I pulled 73g based MHRB tea with naptha several times, with freeze-precipitation, yielding 1.06g of powder, or 1.45% (
details) . The bark wasn't exhausted when I stopped pulling. The reason I stopped was that
I didn't like product obtained, which didn't feel like the plant teas at all and I thought it was useless.
I decided to pull it a few times with vegetable oil and bioassay the product to see if this supposedly wider-spectrum extraction could yield something of medicinal value.
Having assumed most of the DMT had already been extracted by the naphtha, my thinking was that the remaining alkaloids would be mostly the other, minor alks (NMT, beta-carbolines) and little DMT, and so the effects would be unique due to the higher concentration of the non-DMT alks.
I drank an equivalent of 16g bark (with rue harmalas). That's a lot and I'd normally never drink that in crude tea, but (1) this bark had already been largely exhausted for DMT by the naphtha, and (2) some goodies must have been left in the bark after the oil pulls, as I only did 5-6, so I thought it would be manageable and it would be interesting to see what the other alks feel like.
Surprisingly, it turned out not only strong, but indistinguishable from crude tea. It was a wonderful medicine.After the naphtha disappointment, I'm very happy to have found an extraction method that actually extracts medicine from the bark, and produces a pharmahuasca that actually is an alternative to ayahuasca.
To sum up my experience with the extraction techniques:
- sunflower oil pulls medicine
- naphtha pulls something that doesn't seem useful (not for pharma anyway)
This makes me wonder: it is commonly believed it's the DMT in the admixture plants that produces the desired effects. But could this be a myth? Could it be that it's some other co-occurring alkaloids, or that what naphtha pulls is not even DMT?
One bioassay in the pipeline is to take some of the bad DMT with the oil-pulled medicine, and see how they mix. Theoretically this should be an even fuller spectrum, so it should be good. If it's not, it may indicate that the naphtha pulls converted the DMT into something else.