Fractalhead

Hi people, We've been briefly reunited with our babies in qld, and have come to find a fair few seeds on the Datura metel purple triple flower form that i donated to AFSR some time ago. The fruit are still a bit on the green side, but i reckon we'll be able to get some more seed for people via AFSR. Cheers Fractal

I tried soaking in hot water and cold water, but did not get any swelling or sprouting even after many days. I've also tried planting straight into cactus mix, treating with fungicide, and trying to germinate in greenhouse with average temp probably around 25-30C Still no luck. Could it be the seed or am I still missing something?

yeah, that's what i've been thinking about. acid and base catalysed amide hydrolysis. I'm pretty sure that even the freebase ergine and isoergine are quite soluble in neutral water (just like caffeine). The acid probably isn't neccessary. I'm not going to say any more until i get a reference that has a tried and true method. i'll post it next week.

Has anyone tried smoking N. glauca? I've heard some shocking stories about people dying after using N. glauca leaves as a herbal seasoning by mistake. After hearing that, I wouldn't smoke it through a barge-pole - until i find out what the go is. I think the toxin found in the peoples blood was anabasine...?

Rev, I reckon any Erythroxylaceae genetics would be hot property in this day and age

Ok. Is there any legal reason why this drug should not be automatically made Schedule 9? Imagine the media shitfight that would be caused if a group of people - pissed-off with injustices in the scheduling of their chosen spiritual/sacramental medicines - decided to seriously, aggressively, and tirelessly, and not to mention, extremely intelligently, campaign to have ethanol banned for the cause of drawing attention to the illegitimate scheduling of drugs other than ethanol (a prime example, of course, being Salvia divinorum). I bet there would be real public consultation on the banning of ETHANOL! This approach might seem at first to defeat the point, but really, i reckon it would do a lot of good. What do you people reckon?

Thankyou for pointing that out Jetblack, that IS the whole point. See guys, just the mention of banning alcohol (realistic or otherwise) has already provoked emotional and practical discussion between people having a wide range of perspectives on alcohol and drug use and abuse. This is what i think would be good for the community in the form of a large scale 'media shitfight'. All we need to do to get the ball rolling is find a way of getting the public to believe that alcohol could actually be forced to be made illegal for some 'technical/legal' reason. I realise it probably wouldn't end up becoming illegal (no matter how hard we tried) but if we can convince people that it might become illegal it would set the discussion rolling. We just need to find some ambiguity in the drug laws (not a hard thing to do) and try and use this to explain why alcohol should be illegal and then let the media and the public discuss it like crazy until they finally come to a proper explanation why alcohol should be legal while other drugs like salvia should be made illegal all the evidence supporting its exclusion from Schedule 9. [This message has been edited by Fractalhead (edited 26 August 2002).] [This message has been edited by Fractalhead (edited 26 August 2002).]

Actually, when i noticed the newspaper article about kava being on the hit list, i thought, why don't we campaign to get ethanol made Schedule 9 since surely if SD can qualify, it would be criminal not to schedule ethanol for which there is so much evidence as to why it qualifies? Surely it would divide the public down the middle and cause a HUGE public debate about drug taking freedom. Perhaps it would highlight the bullshit double-standards that are at play here...

Rev> Fractal says that the flowers are stronger. actually, i'd like to confirm this myself since i read someone reporting this on the net somewhere. Thelema>> 3)ALCHEMIST prepared a standardized extract fro me with a verified amount of 8mg splendidin in a 10x resin. Spot-smoked. No effect. I'm curious. Did alchemist explain how he verified/standardised the splendidin content? [This message has been edited by Fractalhead (edited 13 August 2002).]

Do you think it is the Salviarin that does the trick? What if i can get a decent sized verified sample of salviarin? Perhaps then we can conduct a thoroughly controlled study, and see what happens at high doses... I'm seriously interested in researching this mysterious (likely to be) 'family' of drugs. [This message has been edited by Fractalhead (edited 12 August 2002).]

I've got some grafting tape rev if you want to try some one weekend.

Hmmm... yeah i don't know if he neutralised the acids in the samples before running them... or if the acids would even effect the results.

Hehe... This morning I tried about 100mg of the re-crystallised alkaloids that we extracted from tea for a prac at uni this week. Was an interesting experience to feel the caffeine effect without having tea or coffee breath (or eating some no-doz tablets that you don't have any personal experience in preparing yourself). There is a smallish yellow book simply called 'Natural Products' that has some interesting practical projects in it that people here might find interesting. I can't remember the author, but i reckon they are on the ball... I think we used basically the same caffeine extraction procedure that's in that except we used more tea and scaled up the rest. We got some nice crystals... so it works, but you really need to extract the aqueous layer quite a few times with DCM (and make sure you mix the layers thoroughly). i don't think i did this enough and only ended up getting about 250-300mg of alkaloid from 75g of black tea (even before hot-filtration and re-crystallisation). The funny thing is, i ended up getting about the same yield when i used green yea (for which a HPLC comparative analysis said there should be only about %40 as much caffeine as the black tea). Maybe my extraction technique was better the second time round when i did the green tea. I'd be interested to try guarana and see what the yield is like. Any guarana heads out there who would like to bioassay some guarana alkaloids? [This message has been edited by Fractalhead (edited 09 August 2002).]

Ahhhh, for crying out loud!!! All this scheduling is really starting to piss me off...

Damn. I was so looking forward to meeting him in a physical form one day...

