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About possible chemical residu in the ifferent extraction teks

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cheiron

cheiron

Rising Star
Hi, I am totally new to but interested in the different extraction teks. Studying the different teks, I noticed that there are some pretty heavy chemicals involved, like naphta which seems to be some kind of thinner.

I was wondering, doesnt tht mean that your endproduct ( the DMT) will contain traces of these chemicals? And wouldnt that make the DMT a lot unhealthier if one would smoke it? Or are the traces of these chemicals very minimal due to chemistry I dont get?

A saw there is a tek with 'nature-based' stuff, but I still wonder if this would be healthier, or maybe it doesnt really matter if you do it well because your can obtain pretty pure DMT?

Anyone ever tested his endproduct to see how pure it was?
 
Understanding the properties of the chemicals you use is key. Always check the MSDS sheets of all chemicals you use and do an evap test on your solvent. There are extra steps one can take to ensure his end product is pure. But like Endlessness said all teks on the wiki should be safe when performed correctly, he'd be one of the guys I'd trust.
 
the natural food-safe teks aren't about a safer end product.

it is about not having to deal with nasty (sometimes caustic) chemicals during the extraction process.
 
performed properly, and understanding the process, and chemicals involved, it will give you a safe to consume end product, mostly irregardless of your extraction technique.

As was already said, evap tests, and msds's are essential.

As well, how exactly you arrive at the end product (be it freebase or a salt) will affect purity. IE, if you do a very fast freeze-x, in lieu of a slow crystallization that yeilds larger and more pure crystals, you get a less pure product.

In any case, if you have a clean solvent your using to freeze-x, it shouldn't matter, just chop up what you get real well with a razor blade and the remaining solvent will evap in a few minutes. If you want to go all the way, put it under vac to vac purge any remaining solvent vapors.

I would just read into the various teks, understand the process vs just following it like a recipe, and you'll get it down.

The only thing thats dangerous about using hydrocarbon solvents, and other chemicals in these extraction teks, is if you are not using pure chemicals/solvents, do not understand the process, or rush/be careless or not pay attention when doing your extraction.

The only real danger, is not knowing what your are doing. Once you educate yourself about what your doing, its almost impossible to end up with an end-product that is not safe to consume.
 
To say there are no traces of solvent left in your crystals is not correct because there will always be traces of the solvent it was crystallized from. I know of nothing that is absolutely 100% pure, even the purest synthetic products are always like 98-99% pure.

That said, you will inhale way more carcinogens filling up your gas tank or walking down a city street than you will smoking properly extracted DMT.

There is some concern of heavy metal contamination in industrial grade lye and likewise while they are usually really quite pure, industrial grade solvents don't really have purity controls in place.

As Parshvik Chintan said, the real benefit of the foodsafe teks is simply being able to avoid having to deal with petrochems and strong caustic agents.
 
Ok, thanks a lot! I'll just go on, trying to understand the teks.
Good to have a community like this around with all these abundand knowledge :)

I was wondering, while I am no professional in chemistry, i have done chemistry in highschool, so I should be able to understand the basics. Is there a thread/wiki that explains in some more depth the process, like what are you actually doing on a chemical level? All I have found so far are more instructions than a deeper chemical explanation...
 
i never took any chemistry class (all my chemical knowledge comes from this site) and i had no problem comprehending it.

1. grinding - this increases surface area, helping more of the plant contact the solvent

2. acid cook - this step is about lysing the cells (breaking the cell walls) - for an A/B it is also about dissolving the (currently salt - DMT + acid = salted DMT) DMT into the water.

~ storing the plant in the freezer prior to extraction also aids in lysing cells

3. basification - this step is about converting the salt dmt (acidified) into freebased dmt - which is soluble in non-polar solvents (naphtha, limonene, whatever). at least for calcium hydroxide (idk about sodium aka lye) it is recommended you let this basified mixture sit for a few days before pulling.

4. NPS pull - dissolving the DMT-freebase into the solvent (fairly self-explanatory)

5. retrieval from solvent - again, fairly self-explanatory, just trying to get the DMT out of the solvent. via freeze precip, evaporation, or in the case of oils: re-salting (Acidify the solvent, making the DMT water soluble, then you add water & shake. separate and evaporate the water to get salted DMT - which can be freebased)
 
Ok, thanks for clarifying this a little bit...
But it still leaves some questions, that might be unnecessary to know, but if someone could explain it, or confirm my thoughs, i would be really thankful :)

1.grinding > i get that

2. breaking the cell walls > i get that too. But dissolving the salted DMT... What makes DMT chemically a salt? It is coupled to some other molecule/atom to make a salt? Something being a salt, what would that be anyway chemically? I recall vaguely something with + and - ions etc, but how that exactly works...? I think I get the part you want to dissolve the DMT. For some reason, it being a salt, makes it dissolvable in and acid solution. Why is that? Does that does something chemically, or does it just makes it possible to dissolve, nothing more? I might just need a better understand of what acid/base solutions actually are before understanding this, i'm thinking now...

