benzyme said:
69ron said:
Acetic acid:
Cons: smells up the whole house; produces unstable alkaloid salts; weak acid.
hmm...you sure about that? my (re)sources tell me that disubbed tryptamines are stable in acetic, while in solution.
I’m absolutely sure about that and I can give references if you like. But you misunderstood what I was saying. I was talking about acids in general, not as they pertain to any particular extractions.
While in an acetic acid solution alkaloids are quite stable as acetates. But dry alkaloid acetates are not very stable salts. After a while they tend to come apart leaving behind an exposed freebase alkaloid. But this is of no concern if SWIY is extracting DMT using a typical extraction tech where the DMT acetate is never dried.
benzyme said:
boiling/evaporation of acids isn't a concern, because the point is to convert the salts in solution into the free base form, with a basic solution. the acid can be a weak one (pH 2 - 3), as long as the solution is heated for a few hours, or else the solid phase will need to sit in the solution for quite a while.
Yeah. But it all depends on what you’re extracting and how. If SWIY wanted to extract a DMT salt, then this could matter. But the only good DMT salt SWIM knows of is DMT fumarate. This is a very stable DMT salt, and its one of the few that readily crystallizes. SWIM has plenty of experience with that salt. It’s great for use in ayahuasca and it has a fabulous shelf life.
benzyme said:
according to the consensus here, the base should be strong enough to take the pH significantly higher than the pKa of DMT (~ 8.6), to around 12 or 13.
what really needs to be taken into account is the nonpolar solvent used (and its selectivity). this is what needs to evaporate
SWIM disagrees completely with that. SWIM uses pH 9.5 and can extract 97% of all the DMT from chacruna at that pH. At those high pH levels soaps start forming making the extraction really difficult and inefficient. It’s not recommended by SWIM.
I don’t know who started using sodium hydroxide to “salt out” emulsions, but it’s now very popular. It’s a bad idea, it’s dangerous, expensive, but it does work. A pH of 12 isn’t needed to extract DMT. At pH 11.2 99% of all the DMT is in freebase form. Freebase DMT is almost just as soluble in water at pH 11.2 as it is at pH 14. The only thing adding more sodium hydroxide is doing is causing a “salting out” effect which can be done by adding good old sodium chloride (table salt). Those guys that are using sodium hydroxide to “salt out” Mimosa emulsions are wasting their money.
It’s SWIMs experience that with Mimosa if he adds 10% sodium chloride before the defat step, and then freebases at pH 9.5 with sodium carbonate, he will achieve better results than he can at pH 12 or 13 using dangerous sodium hydroxide. A pH of 12 is overkill. The only reason people use that pH is to nock down emulsions that are specific to Mimosa. This is caused by a “salting out” effect which is the same as adding sodium chloride (table salt), only it’s more expensive and more dangerous because they use sodium hydroxide instead of cheap safe table salt. “Salting out” actually works better if sodium chloride (table salt) is used rather than sodium hydroxide.
