There appears to be a little confusion about the term "salt".
Commonly, "
salt" (as the white grainy substance that people put in their food for the purpose of flavoring) means sodium chloride.
Chemically, a "
salt" means an ionic compound that results from the neutralization reaction of an acid and a base. Examples of this type of salt are sodium chloride, magnesium sulfate, potassium iodide etc.
Harmala alkaloids belong to the chemical class of amines. In freebase form these are organic bases and can react with an acid to form an
organic ammonium ion and together with the remaining part of the acid (which is now confusingly called a
conjugate base) it forms a salt.
So, you see, freebase harmalas and harmala salts are
not the same thing.
The third meaning of "salt" is in "salting" the harmalas. This is actually not a very exact term, because "salting" can refer to several different chemical procedures. Here, it mean precipitating a specific harmala salt from a solution of a different harmala salt (notice that there is no freebase harmala involved here.) This procedure is sometimes also named "Manske" after the chemist who first systematically described the harmala alkaloids.
What happens is that to a hot solution of harmala aminium ions and acetate ions, there is added a hot solution of sodium ions and chloride ions (from the sodium chloride salt.) When there are enough sodium ions present in the solution, more than 5% by weight, most of the harmala aminium ions and an equal amount of the chloride ions click together and become insoluble when the solution cools. Thus are formed crystals of harmala hydrochloride (or "harmalinium" chloride - not a real term but you get the idea.)
What remains in solution is the sodium ions, the acetate ions and some of the the remaining chloride ions. When you boil down the solution, you get crystals of mostly sodium chloride, a fair bit of sodium acetate and a little harmala hydrochloride that had remained dissolved in the cooled solution.
Harmala salts are very heat stable so you can boil off the water without chemically damaging the harmalas.
Sleepermustawaken, it would help both you and others if you did a bit more research on the forum and on the web in general before opening so many threads here on the forum with IMHO often quite undifferentiated and underarticulated questions.
