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Mescaline & Solvents

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Guest electro

out of pure curiosity only anyone know what solvents mescaline is soluble in ...

am guessing that it is soluble in ethanol, isopropyl alcohol and benzene .

[ 30. March 2005, 14:54: Message edited by: electro ]

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I'm sure you'd normally use nothing of the sort, given the legal status of such a venture... I'm sure you'd never attempt such a thing at all

However if a character in a book you were researching wanted to do such an extraction you might be well advised to post the question here

smile.gif

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Guest electro

thanks all

[ 30. March 2005, 14:55: Message edited by: electro ]

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run yer peepers over these:

http://leda.lycaeum.org/Documents/Extracti...ids.13422.shtml

http://users.lycaeum.org/~iamklaus/extract.htm

http://chemheads.homelinux.com/sanpedro.html

http://nepenthes.lycaeum.org/Drugs/Mescali...actusGuide.html

now with any luck i'll not need to edit any of that.

[This message has been edited by waterdragon (edited 02 December 2002).]

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okay i cant get the chemhead one to work as a link, just go to the chemh home page and scroll down the left hand column.

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i'm gonna show my ignorance & impatience here, but i've had a look at the first 2 links & they are using chloroform- which i imagined was pretty hard to get hold ov.

benzene i know little about, i know it gives off bad gasses & is also pretty hard to get, but i thought if it was soluable in benzene it would also be soluable in naptha?

i've heard conflicting reports about acetone- anyone know?

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i have a link somewhere for creating ones own chloroform, want him?

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It's interesting that all the links recommend using dried cactus. I would have thought that drying a cactus would be very time consuming. And considering that water is usually added anyway, completely pointless.

I'd use the method Murple wrote up as it is well structured and uses nice chemicals such as citric acid. Xylene is recommended as a solvent. I don't know the availability of xylene in Australian hardwares. Anyone?

Anyway, have a look:

http://www.entheogen.com/sanpedroex.html

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Originally posted by Zu:

I don't know the availability of xylene in Australian hardwares. Anyone?

Toluene is more or less equivalent, and is available in the bigger hardware chains like Bunnings. But plenty of exotic solvents are available (unsuspiciously) from chemical supply places; they just tend to be expensive.

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"Xylene and toluene are as dangerous, or more so, than benzene."

Ok, I wasnt gonna post anything on this topic because of the fringes of legality thing but I had to respond to this.

Toxicity of aromatic hydrocarbon series:

Benzene > Toluene > 'Xylene'

Toluene replaced benzene because 1) its much less toxic than benzene 2) its less volatile than benzene. 'Xylene' is even less volatile than toluene (note 'xylene' is actually a mixture of the three isomers of xylene.)

Benzene is classified as 'highly toxic' TLV 10 ppm, Toluene and xylene are both listed as 'toxic' TLV 100 ppm. That means benzene is toxic in one tenth the concentration of toluene.

Benzene bp 80.1 C

Toluene bp 110.7 C

'Xylene' bp 135-145 C

Thats why they sell toluene in hardware stores, but not benzene. Thats why chem labs replace benzene with toluene whenever possible. Thats why college chem labs have gallons of toluene, but only rarely have ANY benzene. Thats why while I will spill toluene all over my hands without too much paranoia, I will only use benzene in a fumehood with nitrile gloves and a lab apron.

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Without having any experience in this area, I will say that Murple's method looks reasonably sound. I didn't think too much of one of the other methods that involved extracting the free base using ammonia water. Here are a couple more ideas:

Mescaline base is actually a solid, not an oil, at room temperature, FWIW. It's water solubility also makes acid-base extractions a little more complicated than usual. The strategy here is to saturate your water layer with salt when trying to pull the base into your organic solvent. Secondly, you could use a water-immiscible solvent which has some degree of polarity. In an ideal world, this would be chloroform or methylene chloride (but toluene will presumably work less efficiently).

A prudent chemist would not use caustic soda for basifying if something less drastic could be employed just as well. Saturating the acqueous layer with sodium carbonate (aka washing soda) could just be the ticket, but I can't say for sure.

As an acid-base extraction is being employed, the defatting step _could_ be superfluous. On the other hand, it could also reduce emulsion headaches. Experimentation required here. Remember that the presence of emulsions can be pH dependent (which is partly why I brought up that bit about alternatives to NaOH).

As to the question of why use dried plant material, it is _probably_ because the drying degrades cell walls and makes the alkaloids more available for extraction. But it could also result in some enzymatic degradation of the goodies (I simply don't know). Extracting fresh frozen plant material might be an alternative. One idea for the experimentally inclined would be to use acidified alcohol rather than water for the initial steeping of the plant material, in order to see whether that boosted yields. This will, however, pull out more fats.

