Fable said:
A bit of info on the Soxhlet procedure would be great. I was thinking of using acidified alcohol as the solvent.
Maybe you could just use acetone and have spice ready to evap? Or naptha?
Don’t use acetone or naphtha unless the DMT is in freebase form in the plant. SWIM doesn’t know of a single plant that contains freebase DMT. Freebase DMT is extremely soluble in acetone or naphtha but most DMT salts are very poorly soluble in acetone and quite insoluble in naphtha.
You can tell if your plant source contains DMT in freebase form or not by simply testing the pH of the plant. Soak it in water and test the pH of the water. Most plants have a pH of about 5-6 so the DMT is in salt form and will be difficult to extract with acetone and nearly impossible to extract with naphtha. In order for the DMT to be present in freebase form in substantial amounts, the plant needs to have a natural pH of about 8.0 or more.
SWIM uses 700 ml of solvent for 100-200 grams of plant material in a 1000 ml Soxhlet. He usually extracts from Hawaiian Psychotria viridis, not Mimosa hostilis, because it's easier. Mimosa has nasty emulsion problems and sometimes is so low in DMT that it’s a complete waste of money. SWIM freebases at pH 9.5 when extracting from Hawaiian Psychotria viridis and always gets very good yields. That pH 13 stuff doesn’t apply at all to Psychotria viridis. In fact it reduces yields for Psychotria viridis by causing emulsions to form by turning all the fats in the leaves into soap. Soap causes really nasty emulsions. Mimosa emulsions are different from Psychotria emulsions. They are not caused by soaps forming because Mimosa bark has very little fat in it. So pH 13 is fine for Mimosa, but not for fatty leaves like Psychotria viridis.
Alcohol that is not 100% pure is best. SWIM uses 91% IPA, not 99%. Using 99% IPA does extract DMT as efficiently. He uses 1 ml of 30% HCl solution for every 1000 ml of 91% IPA. The HCl distills with the water in the IPA and gets recycled over and over keeping the solvent acidic to better digest the plant material to aid in extraction. Letting the Soxhlet run for 8 hours is plenty of time to get nearly every last molecule of DMT out of the plant. The main problem with using IPA is that it extracts a lot of oils and fats along with the DMT. And then you’ll need to concentrate the IPA down to about 50-100 ml or so and then add 200-300 ml water before doing the A/B extraction steps. The disadvantage of using IPA is that you’ll need to defat more than if you used water.
If you don't mind running the Soxhlet longer, like 16 hours overnight, it's actually better to use water. Again use 1 ml of 30% HCl solution for every 1000 ml of water. This makes pH 2.56 water. When using water you won’t need to defat as much. Don’t over do the acid or you’ll destroy the DMT. Some people believe that DMT HCl is very heat sensitive and prefer to use IPA or methanol for the initial extraction because they boil at lower temperatures. SWIM doesn’t believe that and finds that boiling water works very well with DMT HCl. Of course freebase DMT should not be boiled in water, because it will vaporize away!
SWIM had used Vovin's tek with very pathetic results (2 grams from 6 pounds mimosa). Spice yielded was said to be clean and wonderfully active:d After taking to SWIM, I ascertained the only mistake I can think of was in the basification. SWIM was tired and basifying at 3AM. SWIM poured in all the basification liquid (PH 13) at once and shook the containers. PH was brought from 4 to approximately 12 in a matter of moments. Did this destroy the DMT?!?
