Quote:Well it would be great if BW does some investigating on mesc citrate in the meantime.
All I can measure does not include true validations if smoking is safe, I simply have the TGA shown
here and it does not look like a clean evaporation. So just from that picture I would expect more combustion / harsh smoke?
Only additional thing could be measuring plain citric acid and then check if (like told on wikipedia) it will just decompose instead of evaporating. That would be indicated while showing some strong signal in DSC (which shows melting and potential reactions happening) at the same point where it might loose some weight in TGA.
But as it seems already proven that it mostly decomposes (makes also more sense due to formula, many OH or even COOH groups will greatly disfavor clean evaporation) and I also tried evaporating it on a hot plate, it rather became black after 200 °C and fumes were minimal. At the end I never came to a full evaporation, so I stopped at 250°C, where I did not get any further fumes.
But this might have been a sample I had that mostly contained citric acid? Dont know so far. Still if Citric Acid behaves like this it might not be different for the Alkaloid salt, which looks like it in that TGA.
Still at the end as long as you get
some vapor and as long as it feels
smooth I would say it should be quite fine to "test it". But that would be probably only valid for smoke that you generate to a max of 200 °C, because at 250 °C there should be soon also combustion of Mescaline itself starting.
About the fear of acidic vapor and thus hazard to the lungs:
Actually I'm quite sure it will not be too dramatic. Monomescaline Citrate will still have 2x protons of course, potentially causing a strong acidic effect on any tissue. But even though these groups should have all the same acidic strength, their pKa is not the same. That is not actually based on the actual constitution, but rather after the first proton is shot off, only at this point the pKa of the others will dramatically rise (hence get weaker). Reason is that in nature a high density of charges is disfavored, as this is creating a too high potential. Therefore the chance of shooting off more protons is decreasing more and more the more charges the acid already has. Therefore already the second proton is even less acidic than Vitamin C (which is sour on your tongue, but still regarded a really weak acid). The third one being then extremely weak ... So Citric acid that has already deprotonated 1x is actually a weak acid.
Furthermore you can quickly verify if it truly has a caustic effect. To check if I should notice if my salt is acidic, I made a blind check and smoked just pure Benzoic Acid. Only 1 mg will give VERY strong irritation to your lungs. Dont worry, it will just feel like opening your aceto balsamico and get a full nose right at the bottle tip. Irritating, but not hazardous. So if you can inhale your smoke and it will not instantly cause extremely strong irritation (like smelling at the top of your household acid bottle) then I am really sure that this vapor is free of substances with any reasonable acidic effects.
Lastly I also did that evaporation test with pH paper. Pure benzoic acid in a glass banger and added WET pH paper = instantly red. When I did the same with at least DMT Benzoate = stayed "colourless" AKA Orange. Maybe the citric acid proton #2 could still colour it yellow?