Alcohol Mescaline TEK Question

[pmccartney75]

Hi all,

New to posting, but I've been lurking for a bit. I recently made a San Pedro tea out of about 2 feet of cactus give or take a few inches, and I'm curious if it would be possible to do some kind of alcohol extraction TEK with the reduced tea/syrup or if I'm SOL on that.

On the one hand, it seems as if it should be doable given that there are a number of TEKs that proceed from the cactus syrup by basifying it and using a solvent like Xylene or Limonene. On the other hand, the number of impurities (cactus fats, cellulose, etc.) now suspended in the syrup makes me think it won't really work.

Curious if anyone has tried an alcohol based extraction from the tea/syrup. My gut feeling is probably not (turning it into the tea first just adds unnecessary labor), but I made the tea first with the intention of doing a classic A/B extraction before realizing that Xylene and Toluene are both illegal to sell where I am (along with Naphtha, annoyingly enough).

Can I proceed with an alcohol extraction or am I doomed to drinking that vile tea again? Worse comes to worse, I have the limonene option, but I've heard mixed results.

Bonus question: will freezing the syrup damage the alkaloids at all? It's frozen right now, so it's kind of too late anyway, but the last syrup I made was quite weak, and I'm trying to isolate what went wrong (sloppy extraction, bad cactus, and damage during freezing seem to be the potential culprits).

Let me know!

 

[Transform]

You might want to take a look at the CIELO method, which uses ethyl acetate and lime (calcium hydroxide). Usually powdered cactus is the starting material, but it may be possible to adapt it for concentrated tea. Given your local rules concerning solvents this may be out of the question, though.

If you're in no hurry, it's possible to preserve the tea with strong alcohol and leave it to mature on the sludge for a year or two. This may improve the palatability of the brew, although it may depend on the starting palatability of the cactus concerned!

A third option is to embrace the taste as best you can and accept the subsequent mescaline effects as God's way of saying sorry…

If you're determined to perform a solvent extraction of some kind, having a read through the cactus preparation section may help get you oriented; the essential principles of extraction would be a useful reference point as well - although you have to be aware that certain details differ between DMT and mescaline, the most important one being solubility (or lack thereof) in specific solvents.

I'd concentrate the tea down until it starts to thicken a bit, mix it with lime and let it dry out completely before pulling with alcohol. Correct the pH to neutral with some kind of food grade acid, like citric, and evaporate down to collect a semi purified resin. Dosing won't be so accurate because of impurities and uncertainty about the salt stoichiometry, other than it will generally undershoot compared to pure M.HCl or sulfate.

Further steps towards a purer, maybe crystalline, end product would depend on what reagents, particularly acids and bases, and solvents to which you have access. Ideally you'd use something essentially immiscible with water for this.

You will also get a useable result by pulling from the lime/tea paste with limonene and recovering crude alkaloids with white vinegar. Knowledge is power, so get studying!

Freezing will not have harmed the alkaloids, not even a tiny bit. Prolonged boiling may diminish available alkaloid content if a reaction with, e.g., sugars occurs. That particular cut could also simply have been weak, or some part of your cook was inefficient. Was the pH too high, or the cook time too short, perhaps?

 

[pmccartney75]

You might want to take a look at the CIELO method, which uses ethyl acetate and lime (calcium hydroxide). Usually powdered cactus is the starting material, but it may be possible to adapt it for concentrated tea. Given your local rules concerning solvents this may be out of the question, though.

If you're in no hurry, it's possible to preserve the tea with strong alcohol and leave it to mature on the sludge for a year or two. This may improve the palatability of the brew, although it may depend on the starting palatability of the cactus concerned!

A third option is to embrace the taste as best you can and accept the subsequent mescaline effects as God's way of saying sorry…

If you're determined to perform a solvent extraction of some kind, having a read through the cactus preparation section may help get you oriented; the essential principles of extraction would be a useful reference point as well - although you have to be aware that certain details differ between DMT and mescaline, the most important one being solubility (or lack thereof) in specific solvents.

I'd concentrate the tea down until it starts to thicken a bit, mix it with lime and let it dry out completely before pulling with alcohol. Correct the pH to neutral with some kind of food grade acid, like citric, and evaporate down to collect a semi purified resin. Dosing won't be so accurate because of impurities and uncertainty about the salt stoichiometry, other than it will generally undershoot compared to pure M.HCl or sulfate.

Further steps towards a purer, maybe crystalline, end product would depend on what reagents, particularly acids and bases, and solvents to which you have access. Ideally you'd use something essentially immiscible with water for this.

You will also get a useable result by pulling from the lime/tea paste with limonene and recovering crude alkaloids with white vinegar. Knowledge is power, so get studying!

Freezing will not have harmed the alkaloids, not even a tiny bit. Prolonged boiling may diminish available alkaloid content if a reaction with, e.g., sugars occurs. That particular cut could also simply have been weak, or some part of your cook was inefficient. Was the pH too high, or the cook time too short, perhaps?

I've been looking into CIELO especially after acquiring an ungodly amount of cactus entirely for free (Facebook Market can be a wonderful thing), but it appears that Ethyl Acetate is similarly unavailable here, so I might be up shit creek in a chicken wire canoe as they say.

It seems like extractions just might not be excellent options round these parts. Toluene, Xylene, Naphtha, and Ethyl Acetate are all banned. The good news is I ordered some Naphtha off of Amazon (for non-cactus reasons, of course), and it seems to have shipped no mess no fuss, so I might have to do the same with Ethyl Acetate and run the CIELO Tek. But we'll see!

As for this batch, I think lime + limonene is going to be the maneuver. I see no reason why that shouldn't work. Should the lime/tea paste be more basic or neutral? Most extractions I've read through seem to put the cactus quite basic before extracting with a solvent (thinking of CIELO here), but I'm still a newbie at this, so I'm not sure.

Thanks for all your help!

 

[Transform]

I've been looking into CIELO especially after acquiring an ungodly amount of cactus entirely for free (Facebook Market can be a wonderful thing), but it appears that Ethyl Acetate is similarly unavailable here, so I might be up shit creek in a chicken wire canoe as they say.

It seems like extractions just might not be excellent options round these parts. Toluene, Xylene, Naphtha, and Ethyl Acetate are all banned. The good news is I ordered some Naphtha off of Amazon (for non-cactus reasons, of course), and it seems to have shipped no mess no fuss, so I might have to do the same with Ethyl Acetate and run the CIELO Tek. But we'll see!

As for this batch, I think lime + limonene is going to be the maneuver. I see no reason why that shouldn't work. Should the lime/tea paste be more basic or neutral? Most extractions I've read through seem to put the cactus quite basic before extracting with a solvent (thinking of CIELO here), but I'm still a newbie at this, so I'm not sure.

Thanks for all your help!

You need alkaline conditions for mescaline to be converted to the freebase form, which is what dissolves in the non-polar solvent. This is why you subsequently retrieve the mescaline from the NPS with the help of an acid, which turns it back into the water-soluble salt form - or beautiful crystals if CIELO works out for you (highly recommended!)

Naphtha will not dissolve mescaline at all, although there was a report of using it to 'stretch' chloroform for a cactus extraction. Chloroform is accessible to a determined home (al)chemist starting from rocks and water but there are far easier ways
Actually, I've looked and it was an 80:20 hexane/DCM mix, but the principle is identical. To wit, there is always a way - knowledge is power… but be sure always to check the safety requirements for any chemical you may be using or attempting to prepare!