Ph will not go higher

[merkin]

OK, just to complete this whole sorry saga. I evaporated the water. There were a few clear crystal clusters (assume benzoic acid) amongst the dried brown-coloured crystals (similarto sanchez results with HCl).

Scraped up the residue for a tan colored powder. Definitely marquis positive (orange) for mescaline but sadly only 316mg of it. Not sure how pure this is but I suppose there's enough for a bio-assay test in there. Probably at 150mg dosage to compare 300mg of citrate.

Yield in the end is less than 10% of citrate obtained from same powder. So I would NOT RECOMMEND the CITLO process I followed - which was essentially same as CIELO but 2 minute pulls and 2 minute rests.

 

[Twilight Person]

From my findings mesc benzoate anyways has a really high solubility. So you would need to reduce it quite a lot. You got precipitation from 600 ml toluene in one of your pictures I think ... that should not make precipitation.

Because of this I guess your goodies are still hidden in that toluene?

Maybe reduce it way down to 50 ml or less ... I got precipitation at a concentration of around 1 g per 30 ml and still like 20 % stayed behind in the toluene.

 

[Loveall]

OK, just to complete this whole sorry saga. I evaporated the water. There were a few clear crystal clusters (assume benzoic acid) amongst the dried brown-coloured crystals (similarto sanchez results with HCl).

Scraped up the residue for a tan colored powder. Definitely marquis positive (orange) for mescaline but sadly only 316mg of it. Not sure how pure this is but I suppose there's enough for a bio-assay test in there. Probably at 150mg dosage to compare 300mg of citrate.

Yield in the end is less than 10% of citrate obtained from same powder. So I would NOT RECOMMEND the CITLO process I followed - which was essentially same as CIELO but 2 minute pulls and 2 minute rests.

I am seeing similar low yields.

It seems a water saling pull from the toluene/xylene is needed (like doubledog did with sulfuric) as benzoic is not good at crashing the salt (?). Also, there are questions of how well Xylene/Toluene can pull from paste.

 

[Twilight Person]

At least I saw that toluene also could be easily mixed and separated with the cacti powder, unlike my current limonene trial But from what I experienced I had the feeling if going for mesc benzoate the solubility seems really high ... so it would be mandatory to evaporate quite some toluene (if that is true). And obviously evaporating toluene is not cool, but evaporating any solvent (even ether) is not really state-of-the-art ^_^ Therefore I think the toluene method might not be too feasible, even apart from it being not un-hazardous like ethyl acetate. Maybe only if there is an acid which could still reliably drop it ... but this would first have to be found?

So cannot see any way how the classic CIELO is not better, except that it seems occassionally people with bad luck like me just get goo ... but recrystallizing it with ethanol is really easy and fast. Only downside is that you will get rocky chunks instead of nice crystals :twisted: :twisted:

It would be cool to find a way which would not require to have perfect conditions for crystallizing like a specific water content, but it seems toluene + benzoic acid will not work if simply swapped with ethyl acetate + citric acid :shock:

 

[Loveall]

I can confirm that mescaline is extracted by toluene amd xylene from the paste, but that mescaline benzoate stays in solution.

What I did is pull the salted solvent with water. I reduced that to a smal volume (100ml), basified with Ca(OH)2, pulled with EA and proceeded with a CIELO like process. Result is below, usuall xtals but EA has bo chlorophyll in it because of tbe extra processing. Yield looks normal to first order.

Reminder that something similar happened with EA also: salting with benzoic acid did not produce xtals.

Mescaline Benzoate is very soluble in all kinds of solvents. Weird behavior.

 

[Loveall]

At least I saw that toluene also could be easily mixed and separated with the cacti powder, unlike my current limonene trial But from what I experienced I had the feeling if going for mesc benzoate the solubility seems really high ... so it would be mandatory to evaporate quite some toluene (if that is true). And obviously evaporating toluene is not cool, but evaporating any solvent (even ether) is not really state-of-the-art ^_^ Therefore I think the toluene method might not be too feasible, even apart from it being not un-hazardous like ethyl acetate. Maybe only if there is an acid which could still reliably drop it ... but this would first have to be found?

So cannot see any way how the classic CIELO is not better, except that it seems occassionally people with bad luck like me just get goo ... but recrystallizing it with ethanol is really easy and fast. Only downside is that you will get rocky chunks instead of nice crystals :twisted: :twisted:

It would be cool to find a way which would not require to have perfect conditions for crystallizing like a specific water content, but it seems toluene + benzoic acid will not work if simply swapped with ethyl acetate + citric acid :shock:

I am sorry you are having such difficulty with the process. Must be an issue somewhere.

