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"Jungle Spice" - Mystery Alkaloids of Mimosa Root Bark

Migrated topic.
This thing just keeps on growing and growing.

In addition to some miscellanious edits throughout, I've just finished adding a discussion of the available GCMS data. I finally made some sense of the 130 m/z peak, and what I found may shed some light on the odor of extracted spice. It also provides a justification for going overboard with lye, whether you're going an A/B or STB method. Sorry El Ka Bong, but I'm going to have to start calling you out on this when you recommend against supersaturated NaOH solutions.

Also (if you haven't checked back recently), I've added a discussion of the botanical confusion surroudning the issue, as well as a discussion of the various "colored" spices.
 
hey i was reading through your updates and it looks nice. However one thing I should add. There were minor peaks in GC-FID chromatogram, from the red spice that were not in the white one. They were not really so clear in GC-MS but it was probably a concentration issue. However the main peak was DMT. The GC-MS spectra was perfect. If anyone would like an image of this i can ask this guy i barely know to get it.

Recently more of this red spice has been isolated (Straight to base after hexane pulls did toluene pull). This guy should have some free time in the lab and is willing to test it again along side white spice. Would people be interested in this data? I can ask him to use more concentrated samples to try and get mass spectra of the minor peaks?

I want to bring up one more thing. With this red mixture crystals are forming within the red ooze. Maybe if I remember to tell this guy I barely know to take a picture of it.
 
burnt said:
hey i was reading through your updates and it looks nice. However one thing I should add. There were minor peaks in GC-FID chromatogram, from the red spice that were not in the white one. They were not really so clear in GC-MS but it was probably a concentration issue. However the main peak was DMT. The GC-MS spectra was perfect. If anyone would like an image of this i can ask this guy i barely know to get it.
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I'm afraid I don't know much about analyzing FID data, so if the MS data was clean, then it's up to you whether to ask this guy to get the image.

burnt said:
Recently more of this red spice has been isolated (Straight to base after hexane pulls did toluene pull). This guy should have some free time in the lab and is willing to test it again along side white spice. Would people be interested in this data? I can ask him to use more concentrated samples to try and get mass spectra of the minor peaks?
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This would be wonderful. I can't deny that those minor peaks have me mighty curious. Maybe he could try fractionating some of the sample on a column to isolate the minor components?


burnt said:
I want to bring up one more thing. With this red mixture crystals are forming within the red ooze. Maybe if I remember to tell this guy I barely know to take a picture of it.
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This would be very interesting. I've seen descriptions of crystals in the red spice, but I haven't seen any pictures of it before.
 
Burnt, a few more questions for that guy, if you have time to ask him. Ion over at the nook was curious:

Were these analyses performed using a trace GC/MS system? What kind of column? Any info on the ramp method(s) would also be appreciated. :)
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If the guy relays the answers, feel free to post them directly to the thread over there, I think that board is a lot more up to understanding the technical data than we tend to be here at the Nexus.
 
3 microliters of a 5mg/mL solution of the red stuff again gave only dmt in GC-MS. I think this is the only major alkaloid in this mixture. I think the colors are a result of tannins. M. hostillis bark is loaded with tannins so its very likely they are causing the red pigment in "jungle spice". Furthermore tannins may be altering the effect of DMT by non specifically binding to various proteins in the brain or lung or maybe elsewhere. I do not know if the tannins found in this bark could cross the blood brain barrier or how easily they would enter the blood either. one good thing about certain tannins is that they dont get too much into the blood because their toxic. The GC temperatures might not be high enough to volatilize these compounds so thats probaly why they are not in the mixture. Using higher temperatures is not desired because my friend actually uses this machine for work and doesnt want to fuck up his column.

By FID i just ment flame ionization detector. Its just a detector thats more for quantitative analysis. He could inject the red stuff into this machine again to see if the impurities are still present. However it gives no identification information like MS spectra.

LC-MS is too much of a pain to set up and might attract unwanted attention to my friend. Column chromatography is also no small task and could take lots of time to identify compounds that are already known to be in the plant. TLC however could easily show if phenolic compounds are present in the mixture by spraying with fast blue B or some other similar spray reagent. Also dragondorfs reagent could easily be showed to identify DMT and other alkaloids if they are present and seperate.

I am not a member of that nook web board. I know all the GC-MS specifics but am unsure why they would need that information. Its fairly basic to identify low molecular weight tryptamines in GC.
 
oh duh im stupid I ment to mention this very important fact. The molecular weight of tannins can be quite high especially if they are attached to sugars or in polymer form. This GC-MS my friend is using can't look at molecular weights higher then 500 or 600 making it useless. In other words different sample preperation methods/ GC-MS methods would have to be tried to make these compounds visible. I dont think my friend really has time to do this kind of work and he is sorry for that.

also it should be noted that inhaling tannins assuming some of them are volatile into your lungs might not be such a nice thing. has anyone noticed increased irritation upon smoking the more impure jungle spice?
 
i just did a toluene pull on 50g of exhausted MHRB and ended up with a little bit of yellow oil which doesnt seem like it can dry anymore. i guess most of the dmt was already pulled out with the naphtha. maybe a hot toluene would yield a bit more, im not sure.. but i probably wont be pulling any more from that batch.. i have a 200g extraction going now and plan to do a few heated toluene pulls on that
 
Wow i found this from a google search.. didn't know people were trying to figure it out..

