Heptane - trying to purify sub-par (aka get rid of ALL jungle crap) DMT and the heptane is yellow??

[radio879]

Main Question: Do I need to get the heptane to a certain temperature to maximize pulling DMT while minimizing pulling anything else?

I may be ultra sensitive to the other CRAP that usually gets pulled out besides DMT. I used to extract back in the early 2000s, and I remember this was never an issue back then, and at some point, its like the bark started having all the other compounds.. yet most people don't seem to ever complain. But for me, if there is literally ANY other thing in it besides pure DMT, it ruins the experience totally. Ugly trip, ugly colors, weird sensations, totally unpleasant.

[Mod edit: No sourcing talk!] [I have some DMT that I didn't extract]. So I bought some Bestine (which I used to use back in the day) to try and purify it.

I have only just begun trying but today I tried hot water (temp 100F.. is this too low/why it looks yellow?) bath, 500mg DMT in glass vial, couple mL's of Heptane put in it and shook it around. The heptane is very yellow just like the "DMT/other stuff" mix. What can I do about this? Will more heat in the water bath help or not?

I tried putting it in the fridge (while it is all still together - 500mg and couple mL's on top) and it maybe did loose a little bit of the yellow. I know that the 1-2mL isn't enough to dissolve all of it, but my thinking was to try and over saturate it and purposely NOT try to dissolve all of the powder.

Back in the old days I do remember using a coffee maker for a heating pad and putting a vial of DMT/heptane on it.. but am not sure I remember in detail what exactly I did that worked really good.

--- should the water bath/temp of the 500mg + 1-2ml heptane have to be or should be at a certain optimal temperature? I was reading something like around 120F was good.. is this true, does anyone have experience? I know that the color doesn't necessarily mean that it contains the crap compounds... but I am ultra sensitive and i really doubt it'll be good enough if it has any yellow (although I will try anyways if i can't get rid of the yellow)

Also wondering if adding water (I am lacking any basifying material, no baking soda in the house although I could grab some) to the 2nd vial (I was planning on sucking up the Heptane layer, put in 2nd vial) would possibly get rid of some of that yellow stuff - whatever it is. I guess.. I will try it, grab some baking soda (just to up the ph a little.. in case the water has a low ph which will pull DMT into it)

 

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Welcome back!

The technique you're doing is more for making a saturated solution for recrystallization. It would only be able to separate polar from non-polar substances. 15 years ago it was thought that you could use this to separate a yellow oil by letting a hot solution of bestine cool down. In theory just letting it sit for hours causes yellow oil to get stuck to the bottom of the glass and you just pour off the cleaner portion. You might want to add a little more bestine, maybe 20ml? You could always evaporate it down if it's too much.

The other thing though is that DMT can be yellow. This paper found that when recrystallizing some DMT in two different solvents, the crystals were white with hexane and yellow with acetonitrile. I'm in the same situation as you and I've been fussing with some yellow DMT for over a year now and I can't figure it out. When mine is dissolved in a solvent, the solvent turns yellow too, just like yours. I'm not giving up, but as far as I know right now, there is no known technique to turn yellow back to white. That's not to say I haven't seen it happen; even with the yellow crystals I have, sections will randomly grow colorless/white.


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And I tested some of my yellow gems, it was incredible. The best DMT trip I've ever had. A little different than how it normally is tbh, but that could just be the randomness of DMT. So don't worry if you're stuck with yellow crystals, it's still DMT. These days you can even send a DMT sample to one of several labs that will test the potency.

Another thing on the radar this decade is polymerization. It's not clear to me if this even has anything to do with the color, but I bring it up because the technique for breaking the polymers is to do a mini A/B. I did it and it didn't help with the color but it was one of several steps I took to get a very high purity. Basically dissolving the DMT in an acid, then freebasing it again. Doing a mini extraction essentially.

And in 2013 @arcologist found a paper describing how you could essentially separate NMT from DMT using dry ice. You can read more about that here, but that also didn't get rid of the yellow for me.

In my opinion, it's more pure when its crystal habit shifts to a 3-dimensional, prismatic form. I've only ever seen people extract colorless "diamonds", but mine were piss yellow.


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Clarity is another factor I consider, once it's prismatic enough to see through.

 

[radio879]

I am curious if these other methods like fumaric acid etc can purify it more? Does anyone know? What about using Lime with max ph of 12 instead of NaOH? What about separating NMT from the DMT? (I decided to eat about 60mg oral..without maoi.. and it kicked in and reminded me exactly of how I felt when I made 'tea' with Acacia Confusa bark... which was not fun, whatever other compounds are in there are orally active by itself) - reason I ate 60mg, is because years ago, I noticed that if i DON'T take an MAOI, but if i ate some semi-dirty DMT, my body seemed to filter out the junk, but the junk was still enough to activate the DMT.. (probably mild maoi's) well whatever this is I got from heptane - NMT+weird acacia compounds = ugh, dark dysphoric trip for 30 mins.


Is there any more advanced methods that can be sure to separate out these other compounds.. ? I am wondering, if using too high a ph with NaOH possibly causes some to get wrecked/changed into other compounds. I might try Lime. I never considered this back in the day that maybe I was being reckless with unmeasured amounts of acid/base.

Back in the early 00s for a while I never had these issues... I was even sending samples to a friend who had LCMS and it was always 99.x% purity, without having to try hard. Pure white, naptha/heptane, never needed to recrystallize. Then, all the bark suddenly went to crap and after that it was impossible to ever get pure again. (I was one of the people that posted LCMS / NMR analysis results on the old version of this forum / jungle spice) I gave up... I couldn't figure it out. Sometimes, I would even get a lot of white powder that smelled like DMT yet it was inactive.. even at 1g doses orally w/maoi (I remember one night we kept dosing harmaline and just mixing grams into drinks and slamming them down, and we were still lucid and mostly normal)

The pure stuff is magical.. but even a tiny bit of that other crap will give me weird effects like ugly colors, my hands will feel really wet even when they aren't, weird ugly visuals where its just the opposite of the good DMT effects.