This is a purely scholastic question, but what impurities would be present if one salted the toluene instead of using the water/hcl pull?

I thought all the oils and what not stayed in the initial basified solution when the alks drifted in to the toluene?

Cant fully answer that question because I am unsure, but I imagine they are resins and sugars. Often times you can see the impurities as discoloring in the NPS.

What is known is that when SWIM attempted preciping from impure solvent, it did not work out for hcl gassing. Perhaps in the future, SWIM will test fumaric acid precip from original nonpolar solvent for confirmation, though he is not optimistic for success.

Gotchya. From what little I do know it looks like the HCl salting will pull the most from the NP layer than other salts for some reason (way beyond my comp. at this point in time). I do remember seeing a greenish tinge in someones use of naptha so I think I get what you are saying there and if the toluene pulls on a wider scale then that makes perfect sense to use the water to get the alks away from the NP layer if the nauseating parts of the cactus came over with the toluene pull.

I guess I was thinking of a full spectrum extracts like the dmt work when I asked those ?s.

One last rookie question on the alks. I was under the impression that there are other psycho.actv.alks in the cactus as well (san pedro). Since they are alks like the mesc. do they come over though the process to wind up in the final product or do they somehow get left behind and just the mesc.alks come over?

I would like to think there are profiles on each cactus but I would have no idea how/where to find them. Me thinks that there are so many varieties/hybrids that there is no way of really pinning down this answer but I thought I would ask if there was a general rule of thumb/profiles to look at.

Peace and thanks again for the info. I use to be afraid of using the lye/toluene combo but I cant seem to get away from it now.

This is a purely scholastic question, but what impurities would be present if one salted the toluene instead of using the water/hcl pull?

I thought all the oils and what not stayed in the initial basified solution when the alks drifted in to the toluene? [/quote]

like Kash i'm not sure exactly either- but de-graded chlorophyll is likely and other colored impurities at least. (the nps turns darker in color)

salting straight from the nps has been tried many different ways and always required further cleanup steps

I can see the wisdom in the posts that you guys have made in regards to cactus and working with the np layer. With that info and the memories of severe nauzea from the straight juice is enough to keep me from considering doing this. After all, it is just one more simple step and if all I have to do is wait longer for the water to evap. then I think that I can live with that. Thanks for all the great answers folks.

afaik naphtha is not an effective solvent for mescaline extraction

Hey Kash great tek you got here thanks for writing it up.. i did an extraction lastnight on a leftover cactus brew from the other night and it was very similar to this procedure so thought i'd ask you a question.. first my procedure is below:

i added roughly 2.5 ft of sliced cactus to a pot of acidic water. i then blended with a stick blender to help mix the cactus into the water and pull the alkaloids more efficiently.. i boiled 5 times (2 of the boils were for 2 hrs the other 3 for about 45 minutes) and eventually combined the boils and reduced to 500ml.

I then based with a generous amount of NaOH.

i then proceeded to do 2 pulls with xylene.. combined them and salted with 300ml acidic water (achieved with vinegar)

i then proceeded to rebasify the acidic alkaloid containing water to ph 12 and pulled again with fresh xylene. i then did another acidic wash on the xylene - this time with 100ml water and 5 drops of hydrochloric acid (i thought this seemed excessive, though the ph wouldnt fall until I added that much acid) ... i now have the 100ml solution evaporating on a very low setting in the oven with the fan on and when it gets to a very low amount of water i will evap the rest with a cool fan.. my question is after it evaps will much of the extract be hydrochloric acid or will most of it have evaporated?

Hey acacian,

The HCl evaporates away pretty readily, though some gets stuck under the crystal formation. So if you scrape up the crystals after they form and let that evap a few days almost all hcl should dissipate. A solvent wash will clean up any residual immediately. Cheers!

My girlfriends can confirm that a MEK wash works for immed. clean up as well as letting it set for a few days if needed to get rid of the excess HCl.

Something else the girls have found is that when there are more alks in the NPS layer ready to be salted it takes more HCl to get the pH down. That means that if there are hardly any alks in the NPS layer just a tiny bit of HCl with bring the pH down and if there are tons of alks in the NPS it will take more HCl.

is there any chance to find a solvent where mesc is soluble at enviroment temp and than precipitate below zero? kinda like dmt?

DiMiTriX, AFAIK M.E.K. has similarities to naphtha but with mescaline

hence why people wash their mesc in *COLD* M.E.K.

i heard mesc acetate is soluble in M.E.K. when it is Boiling, but i never tried it.

mmm interesting..but here where i live it's not easy to get MEK..kinda like metanol and other stuff! maybe it works with acetone too? btw..my friend will try himself when he'd has some material to work with!

