69ron
Esteemed member
Poisson, back in 1960 performed a high yielding extract on San Pedro. Total recovery was 2% mescaline by dry weight of San Pedro. He dried 180 grams of fresh San Pedro cactus (found to contain 93.5% water by weight). This was then pulverized. It was then Soxhlet extracted with ethanol. The ethanol was then concentrated down and evaporated off. The residue was dissolved in 10 ml of 10% HCl solution. This was defatted 1 time with 100 ml of ether. Ammonia was then added to freebase the mescaline (the pH was not given unfortunately, but most other pros used pH 9-11). The mescaline was then extracted several times with chloroform (amount of chloroform and number of extractions was unfortunately not given). This was dried and distilled at 80C at 0.01mm and 220 milligrams of freebase mescaline was recovered.
I’ve looked at many other high yielding professional extraction techs. They all start with either ethanol, water or methanol. They all used either hydrochloric acid or acetic acid as the initial acid. They almost all de-fat and extract with chloroform (but some de-fat with ether and extract with chloroform). The pH used to extract the freebase was almost always between 9 and 11. I found none of the pros used xylene.
SWIM uses xylene as recommended on the web. So is xylene the cause of the low yields SWIM has been having? The XlogP of mescaline is very low. According to it’s XlogP, it should not be soluble in xylene at all. But basing solubility solely on XlogP information is somewhat inaccurate.
None of the pros have mentioned the need to let the mescaline freebase for a long period of time.
Poisson’s technique mirrored SWIM’s last tech almost exactly. The only difference being that SWIM salted his final product instead of distilling it, and SWIM used xylene instead of chloroform, and methanol instead of ethanol. SWIM’s yield was 0.075% dry weight!
I’ve got to get to the bottom of this. Why are SWIM’s yields so dam low?
Next time SWIM will follow Poisson’s high yielding tech, substituting DCM for chloroform, and DCM for the ether defat. And instead of distilling the mescaline, he’ll just evaporate the DCM and salt the residue and see if that gives better yields.
I’ve looked at many other high yielding professional extraction techs. They all start with either ethanol, water or methanol. They all used either hydrochloric acid or acetic acid as the initial acid. They almost all de-fat and extract with chloroform (but some de-fat with ether and extract with chloroform). The pH used to extract the freebase was almost always between 9 and 11. I found none of the pros used xylene.
SWIM uses xylene as recommended on the web. So is xylene the cause of the low yields SWIM has been having? The XlogP of mescaline is very low. According to it’s XlogP, it should not be soluble in xylene at all. But basing solubility solely on XlogP information is somewhat inaccurate.
None of the pros have mentioned the need to let the mescaline freebase for a long period of time.
Poisson’s technique mirrored SWIM’s last tech almost exactly. The only difference being that SWIM salted his final product instead of distilling it, and SWIM used xylene instead of chloroform, and methanol instead of ethanol. SWIM’s yield was 0.075% dry weight!
I’ve got to get to the bottom of this. Why are SWIM’s yields so dam low?
Next time SWIM will follow Poisson’s high yielding tech, substituting DCM for chloroform, and DCM for the ether defat. And instead of distilling the mescaline, he’ll just evaporate the DCM and salt the residue and see if that gives better yields.