Anyway, for information, the analysis i did (that was in the original post) was LC/MS not GC. My chemist friend that did the analysis overdosed on opiates and died just over a year ago ( :( ) but anyway he did do LC/MS, not sure what difference it makes but thats what was done :)
 
Hey, good to hear from you! I was stoked when I ran across that mass spec you'd posted, it really helped to give some substance to the topic. Sorry to hear about your friend :( .

I'll update the document some time this weekend to reflect that it was LC/MS, not GC. I don't think it makes that much of a difference... except for the curious fact that the red material appears to be primarily DMT according to GCMS, while we tend to see these other compounds with LCMS. I'm not sure why.

So I've been wondering: maybe it's been too long for you to have any idea, but did that sample come from an acid/base or straight-to-base extraction?
 
It was an acid/base extraction - I haven't extracted DMT for a long while now (well 2006) since i got soooo fucking frustrated because of the "mysterious crappy trip" i'd get every time, has the quality been better now? Seems like no matter what supplier it seemed to be still shitty so i just gave up.. When i FIRST started extracting spice, my friend analyzed a sample and he said it was so pure (99%+ LCMS) he'd use it as an analytical sample.

I think i was especially sensitive to the crappy stuff though.

One time a supplier sent me many small samples (he'd grab a handful of bark from each 10kg box he had) to test (not analysis just smoke test).. Each sample would be wildly variable from the next.. A few times I extracted, i ended up with grams of a pure white DMT looking pile of crystals that were *totally* inactive smoked.. I know it wasn't just me because I gave grams of it away to friends and nobody got any effect out of it.

It seems like when I first started extracting, every batch of spice was all perfect..no dark trip and very potent. then it just suddenly changed. I suspected for a while maybe all the suppliers were getting it in bulk from the same large supplier and they were selling the wrong species or something, i dunno..
 
i should add that GC/MS from LC/MS could give a different result because the heat from the GC could make things degrade.

also i took closer look at those TLC results. well i think some of the claims being made about what spot is what may not be correct, the author himself points it out. maybe i'm missing something but spray reagents should be used when trying to get an idea about what compound is what if no reference is available. unfortunatly some spray reagents are rather toxic and i wouldnt recommend someone using them in their home!! he pointed out correctly however that all the red colors and stuff are probaly from tannins.

i think it can't be ruled out that some breakdown product of yuremamine could be in these extracts. LC-MS could shed some light on that. furthermore lets think about the stomach with its low pH. could be the case that oral M hostilis is not active from yuremamine but a breakdown product of that woo woo now that gets fun to figure out! :p

also i dont think people should underestimate the biological activity of tannins. although some in certain doses are healthy some are not. some make you puke you guts out. some don't.

also sorry about your friend radio...
 
If one uses xylene as the non polar solvent and extract jungle spice.
Can you theoretically dissolve what you got from the xylene pull in a bit of naptha to seperate the jungle spice from the dmt.
From what i read yuremamain (which jungle spice supposedly is) is not soluble in naptha.
 
Check out the first paragraph of the first post... I believe you'll find the answer to your question there.... and in the extractions section. Also, it sounds like you're under the impression that jungle spice is yuremamine. I've tried to make clear that there is no evidence to support this claim. There seems to be something else psychoactive in the mixture, but it doesn't appear that this something else is yuremamine.
 
Entropymancer said:
Interesting.... nothing in it but spice? I'm wondering how that can be, when the red fraction was insoluble in the nonpolar solvent when white spice was pulled from the red. I could understand some trace spice left behind, but it's hard to imagine it being the primary component. Very interesting.
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In the new psychnautica podcast D. Mckenna mentions yuremamine and he says that it contains DMT He says it is a larger molecule that contains the dmt structure within it
 
i could be wrong but i believe he was referring to the paper where yuramine was first isolated. if this is the case they used LC-MS in that paper. or am i mixing that up??? i was probably baked when i listened to the talk hehe :p

a friend of a friend had an idea to derivatize the stuff in jungle spice to make it more volatilizable in GC-MS. this may give a much clearer result.
 
Well, I'm just about ready to call this article finished. I went through and editted things for readability/clarity/accuracy/spelling, and I'm pretty satisfied with the informational content.

Now I just need to go through and do all the in-line citing of information.

But anyway, the reason I'm posting is to welcome any last-minute feedback before I finalize version 1.0. After that I'll be writing a substantially shorter article for those who don't have time to read the full thing, and potentially submitting it to the Entheogen Review to get this information in the hands of people who can use it.
 
Alright, all the citations are in there. Since the vast majority of my supporting evidence comes from various forum posts, I've been very thorough in the citations so that interested readers can verify the bulk of evidence behind the claims.

In its current form, the article should now make it easy to track down which threads contain useful information on which jungle spice-related topics.

Since I'm satisfied the document represents all of the presently substantiated information on jungle spice, I plan to quit editting it and leave the document in its current form. If subsantial progress is made in identifying the compound(s) or in determining the factors leading to the different types of jungle spice, I may add an update reflecting that. But I think the current version provides a nice historical snapshot of what is known as of mid-2008.
 
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