3. & 4. basification & pull > you have the DMT dissolved in its salt form, because of the low PH. Ok, and now you transform it to its freebase form. WHat does that mean exaclty? It sounds like it is some chemical process, like Na-DMT (just making something up now) > NA+ and DMT- or something like that?

5. I think I get that aswell, it is in some way going back an forward from salt to freebase in order to separate the DMT from the solvent.

Maybe I just want to know too much, but maybe someone can enlighten me :)
 
Cheiron

From Here

Acid/Base Chemistry:

Alright so this is where I want to begin with the two different forms of DMT. These are the Salt and the Freebase forms. The only difference between the two is that in the salt an extra hydrogen nucleus(proton) has been attached to the molecule at the amine(where the nitrogen is located). This makes this form have a charge of +1 at the Nitrogen. The charge is actually spread out over the the atoms surrounding the nitrogen, but most of the charge is located right on the added proton. The rest of the molecule is still very non-polar and hence still quite soluble in the naphtha, but the charge has a powerful effect on the solubility in water because water can easily dissolve charged molecules, even when they have a large non-polar region. Every molecule that can either receive or give up a proton will exist in the two different forms with different pH's determining what state that molecule is in. This switch from one form to another happens around a particular pH for each molecule. For DMT, this pH(known as it's pKa) is around 8.5. When a molecule is dissolved in a solution where the pH is equal to it's pKa, exactly 50% of the molecules exist in each form, so in the case of DMT a pH of 8.5 will cause the DMT molecules to be 50% freebase and 50% salt. Moving one pH unit higher will make the proportion !0:1(around 90%) freebase to salt. Two pH units above the pKa(10.5), and 99% of the molecules will be in freebase form. At !!.5, 3 pH units above, 99.9% will be in freebase form and so on. So a pH of twelve is really a desirable level for the extraction. This topic is also relevant to increasing ionic strength using the protein that is present in the plant material being used. A protein carries a charge of -1 at extraction pH levels, but when a protein is heated for several hours under heat in the presence of either acid or base as a catalyst, it will break apart into it's constituent amino acids, which will each have a charge of -1 at the high pH levels being used. This could potentially have a drastic effect on the final ionic strength of the aqueous layer but I have not yet tried it myself. The pKa where most amino acids gain a charge of -1 is around 10-12, so even higher pH's will ensure that a full charge is gained by every molecule where a charge can be gained. Some molecules with amine groups like DMT itself will actually lose a charge of +1 and become neutral, but since we are already working at high pH's this effect should be be negligible.
Click to expand...
 
Thank you! That is what I was looking for.
Slowly it's getting clear and it starts looking to some pretty within range, with the propper dedication :)
 
Yet, another question popping up: aint there more chemicals in a plant that would possibly have this ability to go from salt to freebase, resulting in not only extracting the DMT but als other molecules from the plant? Stated otherwise: how do you know it is only the DMT thats extracted? It's just that there are not other molecules that act this way in the plant?
 
It depends, some alkaloids are too water soluble, for example bufotenine, or psilocybin (though none of those will be in mimosa, just giving an example), hence they would prefer the water layer than most solvents. Or other alkaloids get destroyed due to the extraction conditions and don't end up in your final product (for example yuremamine present in mimosa).

Sometimes this depends on the method of extraction... Using naphtha/hexane/heptane usually gets mostly just DMT, while using other solvents like xylene might get more of other alkaloids across (check FAQ for 'jungle spice')

The other thing is that a plant might have only a minor amount of other alkaloids, so even if all of them were to come across to your final product, it would be such a minor amount that it is negligible. Mimosa has some other alkaloids, but the main 'other' alkaloid gets destroyed in the process and the other minor alkaloids mostly don't get across. A mimosa extraction will be typically 80-90+% DMT, with only around 3% max of other alkaloids (mostly NMT and 2MTHBC), plus some other small amount of inactive impurities such as plant oils or whatever.

Acacia confusa will be mostly a mix of NMT and DMT at around 50-50% (or 70-30 or 30-70%), with some small amount of inactive impurities there too.

Phalaris will have a mix of other alkaloids, hence the need to look for one with cleaner profile, and/or extract using naphtha or other selective solvents and processes to separate the wanted from the unwanted

As for how do we know, because it's been analysed with chromatography and mass spectrometry. Either we do the analysis ourselves, or we thoroughly check the published literature to see what others have found before in those plants. You can read my signature links for more info :)
 
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