I was thinking you could try some washing soda. It will dehydrate the EA and clean it some too.

Try this: after the extraction aftet deacnting from the fridge, add 2g of super washing soda per quart of extract. It will absorb more water (about 3.5ml of water only) but not completely dry the extract (leaving about 10ml of water). Swirl until it is all clumped up, then decant. If you get a water layer let us know. Then salt with citric acid and see what happens.

Keep everything as this may fail. You cam scale it down as a test first (recomended).

 

[doubledog]

I can confirm that mescaline is extracted by toluene amd xylene from the paste, but that mescaline benzoate stays in solution.

Mescaline Benzoate is very soluble in all kinds of solvents. Weird behavior.

Thanks for confirming it, this is also my experience. I think last pieces of benzoate puzzle are its solubility in water and also in toluene.
Could you somehow test it?

My understanding is that preparation of mescaline benzoate is worth the troubles only in case it's indeed more bioactive than common mescaline salts.

 

[merkin]

I can confirm that mescaline is extracted by toluene amd xylene from the paste, but that mescaline benzoate stays in solution.
Mescaline Benzoate is very soluble in all kinds of solvents. Weird behavior.

I used the tail end of the usual A/B mescaline tek and threw in some HCl water. Ended up with almost a gram of light tan sanchez with a good positive marquis reaction. So yes, there were still goodies in the Toluene. As that powder had yielded over 3.5g of CIELO crystals some goodies were lost along the way!

My understanding is that preparation of mescaline benzoate is worth the troubles only in case it's indeed more bioactive than common mescaline salts.

This was my motivation! And judging from all this wierdness regarding its solubility, maybe it is just as wierdly better absorbed by the human metabolism also though there was some talk of it being a good candidate for vaping (if that was at all possible and/or a good thing)

Given that (by other means involving citrate and limonene) I have some hard, resin-y and dark red-brown mescaline benzoate (positive marquis) - any recommendations for how it could be dissolved and re-x'd or otherwise cleaned up for consumption?

 

[Loveall]

I can confirm that mescaline is extracted by toluene amd xylene from the paste, but that mescaline benzoate stays in solution.
Mescaline Benzoate is very soluble in all kinds of solvents. Weird behavior.

I used the tail end of the usual A/B mescaline tek and threw in some HCl water. Ended up with almost a gram of light tan sanchez with a good positive marquis reaction. So yes, there were still goodies in the Toluene. As that powder had yielded over 3.5g of CIELO crystals some goodies were lost along the way!

My understanding is that preparation of mescaline benzoate is worth the troubles only in case it's indeed more bioactive than common mescaline salts.

This was my motivation! And judging from all this wierdness regarding its solubility, maybe it is just as wierdly better absorbed by the human metabolism also though there was some talk of it being a good candidate for vaping (if that was at all possible and/or a good thing)

Given that (by other means involving citrate and limonene) I have some hard, resin-y and dark red-brown mescaline benzoate (positive marquis) - any recommendations for how it could be dissolved and re-x'd or otherwise cleaned up for consumption?

A mini a/b with little toluene should work pretty well. That's how double dog xtalized mescaline benzoate, right? Needs to be concentrated and it will crash. There will be some still on the toluene, so keep it of course.

 

[Twilight Person]

I am sorry you are having such difficulty with the process. Must be an issue somewhere.

I was thinking you could try some washing soda. It will dehydrate the EA and clean it some too.

Try this: after the extraction aftet deacnting from the fridge, add 2g of super washing soda per quart of extract. It will absorb more water (about 3.5ml of water only) but not completely dry the extract (leaving about 10ml of water). Swirl until it is all clumped up, then decant. If you get a water layer let us know. Then salt with citric acid and see what happens.

Keep everything as this may fail. You cam scale it down as a test first (recomended).

About dehydration I once tried doing this water+nacl wash already, which had no effect. But maybe with this one could also try. Here is a picture from one of my trials. Definetly quite some water that was discarded, so no idea what else could be the problem.

Anyways will not try anything soon, as I now need to let my remaining plants grow a little more.

Cheers

 

[merkin]

Mescaline Benzoate is very soluble in all kinds of solvents. Weird behavior.

Having spent a lot of time and effort trying to get me some m.benzoate I am afraid I cannot come anywhere close to replicating oetzi's results in this post. Its hard to judge the volume of the Toluene in his picture but that Toluene must have been super-saturated beyond anything I have created. I have never found any gelatinous behaviour whatsoever.

