been a long time since i've visited the nexus here, and quite awhile since swim has done much kemistry practice, so here's his rough process:

boiled down cactus with lemon juice, evaporated most of it, also had a friend donate some leftover mescaline "tea" (boiled down cactus with lemon juice as well).

so basically 750ml of cactus juice.

basified to 13 with NaOH
pulled 3X with xylene approx 100-120ml each pull, swirled 20-30 min and sep funneled apart
took his 350ml +/- of xylene and pulled 3X with 75ml 5% vinegar each time (250ml vinegar total)
evaporated vinegar,
nothing.

also to note: he's still got every step along the way set aside(something he's learned to do!). the xylene is sitting with some Sulfuric acid in it right now, basified tea sitting with xylene it in.

HELP!!!!!

thanks in advance!

Do you know that the cactus material you started with has any mescaline in it in the first place? some trichs are inactive.

as he asked ^

Also, waht do you mean "nothing" ? Literally nothing, or maybe some oil/goo ?

a successful extraction had been performed on the tea from a friend. he had lots of tea and extracted out of much of it. then had some (.5l) leftover and quite generously gave that to go along with swims .5l of tea

very minimal oily substance leftover in evap dish. less than one would even normally think to scrape out of the dish

swim will test his ph strips on some distilled water, and/or just throw some extra NaOH into the tea and try pulling some more xylene out of it? possible the strips aren't viable anymore? they're probably 1-2yrs old. thoughts on that?

often when a product is oily it seems like there is less than there actually is. I hope you didnt throw that oil away btw. You can always redissolve it in acidified water, re-base and re-extract (or redissolve, mix together with the rest and re-extract again)

Im not sure of ph strips get bad after 1-2 years, I would think they should be fine. In any case yeah you can always add more NaOH and extract again. Make sure the pulls are very thorough, make a few cycles of mixing/letting stand before pulling. Good luck

swim scraped up all the oily substance he had, rinsed the dish out with vinegar and put EVERYTHING back into one jug including the acidified mixture, the xylene and the original tea that had been basified, going to pull the solvent off the top, reduce the tea (which he doesnt know if its acid or base right now as he added an acidic mixture to my basified tea.) evap a large portion of the xylene, and try it all over again

and swim NEVER throws things away unless he knows for sure everything was done properly and that it is thouroughly exhausted! he learned that long long ago!

Good work So yeah just add more base to the mix before pulling to make sure its basic, and it should be fine. I think the idea of reducing is a good one.

Good luck and let us know how it goes

Did your friend use the same procedure?

Seems to me you used a very large volume of water compared to the volume of xylene... when compared to the volumes as originally meant to be used in ron69 tek. Perhaps the alkaloids remained mostly in the tea and were not pulled by the xylene? So the oily stuff might be the good stuff, but just a very little bit of what was in the tea. One could have tested for bitterness by licking that stuff : P Wouldnt say anything about the sort of alkaloids/molecules though...

I also read about the phlux- tek about extraction from tea (clearly using more water than used in the 69ron tek.) Wonder what volumes of tea and xylene/limo other people have used. Is the ratio of polar : non-polar, or to be more precise, water : xylene really a factor? I remember from the 69ron limo tek thread where he said the mescaline tends to remain in the water.. or something along those lines.

Anyway, good luck with your experiment

The extraction wasn't really based off of his tek, but a quick read through shows him using limonene (which i have nothing against.) whereas xylene was used in this tek, I've heard xylene is maybe a little more successful at attracting freebase mescaline, although that information may be false.

now that everything is back to its original-ish state, more pulls with more solvent on the basic mixture will be done with greater interaction times after a general reduction is performed, as well as more acid pulls on the freebased solvent mixture (after reducing) will be done, after all, thats what sep funnels are for glad the good ole days of using eyedroppers and gravy separators are done for in this guys lab!

now, if i could just find out where i put that free time i had set aside...

SWIM will almost guarantee you did not base enough. Your end product is the same thing that SWIM would get when he was having trouble extracting mescalito. Just because you reached pH 13, does not mean it is adequately based. You can reach a pH of 13 with only about 20-25 grams of sodium hydroxide, and that is NOT enough. How much base did you use exactly?

Also, ditch the vinegar, SWIM feels that's leading to problems too. He's done an acetate salting side by side with a hydrochloride salting, and the salting done with vinegar always ends up being brown and kind of oily, while the hydrochloride salting scrapes up into a free-flowing powder.

heavenlypursuit, I really think it depends on the Acetic Acid being used. I guess you are right in saying "ditch the vinegar", as diluted lab grade acetic acid has helped people go beyond the goo factor.

Very true. I should not have been so general about acetic acid. Let's leave it at this, don't use vinegar for you're acetic acid.