This idea only occured to me this morning so i'm just putting it up for discussion as to possible benefits/downfalls etc. I can see a plentiful supply of all kinds of interesting neurochemicals sitting in the fridge at the butcher just awaiting extraction. How about smokable 5-HT for that 5-HT boost during lengthy trips? Maybe a waste of time. Maybe there are better things to spend time extracting from other sources? But could we find useful things in left-over sheep brains?

Sounds good to me too. Looking forward to it.

Apparently this really interesting looking device has a max temp of 204.4 degrees celsius (400 F). Hmmmm... unfortunately i don't think you could use this thing for inhaling alkaloids straight from the plant material since they usually occur in salt form in plant material... so you would need to do your extraction... Might be good for terpenoids though. I think the temp. limit might be a bit low for salvinorin unfortunately. I would have to really try one out before sending money off to these people. really cool idea. maybe i should start a disk making company...

Auxin, are those temperatures for the freebases or some sort of salts?

ooops... hehe. i just realised that you were talking about 29th of june. so we haven't organised another one yet...

Ummmm.... does this mean you have some possible way of obtaining propagation material???? How to get this is probably the first question i would ask. ;-) I'll let you all know if i find out... ....one day. [This message has been edited by Fractalhead (edited 26 July 2002).]

Yeah I liked it too. I still feel like i did at EB though... ie. Like a raging river of potential discussion and ideas that has been dammed by lack of time with the appropriate people. So: plenty to talk about. sat 29th is no prob. talk to you soon.

To those people that have been enquiring about HBWR seed, i'm sorry for the delay in getting back to you but my HBWR situation has been up in the air until just the other day. This is just a notice that I will no longer be offering HBWR seeds for sale. Keep an eye out for seed through SAB in the very near future. I hear it is as good (if not better) than the ones i used to offer... Cheers, fractal

Ok. I didn't realise that freebase alkaloids had such low boiling points. Sounds like you would have a better idea than me as to what you need...

Ok, I have just finished a semester of being introduced to analytical techniques so i should be able to give some feedback... Firstly, GC basically separates chemicals on the basis of volatility. You inject a sample at the start of a long hollow capillary tube that may be coated on the inside with a very thin layer of some liquid that acts as the stationary phase. Once you've injected the sample, the machine gradually increases the temperature inside the tube while an inert carrier gas flows through the tube/column towards the detector (in this case, the mass spectrometer). As the temperature inside the tube reaches the boiling point of each chemical fraction, they boil off the stationary phase and merge with the carrier gas to be carried quickly to the detector (where hopefully you will gain enough information to identify what sort of chemical just came off). The problem i can see with using this method for the applications you mentioned are that: Most GC machines only go up to about 200-400 degrees celsius, so if the boiling points of the chemicals you inject are higher than that, you can fuck the column. Say you wanted to analyse various salvias for salvinorin analogs... you couldn't use a GC because most of these big, relatively polar compounds only MELT at about 250 degrees. When working at such high temperatures, you have to also consider the thermal stability of the compounds of interest. GC would be the best choice for analysing essential oils and other low boiling point plant fractions. You could use it for quantitative analysis of the various aromatic ethers you might find in the lauraceae or monimiaceae for example. Or maybe you could separate the isomers of citral in lemongrass (like we did for a practical session). Another problem with using MS any time is that it only offers very limited information for identifying new compounds and elucidating their structure. To really determine structure, you need 1H NMR and maybe 13C NMR, aswell as MS. MS would be useful for confirming the presence of compounds for which the mass spectrum has already been recorded. Your computer will record the MS as the compound comes off in the GC, and you can cross match this result with databases of MS for all kinds of chemicals on the internet. If you are looking for a particular chemical, you could easily obtain the known MS, and look for that MS in one of the fractions. Another limitation of GC is that its only separating factor is volatility and you can't really change the nature of the stationary or mobile phases much. Since you want to be able to have a high level of versatility and want to be able to look at alkaloids (probably with relatively high boiling points), i think you really need a HPLC / MS. With HPLC you can really control things and may separate chemicals by all sorts of chracteristics. You could analyse non-polar essential oils by using a normal phase column, and then the next day analyse alkaloids with a reverse phase column. You can control the polarity of the mobile phase during elution to analyse whole plant extracts. You can even add all sorts of weird coatings onto the stationary phase to do highly specialised separations. The same limitations of MS apply though. At most, you will determine the molecular weight and clues as to various functional groups present if you come across a new chemical. I'm not sure what the price difference is between GC and HPLC machines devices, or all the nitty gritty when it comes down to accessories etc., but GC would be perfect for essential oil analysis... no good for alkaloids or other high boiling point chemicals. If you just want to focus on essential oils... go for GC. If you really want to analyse alkaloids, you will need HPLC, and someone who really knows how to get the most out of one. Proper HPLC use is an artform that takes a lot of experience and knowledge to develop. ideally, you would have both a GC and a HPLC since that would eliminate the hassles of changing your column each time you want to look at a different sort of chemical mixture. GC is simple and fast aswell as good for quantitative analysis. I think its also cheaper and would be a good start until you can make the most of HPLC. There is plenty of stuff to look at with gc, and it will keep you bisy for a long time. I hope i haven't just told you a whole pile of information you already knew. there is a book at the library all about choosing the right hplc equpiment for you, if u want me to get a reference... alkaloids seem more interesting than essential oils. fractal