All my results with a CIELO type extraction using Toluene and Benzoic acid excess failed essentially. While freezer temperatures created some precipitation it was nowhere near the look of CIELO needles as in oetzi's second pic. In fact it was more DMT freebase-style clusters. But these smelt so strongly of Benozoic acid I figured they were not Benzoate or needed cleaning. That mess was documented earlier!

I then began trying with converting (from CIELO crystals) rather than extracting, using far less Toluene in the process and a similar lime paste. Again, the saturation needed for precipitation is extreme and freezer temps are mandatory. I kept reducing the Toluene by evaporation to concentrate and refreezing every 50% drop and always more precipitation occurred. Until eventually it was all dry and the long Benzoic Acid crystals from the excess appeared as well.

With some advice from BW I have eventually ended up with some super white M-Benzoate (assumption)but as a very very fine sparkling crystalline powder. It has no smell of benzoic when dry and no excess benzoic acid was used (around 50% of the calculated mesc freebase was added for salting).

Still, reducing the Toluene by 20mls at a time (less than 60ml starting out volume) and into the freezer 12hrs always produced more precipitation until I had ~10ml left, which again yielded another ~200mg.

BW's conversion method using acetone to pull from dried, based, m.citrate/lime paste was the one that worked best, but still I had to work hard to get back, as m.benzoate (?), about 60% of what went in as Citrate.

Never, at any stage though, did the precipitate ever look anything like the CIELO-like fluffy crystals in oetzi's photo.

It is difficult for me working with small amounts so maybe that played a role in yield. nevertheless, getting M. Benzoate back out of Toluene is not trivial. So I repeated BW's method with some powder from my earlier attempts and got a similar result with a very white crystal powder.

Testing all along with some fresh Marquis reagent pretty much confirmed mescaline was in everything and following BW's instructions a very clean and vibrant orange on my final results. The (assumed) M.Benzoate I have now, ~1.4g, is pure white, fine crystals and odourless (earlier results were more light yellow-gold-brown-red tinted colours).

My chem knowledge does not allow me to draw much conclusion from all this, except to say M. Benzoate is super soluble in Toluene and the solvent must be really, really well saturated and @ freezing temps before anything will precipitate. And also, I cannot replicate any of the soft needle crystals (ala CIELO). But certainly not anything that looks like this pic!.

@Loveall - I am most curious about these two posts: I am unable to get anything near these results at all! And any idea what caused the green colour?
1
2

Hopefully there is an easier way to produce mescaline benzoate (the DMT version was way easier!) and of course, its assuming we even want to! But now, hopefully I have enough material to find the answer to that

 

[oetzi13]

Heya friends. Haven’t been here in a while...
I see you guy did some more work on this CITLO tek. It appears that the most difficult thing is to differentiate between benzo crystals and Mesc crystals and knowing how much B. acid to add for the salting step. In this run swim kept pullign and salting until the crytals just started to look too good to be true. I reckon the last few saltings were just B acid.

A friend of mine ran this first product through a spectrometer and it came back pretty pure. I don’t remember the exact number but it was somewhere around 98%.

The starting material for this run was made by the freeze/squeeze method. There was a fuckton of material swim was aiming to shrink down cause it took up too much space. After squeezing he boiled it down to an almost tar like substance but still liquid. Rathr high viscosity.

Solvent burbs did not go away with acetone wash. But on the wiki page for B. Acid it says that benzoic acid as well as toluene gets metabolized and excreted as hippuric acid.
So the solvent burbs are not a health hazard just unpleasant.
Not too worried about it anymore but I still want to get rid of them. Someone recommended a vacuum oven. Swim has yet to try this.

Swim will be back in his shack running some more experiments attempting to repeat what he had done in this first run. Will report back here soon.

 

[Twilight Person]

How did you get crystals straight from the toluene of an extraction? I think my conclusion was it will not xtalize from the toluene that you get when extracting...either because toluene is way too much (solubility is too high in general) or maybe stuff from the cactus keeps it from xtalllizing.

How much cactus did you use + how much toluene + how much benz. acid?

Cheers and good luck with more experiments. Would be happy if this works because i only get goo and even this goo is below expected yield?

 

[downwardsfromzero]

Mescaline Benzoate is very soluble in all kinds of solvents. Weird behavior.

This suddenly really stuck out at me - maybe MH.BzO is also really soluble in fats, meaning it penetrates the CNS more effectively and the subjective potency is enhanced that way?


