Could DMT be distilled?

[wikipedia]

Could a mixture of water and a salt-form of DMT be distilled, to yield a product which would contain enough DMT for recreational use?

While by no means pure, if possible, this would be a good way to extract DMT from low-concentration, but very cheap and widely available plants, such as the various Phalaris species.

 

[endlessness]

I think its good to try and think out of the box, try innovation, but in this particular case I don't think it would work.

First of all, the water present would limit the temperature as the water boils to 100c, which is less than the vaporization temperature of DMT, specially in any salt form. Once the water is completely evaporated (and all the energy/time it would take) you'd be left with your DMT salts + impurities, which would be hard to measure to dose because you don't know what impurities and how much DMT is there in the first place. And if you'd heat that up to try and distill it, its very likely you'd get some degradation of DMT in salt form. If you want to distill your DMT, you'd want to have it in the freebase form. Plus you dont know the boiling point of the unknown impurities, if they might co-distill with DMT.

Also, another problem is the suggestion to use Phalaris, which is an extremely unreliable plant for DMT. Firstly because yields may be extremely small (most times), and secondly, because you never know what variety of other (possibly unwanted/toxic) alkaloids are there.

If you really want to insist in using Phalaris, I highly suggest checking this out if you havent yet.

 

[Aeroman]

Tepezcohuite is psychedelic but... - Welcome discussion - Welcome to the DMT-Nexus

I've been experimenting with different ways of preparing mimosa hostilis stem/trunk bark to extract the dmt. A freebase extraction using classic methods produces extremely low yields (0.03%) but brewed in a ph 4, white vinegar and deionised water solution, the resulting extract is very potent. 20-25 grams of bark will give you a long lasting breakthrough trip.

There is a problem though, the temperature of the brewing phase directly influences the potency of the resulting tea. Boiling even briefly seems to destroy the DMT. If the brew is allowed to dry out or burn, there is no DMT psychedelic effect.

I have found that the optimum temperature setting for maximum potency is around 75°C. Time also seems to be neccessary, usually 9+ hours of brewing is required.

I suspect that attempting to distill the DMT from a solution will destroy it due to the higher temperatures required. I might be wrong though, I don't understand the chemical processes yet.

 

[downwardsfromzero]

In order to successfully distill DMT it would be necessary to use a low pressure, preferably inert atmosphere. The DMT would have to be in freebase form, although there are some indications that DMT acetate might be volatile to a certain extent.

User 1ce carried out some experiments a while back co-distilling DMT freebase with an entrainer solvent - cyclohexanol iirc - whereby the vapour pressure of the DMT and the entrainer combine to increase the rate at which the DMT distills at a lower temperature than it otherwise would. At least that was the principle being tested - it didn't appear to lead to a significant breakthrough in the art of extracting.

One more thing that could be tested, and indeed it has been mentioned from time to time, is steam distillation. There is a possibility that DMT freebase might be steam volatile but to my knowledge no-one has posted results of successfully having tried this.

Crikey! I even started a thread about this when I was but a n00b on this forum, that I'd completely forgotten about:
Steam distillation as water-based STB extraction method?

As endlessness rightly points out, all of these methods could be confounded by the presence of other compounds in a crude plant extract and thus any other form of workup to sort this out would make the distillation procedure essentially pointless.