This is a shortcut to dg's acetone/water/sulfuric mescaline precipitation TEK.

Process is under development and not guaranteed to work (has not been replicated yet). Numbers are rough guidelines only that could be optimized in the future. Use acetone and sulfuric acid compatible materials starting at step 2 (e g. a mason jar with appropriate lid such as commercially available polypropylene) Here is the outline:

1) Make a plain (no acid) water cacti tea that is filtered/decanted and concentrated
2) Add ~2 volumes of acetone
3) Gunk will separate quickly (5 min or less), separate gunk out, optionally also freeze precipitate and decant*
4) Add another two volumes not acetone**
5) Add a few ml of ~10% sulfuric acid (pH down at the pet store)***
6) Put in freezer for a couple days
7) Collect precipitate in a coffee filter (if nothing significant has precipitated, or to test for possible remaining nproduct in solution try adding more acetone or sulfuric and re-freezing) and let dry.
8 ) Dissolve product in dry filter and dry jar with minimal water at least 2x
9) Pour water in shallow Pyrex dish and evap at low temp in the oven
10) Optional: perform a cold acetone wash to remove any traces of sulfuric
11) Scrape and collect the potential goodies (this process now not yet verified).


The result should be sparkling crystalline and slightly off white (see image bellow). Purity and mescaline content are unkwon. First yield is on the high side, so it is though that some non-mescaline product could be present despite the clean appearance.

Some numbers/details during an experimental run

1) 164g of fresh cacti made 100ml of tea concentrate. Fresh cacti was frozen before multiple hot water extractions. After decanting/filtering, tea was concentrated to 100ml.
2) Added 200ml of acetone and chose to do the optional freeze precipitation*
4-7) This was skipped originally but since not much precipitated at step 7), I went back and added ~200 more ml of acetone and another splash of sulfuric to have more cloudiness, and that precipitated well.
10) 628mg of sparkly off white fine powder collected (see image).
11) No significant precipitation seen after adding 200ml more of acetone and a splash of sulfuric and re-precipitating.


*this may be optional, a small sample skipped this freeze precipitation and was still powdery. Experimentally yields were good with this 'cleaning' step though. It is not known if this will start to precipitate natural mescaline salts instead of (or along with) contaminants.
**Final acetone volume is currently unknown, proposing 4 volumes of acetoje per volume of tea at the moment (20%)
***Final sulfuric acid volume is unknown. With 10% sulfuric, 6ml matches to 1g of mescalime. One can always add more sulfuric during step 5 and check for new clouds/precipitation.

This is great! So what form of salt is mescaline in naturally in the cactus? I had always assumed citric but I didn’t think that was at all soluble in acetone.

I know freebase mescaline is very soluble in acetone

Will have to give this a try. Mescaline Sulfate will form lovely long crystals directly in cold water if you are patient. It’s a great way to ensure purity as not many other contaminants will do that

I have no idea what the natural salts are. We are depending on them not crashing in the acetone/water mix before sulfuric is added. I wouldn't base the water to make sure mescaline remains soluble because since that could cause extra salt contaminants down the road.

Looking forward to any results.

Also the original post is a bit long because there are some unknowns. Here is a simplified version (Calling this STARS for Straight To Acetone Reprecipitation of Sulfates, and also a cacti cross section looks like a 🌟 :


1) Extract: Make concentrated clean cactus water tea using your favorite method with a final volume of ~20ml for every 100g of fresh cacti or 5g of dry cacti. Use only water, do not add any additional acid (this could risk mescalime salts crashing too early before contamination can be removed during the first acetone precipitation). For example 500g of fresh cacti are processed to 100ml of concentrated filtered tea (somewhat coarse filter is OK, like a metal coffee filter which is not as fine as a paper coffee filter).

2) Gunk precipitation: Add 2 volumes of acetone (for example if starting tea was 100ml, add 200ml of acetone), filter the mucus reaction. Note that filtering is very easy once the acetone clumps up the gunk, so this is a good place to use finer filters such as a paper coffee filter (instead of in step 1). Optionally freeze precipitate for a cleaner product (hypothesis is that the cold removes proteins (?) small amounts of salts (?) but Hopefully no product(?)) and decant/filter.

3) Reprecipitation: Add two more volumes of acetone and a dash of sulfuric and collect any new precipitate. Optionally, test that product is exausted with more acetone/sulfuric (please report any findings on final acetone volume needed, especially if 4 water volumes does not work in your case).

4) Crystallize from water: Product at this point is chalky and difficult to collect from jar/filter. Redisolve it in water, dry in shallow Pyrex dish (low temp oven or fan), and easily scrape up flaky crystals. Mescaline Sulfite purity is currently unknwon.

5) Cleanup: Optionally do a cold acetone wash to remove any traces of sulfuric acid. A good place to do this could be back in step 4 before scrape up.


Seems to roughly work so far based on above result. Key is that in step 2) natural mescalime salts remain soluble while in step 3) mescaline sulfate salts do not. This would make cacti extraction very simple 🙂🌵

edit: Updated after further testing on 2/1/2020.
edit: Updated again on 2/2/2020 after further testing.

I would say that natural salt of mescaline is malate.

This looks good. Do you think this method might work using phosphoric acid rather than sulfuric?

I did try a small separate jar and added phosphoric (10% from the Brew shop). I was surprised that nothing significant crashed. To that, I then added sufuric and white powder crashed out. This is not what I expected as I thought phosphoric would crash too, but that's what I got.

