LOL, sounds like an extraction disaster! We all run into those at one point or another.

Awesome that you didnt give up on it and still salvaged a good amount of product. Usually though, hot sink water isnt enough heat to break up an emulsion quickly. Heating it in a hot water bath on the stove/heat source works nicely.

The key is to pulling all the goodies out with plenty of solvent pulls, but then after that point you only need to do a single acid salting.

my snot is not boiling away any tips?

How long has it been cooking? Add another tablespoon of citric acid and alittle more water. Keep boiling lightly, it dissipates after around 2hrs. Make sure to stir it and pull out any skin that forms on the soup surface.

Just takes a little patience for the first pull.

Latest Results:

This was done with 400g pachanoi powder.

Someone started by adding 75g citric acid + cacti powder to a pot, added enough water to make wet but not watery. Added 5L H2O and lightly boiled, mixing periodically for 3hrs. The mix started out as snot soup that gradually became completely watery. Filtered out liquid through a cloth filter and started reducing in another pot. Cacti material was put back in original pot and 3L H2O added, which was simmered for 2hrs. Performed 4 water extractions and filtrations total, and reduced combined liquid to 1.5L and filtered a final time. This gave a nice amber/red/brown solution that was combined with 200ml H2O/ 100g NaOH solution. Performed 5 toluene pulls of 250ml each, using an 85 C hot water bath to seperate emulsions. Then salted the nonpolar with 100ml H2O/1.5ml HCl. Upon evaporation of aqueous layer and MEK wash 2.65g full spectrum mesc HCl was yielded.

Its nice how this extraction can be easily scaled up without requiring significantly more expensive reagents/solvents. For that reason alone A/B water extractions are SWIM's favorite with cacti. Additionally, the material worked with has been consistently extracted with 0.6-0.7% yield in smaller scale(and also this trial), so it seems to maintain its efficiency when scaled up.

So for 100g you use 1L of toluene but for 400g you only use 1.25L ? Just sounds odd to me. And is 1L of toluene really necessary for 100g of cacti ?

And question: would it be fine to salt each pull individually in a 500ml glass sep funnel instead of all at once ? So like 25ml of hcl solution to 200ml toluene.

Hey orion,

The reason behind the odd volume change in nonpolar solvent isnt becuase of concentration, but because SWIM believes that toluene does a pretty good job at solvating givin the right volume. The volume of solvent that was used was dependent upon the volume of solution being extracted to permit adequate mixing.

Also, one could salt every single nonpolar pull if they really desired to do so, but it is much easier and more efficient to simply pull the total once with a salt solution, atleast in smaller volume. Actually, the volume of salt solution it seems must also be proportional to the concentration+volume of nonpolar being extracted. Upon 2nd 100ml salting of the 400g batch toluene extract, an additional 1g of m.hcl was recovered. 3rd pull gave no measureable amount. These were done with titration, and maybe further mixing would have changed the result, but this was a suprise as 100-200g extract toluene pulls only required one salting, and no additional m.hcl was salted out with additional pulls.

So make of it what you will, but SWIM will use these observations and say 400g extract needs 2x 100ml h2o titrations while 100-200g extracts only need 1 100ml titration. Would like to test this more in the future if a longer mixing time effects this, or also if a 200ml h2o volume titration would be sufficient. Cheers, hope this helps!

So does the dosing amount differ between mescaline HCl and fumarate?

Also, does the mescaline fumerate attract water like mescaline HCl? If not, I'm definitely doing the fumerate. It gets a little old having to watch my mescaline, and keep it from becoming soggy (I live in a humid place).

I am glad to see you earned your little brainy icon, Kash!

Maybe your Mesc has excess HCl and thats why its hygroscopic. Put it in an oven for 20mins at 200f.

I just converted all my HCl over to sulfuric. Some kind of contam gets stuck in the HCl no matter how much you clean it. Sulfuric when crashed out of water/acetone leaves this crap behind.

If you think you have pure mescaline HCl. Put it back into solution and re-base and you'll see how much crap it trapped in those crystals.

Sulfuric all the way

Very interesting, thanks for the response. You may be right about excess HCl.

For the sulphate, wouldn't the intrepid home chemist need a titration setup to accomplish this? Unfortunately, I do not have such a setup, so fumerate is looking like the best option for me at the moment.

Here's the TEK
https://www.dmt-nexus.me/forum/d...aspx?g=posts&t=14000

Nothing hard to obtain here.

