I’ve been searching around and so far haven’t quite found an answer. I struggle a little with the search function here.

Is it ever normal for spice to numb your tongue and be very harsh on your throat? I’m trying to draw the line between it being burnt or it being contaminated. The spice in question does vaporize completely, using the e-mesh method. I’ve noticed a pattern of people asking this topic with the yellow goo being the appearance of their spice, snowy white doesn’t seem to come up so are plant fats etc a cause?

I’m basically looking for descriptions on how it should be vs the numb tongue harsh hit. Is there any way to narrow down what could be taking place? I still have pretty much zero experience vaping spice so I can’t really tell exactly when and where things begin to go off the rails so I appreciate any help, especially details of things like naphtha contam vs lye contam or feel and taste on the tongue as the range goes from proper to burnt etc.

I feel like this is going to get pegged as a repeat question because it’s had to of come up before but I’m not finding much details.

I've had dmt burn my lips and mouth while vaping, due to dmt residue in the pipe melting into liquid and getting on my lips/in my mouth. Dmt freebase is caustic, even white-as-snow re-xed spice. If you doubt this, don't take my word for it, put a little bit on your tounge. A normal vaping session generally will not do this though, seems like only the liquid (melted) spice is caustic, not the vapor itself.

I eat sour candy and rub the sour powder on my lips if/when I have this issue. The acidity nixes the burn. And is very tasty after a smoalk.

A post copied from reddit:

r/DMT
•Posted byu/gggumshoe
2 years ago
PSA: Harsh smoke? Could be lye. Try a sodium carbonate wash.

This isn't news exactly, but from how long it took me to stumble upon on it I figure I should signal boost. I spent a couple weeks trying to figure why my spice was so ungodly harsh. I had done an STB tek from MHRB, very careful with the naphtha pulls, evapped dry then did a couple naphtha recrystallizations to be sure. Had nice light tan fluffy snow by the end. But touching it to my tongue made it burn and go numb like a bitch. I ran pharmahuasca with it at 150mg and I think it nearly burned a hole through my stomach, it was so damn caustic. Trying to vape with a GVG, I couldn't hold the smoke in for more than a microsecond, it would just scald my lungs.

I thought it might be leftover lye, but searching the nexus for why DMT burns mostly just returns threads where everyone says variations of 'DMT is harsh, sad but true, man up or go home.' And people like to say there can't be any lye if your naphtha pulls were clean, and even if there were lye it couldn't combust at the temperatures DMT vaporizes at. So they had me nearly convinced that lye couldn't possibly be the culprit.

But, a couple random forum posts suggested doing a carb wash. I had some on hand so I gave it a whirl. I used this tek. It took about 10 minutes, very straightforward. Then I re-x'd again after.

I am really happy to say the harshness is almost completely gone now. And I say this as a person with no appreciable experience smoking anything before in my life. I took a nice fat rip of white smoke and kept it in for twenty seconds with no trouble. I didn't break through but it did feel just freakin' awesome. The difference pre- and post-wash is night and day. My spice is saved.

Anyone who has tried and got discouraged because the smoke seems ungodly harsh (especially if you STB'd), you owe it to yourself to do an aqueous wash on your spice (sodium carb seems the simplest). Lye can be in your product even if it's perfectly white, and lye particles can travel into your lungs with the smoke even if they haven't combusted.

@Asher7

Freebase DMT is mildly basic, so I believe it is normal for it to be a bit harsh. In my experience with e-mesh, you can minimize harshness by fine-tuning vaping temperature and technique. You want a vapor stream with "Goldilocks" properties. If the vapor is too hot and/or concentrated, it can be pretty rough-- I think the heat might even have a "double" effect, in that perhaps the basic vapor reacts more quickly with your oral tissues at a higher temperature, so you are burned more both thermally and chemically. On the other hand, if the vapor is too cool, enough can condense inside your mouth and throat to cause some burning.

Ideally you want it just hot enough to go down without significant condensation and just concentrated enough to get it all in one hit. After a lot of experimentation, I've had the most success using my e-mesh rig (Vandy Vape RDA v2, fitted mesh, Aegis Solo) in wattage mode at 13.5W with an 8" glass straw fitted to a ~3" drip tip, so the vapor travels about a foot (allowing it to cool) before reaching my mouth.

@Jega



Can anyone explain how sodium carbonate would be useful for removing lye? It is my understanding that the primary purpose of a sodium carbonate wash is to deprotonate acidic impurities (such as acetic acid introduced in an A/B extraction) that are somewhat lipid-soluble. When deprotonated, they become much more water soluble and are thus and removed in the aqueous phase of the wash.

Lye is already extremely water soluble, and shouldn't be made appreciably more so by the presence of sodium carbonate. So if lye is the issue, I would think a plain water wash would be just as effective.

The presence of the carbonate serves the purpose of stopping the water from eating appreciable amounts of DMT. Some also use a plain water wash (perhaps after the carb wash stage) but the understanding here is that it must be performed quickly to avoid substantial losses. The time limitation also presumably limits its efficacy.

@Asher7- Barnacle's advice is solid, however do not discount the possibility of lye contamination. I myself perfected my smoking method with my first batch of spice. It was EXTREMELY smooth. For some reason this first success was a fluke of sorts since subsequent attempts yielded a product that burned so excessively as to be unusable. I might have believed 'that's just how it is' if it wasn't for my early success. All this despite taking a lot of care with my extractions.

@Jega



Ah, makes sense. The lower the pH of the wash solution, the more DMT will stay in freebase form and thus remain in the NPS layer.



Given the above, this seems sort of pointless unless there is a specific reason for it. In fact I can recall doing this once before and it destroyed my DMT yields. Doing it quickly is probably a bad idea. Not only does doing the wash fast have an unpredictable effect, whatever it is one is trying to achieve could be done by simply using a lower volume of wash solution and allowing it full time to equilibrate.