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Bugger me, somewhere in the back of my mind is a memory that chloroform might actually react with mescaline. If so, don't use it smile.gif

Another strategy for separating alkaloid bases which have some water solubility is to use a cocktail of organic solvents, eg, alcohol + toluene. But this is starting to violate the KISS principle.

And even though I scoffed at the idea of using ammonia for the initial extraction from the plant material, the choice of whether to extract under acidic, basic or neutral conditions can actually be quite involved. It all comes down to what state(s) the natural alkaloid is in, what it is bonded to, and what releases it best. Extracting acidic tends to be most convenient, provided it works.

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"I'm sure you'd normally use nothing of the sort, given the legal status of such a venture... I'm sure you'd never attempt such a thing at all"

With that in mind, in terms of extracting legal entheogens with chloroform there is a problem with reactivity. Chloroform reacts with air and light to form PHOSGENE and hydrochloric acid. Phosgene is highly toxic (TLV 0.1 ppm in air) and corrosive, before the doctors gave up on using it on people they had rules that before the chloroform was bottled it had to be purged of all phosgene and HCl, when bottled it had to be put into a brown glass bottle filled to the brim and sealed in such a way that no air could enter and after using it any unused portion had to be thrown away immediatly. In the past I've had the job of cleaning the toxic orange crust off the old chloroform bottles, not something I would want to eat!

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Originally posted by electro:

The gnome down the road already had success using ethanol instead of isopropyl for that extraction.

He would however like a nicer looking and more compact final product ....

So he extracted using basic alcohol and water, then evaporated that down? He can only hope to obtain goo that way, as he will have pulled all the oils out of the plant, the freebase mescaline is itself probably quite waxy, and some of the other alkaloid bases could also be oils.

He could try cleaning up what he already has by first, converting the base alkaloids to an acid salt and then, second, washing the product with acetone. So it might involve something like: scrape the residue into a jar and cover it with a goodly amount of white vinegar. Give it a shake every so often over the next few days, then strain and filter. (Keep the solids, just in case)! Evaporate the filtrate to dryness, then return it to a jar. Add just enough acetone to cover it, and leave to soak for up to 2 days. Don't exceed this duration, as the acetone can start to eat the plastic in the lid. Filter off the acetone, to hopefully leave a more compact product, after drying. (Keep the filtrate, just in case)! If the acetone seems to be pulling out a lot of colour, then repeat the washing process.

For further finesse, he could try re-extracting this product into 100% ethanol, filtering, then evaporating to dryness. But crystals should still not be expected.

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i seem to recall ether or petroleum ether being recommended as being magic for cleaning mescaline.

t s t .

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Guest electro

hrm edits are good ...

[ 30. March 2005, 14:57: Message edited by: electro ]

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is it just me or does it seem a little excesive to use 400g of sodium hydroxide in the first link?

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almost any extraction that lists chloroform as solvent can also be done with methylene chloride. This can be distilled out of painstripper.

Both methylene chloride and chloroform can donate methyl groups to the ring of mescaline, and the artefacts discovered in some cactus extractions were presumed to be due to this process. leaving the mescaline sitting in solvent (under basic conditions escpecially) for a long time will encourage this process, but even then it is so minute as to be negligible.

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Guest electro

again, edits are good

[ 30. March 2005, 14:59: Message edited by: electro ]

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Originally posted by electro:

UNDILUTE HCL was added to the purISH xylene drop at a time. tiny (1-2mm) Crystals formed on contact with the acid. a VERY fine filter could have (INPUT??? ANYONE) come in very handy here, but with none available the procedure carried on.

Well it doesn't get much finer than lab grade filter paper! and I suppose multiple layers of coffee filters could do at a pinch.

An alternative procedure, which might possibly yield a dryer product, would be to introduce the HCl as a gas instead of as acqueous. Gaseous HCl can be generated by dripping concentrated (98%) sulphuric acid onto table salt. Obviously, you (generic of course) need to rig up a way of bubbling the gas into the non-polar solvent. Stop as soon as no further solid is formed around the end of the gas line.

Oh, and the non-polar containing the goodies should have previously been treated with a drying salt. And, at the risk of stating the obvious, don't have any metal in contact with the HCl.

[This message has been edited by John_Barleycorn (edited 09 December 2002).]

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Guest electro

Does lab filter paper come in different grades, if so which is finest.

[ 30. March 2005, 15:00: Message edited by: electro ]

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just remember that the finest/thickest ones are made for vacuum filtration... and unless you are going to do that you will be waiting all day for it to go through (if it ever does). This may not be so bad if you have just a solvent/crystal mixture, but... heheh good luck smile.gif

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