Help needed with butchered harmalas purification

[reun]

Hi all,

I have just finished performing my 3rd harmala extraction and I feel like I must have screwed it up. I followed this tek. I would appreciate if you could weigh in with your thoughts on what I could do here.

Here is the summary of what happened:

• I ran the original extraction by freezing, thawing and then boiling the seeds, and then collecting the results -- this produced 6 g (out of 100 g rue)
• In order to be able to weigh rue effectively, I wanted to perform the Manske filtration step. And this is where you may correct me, but I read that you'd need 200-250 mg of harmalas for a proper pharma experience, I've also been planning to prepare some changa with 1 g of harmalas -- I just wasn't sure whether 250 mg of crude harmalas freebase is what I'm after here, so I wanted to purify it. Perhaps the biggest lesson to take away from all of this, is that I don't need to move past that step, instead I can just multiply all doses by 1.5-2 or so -- please let me know if you have any thoughts on this
• Anyway, I continued with the harmalas purification step, but I made a mistake: I did not remove excess salt, so I carried it through the rest of the process
• I got purified harmalas and it did look like it was supposed to, except I now had 23 g of the product -- about 4 times more than my original crude harmalas
• Anyway, I decided to press of with the separation part, hoping that it may fix the problem. I ended up with 7 g of harmine and 7 g of harmaline, but both were tainted, not off-white, but a little brown, like raw sugar. I was expecting to end up with about 2 g of harmine and 2 g of harmaline, so I'm guessing they are still present in my powders, but I may just need to multiple the dosage by 4 or so. I've tried dissolving it in water and passing it through the filter again, but it didn't help

Considering the above scenario, I have a few questions: What do you think I can do with my harmine and harmaline extracts? Are they usable in a pharma setting and in changa?

Many thanks!

 

[northape]

• I ran the original extraction by freezing, thawing and then boiling the seeds, and then collecting the results -- this produced 6 g (out of 100 g rue)

First of all, I'm far from an expert in extracting harmalas. Still, I've some basic understanding. This first step is basically all you need. You can purify further with Manske, but realistically, if you did the first step right, it's not that necessary. So 6g was your result or 6%, which is quite reasonable. Most likely, you still have some impurity, but it's a workable extract.

• In order to be able to weigh rue effectively, I wanted to perform the Manske filtration step. And this is where you may correct me, but I read that you'd need 200-250 mg of harmalas for a proper pharma experience, I've also been planning to prepare some changa with 1 g of harmalas -- I just wasn't sure whether 250 mg of crude harmalas freebase is what I'm after here, so I wanted to purify it. Perhaps the biggest lesson to take away from all of this, is that I don't need to move past that step, instead I can just multiply all doses by 1.5-2 or so -- please let me know if you have any thoughts on this

We talked about it before: you get freebase in step one, and salt after Manske. Dose-wise, you can consider them more or less the same. However, you seem to have a lot of salt contamination after your Manske, so sure, now you need to use more.

Considering the above scenario, I have a few questions: What do you think I can do with my harmine and harmaline extracts? Are they usable in a pharma setting and in changa?

You can always redissolve it all back into warm water and base it once again. You should get a pretty pure extract that way. Further, you can see how much was lost during all the experiments.

Now people can correct me, or whatever that psychology trick was

@Sakkadelic @The Sofa Traveler @blig-blug @Transform

 

[Sakkadelic]

To deal with a salt contamination what you need to do is dissolve everything in acidic water, if not everything dissolves it's fine, as long as the pH is acidic the harmalas should be in solution and you can filter any undisolved stuff. Then base, wash several times and collect the freebase.

For accurate dosing you don't need to do a manske. Once you have your crude freebase, dissolve it in acidic water, let it settle and filter it, again not everything will dissolve and that is expected. It's advised to keep the volumes minimal here for easier filtration. Then base again, wash several times, and collect the cleaner freebase. I believe this produces >90% pure freebase harmala, I don't have real numbers though.


The key for clean harmalas is water washes and a single filtration at the right moment (at the second acid phase).

You can also stop after the first basification like northape suggested and that's good enough, but give it several water washes. If 200 mg doesn't do the job increase the dose gradually.

 

[Sakkadelic]

A more general advice is that harmala extraction is pretty chill and forgiving, so take your time with it, pause if you're unsure and get some answers, read the steps carefully and don't rely on AI summary.