Furthermore, noting that benzoic acid is soluble in hexane, could one of you who has some spare MH.BzO check its solubility in naphtha? If it is insoluble or only poorly soluble in naphtha, one possible workaround to the high solubility of MH.BzO in toluene might be to dilute with naphtha. Of course, you would then have a mixture of naphtha and toluene. which isn't necessarily ideal.

Also, if MH.BZO really isn't soluble in acetone then it should be possible to use acetone to help crash it out of toluene - and it should be relatively straightforward (!) to separate acetone from toluene afterwards.

 

[oetzi13]

Twilight: What swim did was rather simple. Based the tea/tar, pulled with toluene and salted with benzo. The exact ratio of materials are not known cause this was kind of an experiment. Since nobody here can replicate this it must have been pure luck.

 

[Brennendes Wasser]

Also, if MH.BZO really isn't soluble in acetone then it should be possible to use acetone to help crash it out of toluene - and it should be relatively straightforward (!) to separate acetone from toluene afterwards.

About the Acetone, yes it is not very soluble, but once you heat it up and put it back to the fridge, it will not precipitate anymore. So regarding crashing it out even in pure Aceton, once it is fully dissolved, I think it will not work. I even waited for all the Aceton to evaporate and it did not give crystals, but then again only oil. So probably cannot help forming crystals?

Furthermore, noting that benzoic acid is soluble in hexane, could one of you who has some spare MH.BzO check its solubility in naphtha? If it is insoluble or only poorly soluble in naphtha, one possible workaround to the high solubility of MH.BzO in toluene might be to dilute with naphtha. Of course, you would then have a mixture of naphtha and toluene. which isn't necessarily ideal

I checked today and it is not soluble. So normally it would work, but I think I tried it already and still got no precipitation. But I could have been maybe going stronger with the Hexane. So maybe might repeat.

But now my question is: Does Meskalin Freebase dissolve in Hexane/Naphtha and if not then maybe still in hot Heptane? Thinking about this since quite some time as it might be the key to a TEK which goes straight to M Benzoate and therefore crystallization hopefully is guaranteed.

Now I ordered a cactus and will make some trials ...

 

[Loveall]

I think mescaline is not soluble in naphtha.

Conclusion from this thread is that mescaline benzoate did not precipitate well from a toluene unless it is concentrated, which involves other procesing beyond strait CITLO.

Perhaps mescalibe FB precipitates better as mescaline benzoate from limonene? CILLO? Edit: CILLO won't work well.

Any other bioassays for mescaline benzoate?

 

[Loveall]

Any other bioassays for mescaline benzoate?

Since mescaline benzoate requires extra work (so far), how about doing a bioassy with mescaline citrate, but adding benzoic acid to the mix? DWZ discusses possible effects from benzoic acid metabolism here.

For example, take 300mg of citrate (or equivalent HCl, Sulfuric, etc) together with 300mg of benzoic acid. Is a potentiation noted?

Maybe it's a dumb idea, but easy to try.

 

[Loveall]

oezti13's experience seems to hint at the fact that the mesc in the Benzoate form may be more bioavailable?

This suggests to me it would be worth looking at the specific metabolic effects of benzoic acid especially wrt mescaline, and/or how benzoate affects the excretion of mescaline.

IIRC, benzoate gets excreted as hippuric acid, which is formed by the combination of benzoic acid with glycine. Would this alteration of glycine levels in the CNS increase the effects of mescaline? Is ~300mg or so of benzoic acid/benzoate sufficient to have that effect though? A roughly similar proportion of it gets excreted as the glucuronide, after all.

In any case, it would be good to hear a few more reports with using mescaline benzoate, for sure.

Looks like MDMA also has a metabolic pathway involving benzoic acid derivatives. Could 300mg of benzoic acid potentiate MDMA? A similar question can be asked about 2C-B and phenethylamines in general.

 

[Loveall]

I tried to convert mescaline citrate to mescaline benzoate in water using a sodium benzoate "manske", but it didn't work (details in spoiler if anyone is interested)

I'm going to try mescaline citrate + sodium benzoate bioassay soon to see if there is any potentiation by adding benzoate.

Spoiler

50mg of mescaline citrate where dissolved in 0.5ml of water. 0.5ml of a concentrated solution made with 0.6 parts sodium benzoate and 1 part water was added. Clouds formed and precipitating solution was left over night. A very small anmount of xtals where collected < 5mg, indicating that mescaline benzoate is very soluble in water and will not precipitate completely.