In other news, a sample from post #1 has been sent out for analysis

I chose the same route for crystallizing mescaline and so far it has been fruitless. I added an 11% sulfuric acid solution to my mescaline laden xylene and waited until the polar layer turned deep amber to seperate. I then added 75ml acetone to my 50ml sulfuric acid solution for a ratio of 60:40 and after 4 hours in the fridge i did not see the slightest crystal formation just a little dust at the bottom. I added another 75ml of acetone and I am yet to reintroduce it to the fridge. Any tips? Should the extra acetone do the trick? If it does not how could I salvage? Thank you for your help.

Did you try the freezer (to me fridge means above 0C)?

Another 50ml of acetone won't hurt I think.

I only use a dash of sulfuric, seems like your final water is 11% sulfuric. I don't think that will stop the crystals in the fridge, but I'm not aware of anyone using such high concentration (dg used a few drops of sulfuric and monitored the pH of the water later).

I would do a cold acetone wash to remove any traces of sulfuric in your case.

Note that this question is about dg's original TEK. In the experimental process in this thread there are no solvent pulls.

This is what my freezer crashes look like,

Thats what the little precipitate I did have looked like. I was worried about water freezing in the freezer. So you recommend 175ml of acetone?

I now see that this is in fact a question about dg's tek.

No worries mate. I would just throw it in the freezer (nothing should freeze) for a day and see what happens. If still not happy with the result go up to 175ml of acetone, but you may be ok at this point. You can allways add more acetone later until cloudiness no longer appears.

Next time if you feel adventurous you can try skipping the basing and the xylene pulls and go strait to adding acetone to a concentrated filtered plain cactus tea, then filter the gunk that forms, add a dash of sulfuric acid and put in freezer.

Good luck

Breakthrough stuff y'all! Looking forward to learning more soon! Thank you OP!

I did this process again with a larger cacti and took a couple pictures of the final drying tray from water. Looks like a lot of long needles are in there.

The whole process (cactus chunks to needles) took only ~36 hours, most time was spent allowing stuff to settle in the freezer.

Benz is going to analyze 🙂

Excellent work Loveall, Im very grateful for people like you who experiment and share their results (whether results are positive or not).

What was the yield like this second time around?

Thanks Endlessness, I'm grateful for you

I just measured it. 2.653g, this was a larger cacti (1345g) and much wider in diameter. So 0.2% fresh (estimating 4% dry). Less yields and more cactus gunk this time, maybe from the lower skin surface to volume ratio (?): I don't know I haven't done a lot of cacti extractions. This was also a different hybrid, one of those that gets faster quicker.

That's just the weight of the crystalline result, as you know, we still don't know how much mescaline is in it (if any) until Benz gets back to us. This time it didn't come out as white as before even after an acetone wash. I don't mind the different color, I mainly want to do the wash to remove any chance of sulfuric traces.

PS: I was sad cutting the cactus after having it for several years. The folks in the chat helped me through it. Good emotional support for cacti cutting if anyone needs it. I'm sensitive towards plants, lol.

Update, did a quick second acetone wash from the previous post and at it looks whiter. This is good enough for me. No significant change in weight. Perhaps warm acetone would whiten this a lot more, but I'm not going for that right now.

The crystals that form from water evap are very easy to wash in acetone. They are heavy, stick to the bottom and decant very well. On the other hand, the precipitation out of water/acetone/sulfuric is less crystalline, more chalky and I need a filter to catch part of it since I can't avoid some spilling over.

I hope we are getting mescaline here because this process is simple and only uses 4 ingredients (cactus, water, acetone, and sulfuric).

When do you expect your analysis results to be in?

For what it’s worth. I know for a fact sulfate will precipitate beautifully from water alone if the concentration is close to 10:1

Here is an example of an extraction I performed some time ago
https://www.dmt-nexus.me...aspx?g=posts&t=79523

I feel that this is the best way to super clean crystals as many other impurities will remain soluble in the water while the mescaline forms lovely crystals. Just pour the water off!

Really excited to see the results here. If it works you have really discovered A great leap in process for us all.

Much love 💕

Results are expected in one to two weeks.

Thanks for the link, those are beautiful crystals, I should try that. Did you ever check the water you pour off to see if there is any mescaline in it? Also, what temp was the 10:1 titrated solution kept at?

There is certainly mescaline still in the water but not much. Adding acetone to a 50/50 ratio drops the rest out but that powder is no where near as pure as the crystals.

The crystals precipitating in the first few pictures are at room temperature (around 23deg C). Then the beaker was put in the freezer overnight but most of the precipitation seemed to happen quickly and while warm.

Your pictures certainly don’t look like mescaline sulfate precipitating from a water solution to me. However I really hope it is!!!

I had a few more thoughts on using water to purify the end result here
https://www.dmt-nexus.me...aspx?g=posts&t=72741

The last photo in that thread is what I’d expect to see when letting water completely evaporate . You can just make out the contaminants below the crystals as that’s the last region of water to evaporate. Pouring out the last bit of water before it evaporates seems to take the junk with it and so that’s my preferred method of crystallisation now, just water!

Thanks antichode. It is very likely that non-mescaline salts precipitate along with potential mescaline sulfate (e.g. Calcium sulfate from natural calcium in the cacti was suggested in chat). If the mescaline sulfate is present, the water re-x may clean these other salts out.