I had success with bufotenine extraction using acetone, citric acid and sodium carbonate.

I tried crashing bufotenine citrate from acetone solution but this time used traditional yopo (freebased using calcium hydroxide). Unfortunately, no precipitation happenns.

Any ideas why? Does the calcium reacted with citric acid or the bond between calcium ion and bufotenine was stronger than when sodium is used?

How was your entire process?

The preparation of Yopo snuff:

1) Seeds toasted, peeled and finely crushed in a coffee grinder.
2) Weighed and mixed with calcium hydroxide (1:2 ratio lime:seeds by weight)
3) Made into wet paste, kneeded for several minutes, spread and let dry overnight.
4) Crushed in mortar, dried for 60 minutes at 80 C (180 F) in oven

Bufotenine extraction from snuff:

1) Mixed with small amount of anh. acetone (2 parts acetone to 1 part snuff), filtered through cotton ball, repeated 2 more times.
2) The acetone solution filtered through a very thin bed of Celite.
3) Added 1 g citric acid dissolved in 10 mL acetone.

(nexts steps would be freebasing the bufotenine citrate, drying, mixing with acetone, filtering, evaporating the acetone leaving tan alkaloid powder)

The same batch of yopo snuff has been tested the day before and was very active at low dose, so I am sure bufotenine was present.

I will try next time with sodium carbonate but I was surprised absolutely nothing precipitated by adding the acid. I am sure the acetone was anhydrous.

My guess would be not enough wetting and the CaOH didnt have enough time to FB the bufo before drying.

Yes this is possible. The seed-lime-water paste was quite dry - I thought making it wet but not watery is enough, but maybe more water should be added... The snuff was also more painful than usual so this all indicates leftover CaOH and not enough freebasing.

Okay so more water next time...

Is it from the same batch of seeds? How many seeds did you use?

It's possible that you were unlucky and got a 'cold spot' in your seed batch

I've used about 4 grams of powder, which is equivalent to approx. 15 seeds. I've used that much because I did this several times (only not with lime) with great success and I was sure the yopo won't be snorted in the next weeks anyway, so better extract it (it is said it quickly loses power over time).

And the exact same powder has been snorted by 2 people, both having strong effects from a dose equivalent to less than one seeds. So I am almost certain there was high alkaloid content hence I am surprised no citrates precipitated at all.

The most likely case was that the snuff has been dried too quickly and freebasing not completed. Maybe also too little lime used (I however smelled ammonia when mixing seeds with lime, indicating a reaction happening).

I will try tommorow on more seeds but with sodium carbonate and see.