Hey Kash I am doing another extraction on san pedro at the moment. I plan on performing the additional purification step, though I was going to do it with anhydrous HCL acetone rather than fumeric methanol as well as anhydrated xylene rather than toluene.. I was just wondering whether I could use the same ratios you used of methanol to solvent with the acidic acetone to xylene?

using phlux-'s method

... so i'm getting some pretty intense emulsion in this extraction.. the same thing happened last time I'm not sure what it is that I'm doing wrong. I haven't been measuring my lye and I've been adding quite generous amounts.. could too much lye be causing this?

i filtered my tea very carefully so there was like no sediment in there at all. I added 50g initially, but did not see any precipitation so I added a little more. it then precipitated and worked fine for the first pull. but the second won't separate. also, I tried precipitating mescaline HCL by adding HCI dissolved in anhydrous acetone and mixing with the xylene.. there was a small amount of white precipitates though it didn't look like a very big yield at all.. it was only the first pull though

I found that emulsion/snot to be intense too with the a/b and what i did to help (not sure if it was safe) is that I added the toluene first in the boiled cactus juice THEN added the lye all at once and that seemed to kill the emulsion/snot quite well. Again, I am not sure if it safe to add the lye through the toluene but it worked.

Maybe it was the extra heat from the lye that killed the snot.
I did have it in a sink of super hot water, too hot for hands as it would have scolded them, heat bath that is.
The longer it sat the better it got too, but remember I had that jar super hot from the heat bath and lye.

For the record, I did rewash the end product when I did it this way.

Thanks Journeymann... I'll try that next time. I have used a lot of heat and quite a lot of NaOH. Given it heatbaths in very hot water and nothing :/

Sorry to hear of that acacian, strange that is happening. Have you tried soaking the container in an almost simmering hot pot of water on a stove? It should seperate readily. Could try adding some salt to it additionally to induce seperation.

Sooo, I've been doing some experiments on San Pedro. One of them included a side-by-side where with one jar I strictly followed Kash's Tek and the other I added 200g of sea salt after I the base was added.

I noticed that during the shake and separate step, the one with salt separated much more quickly. Also, the jar that I followed Kash's TEK emulsified ever so slightly. The emulsion was in the form of very very tiny bubbles that looked like a white layer in between the Xylene and Base solution.

I'm not sure how it affects yields yet. But I will soon.



So in summary, adding salt (sea salt) will help with emulsions.


But be sure to read this and do what Infidibulum recommends:
https://www.dmt-nexus.me...aspx?g=posts&t=31486

I'm not positive in what I'm about to write, but it seems to me that the salt particles mechanically knock the bubbles free from their state of emulsion. I have used NaOH to break emulsions in A/B's with DMT, and this was my distinct impression watching the process.

If this mechanical action is what breaks the emulsions I'd suggest using sand or some other inorganic thing that will not dissolve in any liquids. I understand the other theory on this, despite my not mentioning it. Next time I have an emulsions I will simply try and see.

Hi Kash ...an update on the San pedro extraction from a couple weeks ago... after I posted here last time, I went to give the soup a hot water bath - only I left the room and left the hot water going.. i came back and it was just beginning to over flow from the sink, and the flask was in the water with no lid on. The water had turned red and I assumed I'd lost most of it. I took the flask out which was full to the brim and sat it in the shed wondering whether there would be much left. I then went away for a week and when I came back I realised it was still a very dark colour, so I decided to try and salvage some alkaloids out of it.

I divided the liquid into two as the volume had increased to well over a litre. I then mixed a couple tablespoons of cooking salt into around 150ml of boiling water, allowed to sit a couple minutes and then added to one of the lots of liquid. I repeated the same procedure for the other lot of liquid too. I then added 150ml xylene to the soup and mixed thoroughly for about 10 minutes. It began separating immediately.. the salt worked a charm!

I then added around 5-6 drops of hydrochloric acid to 100ml water and mixed with the xylene. my electronic ph meter has started malfunctioning and my buffer solution got dirty so I figured if I can't measure the ph I may as well add more HCL to make sure it wasn't alkaline after contact with the xylene. I mixed for about 5 minutes and then separated the layers, keeping the alk water aside in another flask and returning the xylene to the vessel to do another pull on the soup i'd done the previous pull on. After mixing and separating I added the xylene back to the acidic solution, added one more drop of HCL and then mixed and separated. This time the xylene was kept but added to the other flask of soup.

I ended up doing 2 pulls on each lot of soup. Also, I had already done 1 pull originally and salted the alkaloids before the emulsion problem began on the second pull. So to recap I did one pull on the entire soup (originally 500ml) ..salted out the alks - and the second pull was lost in the sink of water. I then did 2 pulls on each lot of liquid which I had divided and salted all of them with the same lot of 100ml water. I then evapped the water via hairdrier, turning it on the cold setting as the liquid became smaller in volume. I was left with 500mg of light brown crystals which were then washed with anhydrous acetone.. the yield after the wash was basically the same and the acetone was only slightly coloured.

I have done another couple pulls and salted them.. do you think there would be any alks left in them? I used almost 2 ft of cactus.. maybe 50cm

[EDIT] just wondering whether the anti caking agent E535 Sodium ferrocyanide could be undesireable in extractions? It is present in the cooking salt that I added. I tasted a small amount of the alks I yielded and they were extremely bitter and tasted the same as the last mescaline I extracted.

I noticed this time round too, that the alkaloids were a much lighter tan brown as opposed to the greyish colour last time when I evapped in the oven at 100 degrees.. I assume this means the last batch was scorched.. still seems active though I tried a very small amount one evening