I've messed up the titration a couple times (down to 5-5.5ph). If it comes out yellowish or with little sulfur salt balls. Just redissolve in minimal dH2O, add acetone and refreeze. This will get rid of the excess sulfuric/contams.

I think the biggest worry about adding too much sulfuric occurs when your reducing the water at the end of the TEK. If it gets too hot or concentrated, it can scorch the goodies.

I've been doing cactus extractions since 09 and this TEK is, IMO, the only way to get a highly pure result. No amount of cleaning or re-xing of mesc HCl has ever come close.

So do I want to do this after I extract with HCl, or do I want to use sulfuric acid to start with?

To start.

It'll blow your mind to see all those little white needles and sparkling rainbows floating around in solution.

No more evaporating excess HCl and ruining your oven....happened to me
No more multiple acetone washes
No more dirty sanchez

You were right, it blew my mind. My mind was almost so blown that I wouldn't be able handle tripping on the mescaline.

Almost.

After my first salting, learning the process, things went smoothly. I definitely enjoy the sulfate route a little more. It ends up being about the same work as HCl, though more work is needed for the titration, I really enjoy not having to wait for my stuff to dry.

So far I've gotten about 700 mg from a couple pulls, but that stuff is thick, and I know there's a lot more in there. I can't wait to give my new batch a whirl! This is my second cactus extraction, and the first time I'll try some nice pearly white mescaline.

Thanks so much for the great advice Bezerker, and the great writeup Kash!

Very true Bezerker, the sulfuric titration and precipitation is a nice way to go. Though one time SWIm added too much sulfuric and made it impossible for the mesc to precipitate and was alot more work. So need to watch out for that not to over titrate since sulfuric acid does not evaporate, but aside from that great.

Any updates Mr. Peabody?

I've had the same problem, it's easy to over acidify! It works great, and I really like the purity of the mescaline using sulfuric acid.

I have done another batch, but the cactus was very, very weak. A few pounds of fresh cactus got me a total of not quite a 300mg dose. Oh well.

Sorry to hear that, happens to the best of us. Did you use pachanoi? Sounds like a pachanot! Pachanot's are rampant, and SWIm gave up on them long ago. I find bridgesii to be much more consistent quality, or sacred incense from South America is always nice too.

Yes, they were certainly pachinot! I figured before hand. I bought them well over a year ago, before I knew the difference. Been sitting in my freezer, and I finally got around to working on them. In addition to a good torch specimen, I do have some other pachinoi genes which are very potent (which I discovered just how potent accidentally on one of the most intense days in my life), but I've gotta wait for them to grow!

Conclusion:
More evidence to add to the heap, pachinot are great for ornaments, but bad for tripping.

KASH, great tek!
one thing is abit unclear though: in your purification procedure it says:
'1) To a glass container with 1g cleaned Mescaline Hcl add 50ml H2O + 1ml HCl. Mix well until crystals completely dissolve.''

Confused about the 1ml HCI, - what concentration do you use? 10%, 30%, 100% ??

Do you mind if I ask what your true pachanoi is and where you came across it? Sounds intriguing... my friend has a kk339 from seed and a Huancabamba pach from ss (neither has been sampled), but is always looking to expand his collection.

I have a few noobish questions here so dont mind me.

1. I have food grade phosphoric acid, could I use that instead of HCl for the HCl part?

2. How many pots would really be required for this, is 2 ok? How many glass jars total? What size, all at least 1L?


3. "6. Add 200ml toluene (or xylene) and mix for 10-15 minutes. Let the mixture settle and use a hot water bath to seperate the layers from the emulsion if necessary. The layers should seperate quickly. Seperate the layers with a pipet, separatory funnel, or syringe. Save the toluene in another glass container and put basic aqueous cacti solution back in original container.
7. Repeat previous step atleast 4 times total. Discard basic aqueous layer after, saving the toluene extract which contains the alkaloids. "

In this step, are you adding the 200ml of toulene to the glass pickle jar with the 500ml of aqueous cacti extract?

3a. Once the toluene is added, does it need to be rolled lightly like during a spice extraction and then allowed to separate, or just add it and let it separate without agitating??

3b. Is the toulene the top layer or the bottom layer?

4. " 9. Seperate layers, hot water bath may be necessary to seperate emulsion quickly. Filter and save acidic H2O layer and discard/recycle toluene.. "

Again, is the H20 layer the top layer or bottom layer?


Again, these are noob questions, but I really appreciate 100% clarification in stuff like this just because it's time consuming, Id much know before going all in that I have everything sorted out fully!