That's a good test, but you'll need to perform it probably a dozen times to get somewhat accurate results, because alkaloid contents vary quite a lot even for two pieces of the exact same plant! SWIM knows, he’s tried these sort of tests and keeps getting inconstant results from batch to batch
Here’s a bit of discouraging information. In one batch SWIM extracted 0.57% DMT, in another 0.031%!, in another 1.09%, in another 0.19%, and that’s all from the same plant with the same exact extraction procedure!!!!! Talk about inconsistence results! Man!!!!!!
The norm for alkaloid extraction in water is pH 3-4. This is what most scientists will use for a general purpose extraction. The reason is that some alkaloids, like harmine (pKa 7.7), have very low pKa values and therefore they need such a low pH for extraction because they need to be ionized to be water soluble. An alkaloid with a pKa of 7.7 is 99.9% ionized at pH 4.7. DMT has a pKa of 8.68 and only needs a pH of 5.68 to be 99.9% ionized, but is still 90% ionized at pH 7.68! So for it, pure water works just fine because most of the plants are acidic anyway and will bring the water to about pH 5-6 on their own. At pH 6.68 99% of DMT is ionised. A solution with a pH of 6.68 is considered a dilute acid solution. That’s all that’s needed for good DMT extraction. However, there's often more than just DMT present and if you want everything in the plant, you should use pH 3-4.
Once advantage, which was brought up many times by other people, is that at pH 3-4 the acids help to eat away the plant matter, and therefore plant extraction is usually improved a little bit. But it’s not much in some cases. Boiling will also break apart the plant matter and improve extraction. If you’re not boiling, adding extra acid can really help break apart the plant matter. Another obvious way to improve extraction is to break apart the plant matter by grinding it to a powder. This is generally much more effective than adding extra acid, but this makes filtering really hard. Extremely high pH values like pH 11-14 also have this effect of breaking apart the plant matter. This is why high pH values are used in DMT oriented STB techs. But in some cases hi pH values are death to an extraction, because they destroy some alkaloids and can cause soaps to form, especially in fatty plant matter, like some leaf materials.
Don't use a pH value below 3. Some alkaloids are sensitive to very low pH values. Also, some alkaloids are soluble in dilute acid only, and insoluble in concentrated acid. For example, there is harmine HCl, an alkaloid which is only soluble in dilute HCl, and insoluble in concentrations of as little as 10% HCl! So overdoing the acid is not always a good thing.
Remember that DMT is soluble in DILUTE ACID aqueous solutions and non-polar solvents. In no reference does it ever say that DMT is soluble in concentrated acid. It probably gets destroyed in concentrated acid.
Extraction is not all black and white. A tech that works for one plant for a specific alkaloid may not be the best for another plant even with the same target alkaloid. Case in point: Psychotria viridis and Mimosa hostilis. For Mimosa, you are plagued with emulsions, so techs have evolved using pH 13 for that plant to help stop those frustrating Mimosa emulsions that hinder extraction of DMT. These emulsions are caused by slightly insoluble material that forms at certain pH ranges. The same techs work better for Psychotria Viridis if the pH is lowered to 9.5-10.5, because higher pH values cause soups to form from the fats present in Psychotria, and this will causes super bad emulsions when extracting from that plant. This is one case where one pH works great for one plant, but messes things up for another plant.
