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Different solvents to extract dmt?

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Nailheadjake

GarkMAUL
Has any one used any other solvents besides napitha. Would toluol work or something like ethylene dichloride? Just curious if one has a better yield when extracting dmt.
 
Hello,

Yes, you can use other solvents, but not every solvent. Toluol/toluene will dissolve DMT very well, but also other impurities from the plant, and you won´t be able to do a freeze precipitation so you will have to evaporate it.

It smells pretty strong when evaporating so make sure you can do it outside or in a very well ventilated area, please don´t breathe those fumes. Also you will end up with a reddish oil instead of crystals due to it dissolving other impurities. If you dont mind those mentioned things, the oil is active, mostly containing DMT, but being an oil might be harder to weigh and manage in general.

ethylene dichloride I have no experience with but it is probably not a good idea to use for several reasons. It is slightly soluble in water, so you can both lose some of it to the water or also it might carry some of the basic solution together with it which would not be wanted. Also, it is a halogenated solvent so it might react with DMT to form an inactive compound if you arent very quick. I dont know the solubility of DMT and other impurities in it either. Id avoid that.

Also, this is relevant:
 
Toluene is better solvent with higher yields (it dissolves also the yellow/brown dmt fraction), but freeze precipitation can not be performed with it, solubility of dmt fb in toluene is too high.
Ethylene chloride is most likely also good choice of solvent, although I have no experience with it.
 
Another reason not to use ethylene dichloride is its toxicity. It's quite unusual to see it available to the general public so I'm wondering if you perhaps meant methylene dichloride, a.k.a. dichloromethane or DCM. That is also a good solvent for DMT, non-flammable, but still somewhat toxic and the same caveat applies regarding reactivity. It's also heavier than water so you have to remember which layer to collect - and if you've added too many things to the aqueous phase that increase the density, separation becomes difficult and the risk of emulsions is correspondingly higher.

DCM also has a low boiling point [39.6 °C (103.3 °F; 312.8 K)] which can be convenient or a nuisance, depending.

Other solvents more or less commonly encountered might include xylene and ethyl acetate in the water-immiscible realm, and ethanol, isopropanol and acetone being miscible with water, although isopropanol and acetone partially separate from concentrated alkalies.
 
Nailheadjake said:
Correction I understand ethylene dichloride =not good
I'd say the toxicity risks alone make it not worth it, and it may react with the DMT as well. If you were to get into home chemistry, though, it would still be a bit of a treasure to be looked after.
 
A very experienced alchemist who has written several books indicated to me that they believed antimony oxychloride to be a solvent that was known to a greco-egyptian alchemist by the name of Zosimos (not necessarily for dmt)

I don't have any stake in whether this is true or not and have no experience with it, hence why I'm asking here.

Can you please explain to me why it would be unsuitable for typical acacia extraction teks?

Thank you
 
It is unsuitable for extractions other than if you want to use it as a solid substitute for hydrochloric acid. Even that is inadvisible due to the toxicity of the antimony residue. It is in no way a solvent in the sense of being an alternative to the usual non-polar liquids.

There's an element of fundamentals in inorganic chemistry that you would need to learn before proceeding with any of this. The works of F. Sherwood Taylor were my starting point although they are long out of print.
 
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