

Material. 11g dried lophophora wiliamasimi (peyote) and about 35g dried trichocerious pachanoi (san pedro)

SWIM wishes do his first mescaline extraction. He plans on mixing the dried cacti in order to get a decent amount of material to work with. In the country that SWIM is in that type of cacti is hard to come by.

My question is can SWIM substitute Ch2Cl2 for xylene? And do you suggest he uses the pure HCl or use citric acid instead. SWIM will be following San Pedro Alkaloid Extraction For Dummies extraction method (http://www.erowid.org/plants/cacti/cacti_chemistry2.shtml)

SWIM will gladly except any suggestions or comments =P
Thank you for your time.

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Because of the last two replies i got my question answered, now instead of making a new thread i changed the name of the thread to accomidate my net question

can i substitute calcium hydroxide with NaOH if not, what are some common substitutes?

yes.

citric acid should work fine

It's hard to get rid of the excess citric acid. Many people complain about that. For that very reason I recommend using vinegar or hydrochloric acid.

DCM (Ch2Cl2) will work, but xylene or d-limonene works better. With DCM you’ll get a dirtier product because it extracts nearly everything.

Also DCM sinks to the bottom of water while xylene floats on top of it, so keep that in mind.

That extraction tech doesn’t work well. SWIM tried it. You should do a semi-dry tech. We have two good semi-dry techs on this forum that I posted. They are found here:

Non toxic food safe extraction of mescaline using d-limonene (orange oil)

Pure white mescaline HCl from cactus using d-limonene (orange oil)

In either tech you can substitute DCM for the d-limonene. Both work much better than that old Erowid tech which is a wet tech. Wet techs do not work well for mescaline and should never be used. Only STB’s and semi-dry techs work well with mescaline because mescaline is highly water soluble.

Thanks for the replies,
I decided i will be using "Pure white mescaline HCl from cactus using d-limonene (orange oil)" method and substituting DCM (Ch2Cl2) for xylene.

I had a question on step number 4



I will be using concentrated HCl, pure HCl. Does this mean i will need to add %10 of 5ml (of HCl) in order to get the same affect? Meaning per 20 ml of water i will add 0.5ml of HCl? I am kind of confused on that part.

I had one more question, i read that calcium hydroxide has a strong basic property. Does this mean i can substitute NaOH instead calcium hydroxide of Ca(OH)2. Otherwise if I am unable to get a hold of calcium hydroxide what will other substitutes be? (I am going to speak with my chemical guy on saturday) Im not sure i will be able to get that if it is not a common lab chem. Im not in the USA at the moment so some chems. that are common there arent common here, and vise-versa.

Thanks again.

swim got the same question, if it's 100g cacti, then how much NaOH would you need (instead of using Ca(OH)2 ). As swim remembers, according to d - limonene tek, 25g of Ca(OH)2 should be used for every 100g of cacti.But NaOH is more "powerful" base than lime, so...