Sooooooooooooo........... this tek, couple points to make here.
The tek reads "the clear solution above is filtered off and and evaporated to yeild."
Does this mean the liquid is evaporated? Or the remaining precipitate is evaporated?
And what does "The part that was washed off still contains a bit of mescaline" refer to, which part?
Tell you what happened when someone tried this: The mesc HCL dissolved in water, then "copious" amounts of -10 C acetone was added. Mesc HCL fell out of solution and was fluffy white. Now according to folks like soulfood and antichode the opposite is expected to occur: mesc HCL stays in solution while impurities fall out. Quite frankly that makes about as much sense as oil dissolving salt and water dissolving some non-polar thing. I'll explain why at the bottom.
Also the second post from OP says "The liquid portion evapped," and it shows some pictures, and so the first post must have meant to evaporate the precipitate; Right?
*southern accent* I do declare this thread a confusing conundrum. Only conclusion I can come to that makes everyone's opinions happy and validated is that depending on the ratio of acetone:water you either get a precipitate of mesc hcl or of junk.
Here's what I think the point of this tek is, and how I conceptualized it prior to being informed about the results.
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Theory time:
Mescaline HCL extract has inherent impurities due to inaccurate titration which exhibit the color brown, these impurities are understood to be anything other than Mescaline HCL. In San Pedro they are 3,4-dimethoxyphenethylamine, 4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenethylamine, 3-hydroxy-4,5-dimethoxyphenethylamine, 4-hydroxy-3,5-dimethoxyphenethylamine, anhalonidine, anhalinine, hordenine, tyramine, and 3-methoxytyramine. Now when performing acetone washes of Mescaline HCL crude extract it is best to crush the mescaline into as fine a powder as possible. This is to increase surface area of the extract in order to dissolve as much of the impurities as possible. However when mescaline HCL forms, since it is crystalline, it will trap impurities in its structure, and it is very difficult to entirely grind the powder into an ultra fine dust. Because of this limitation, acetone washes often leave the extract remaining some shade of brown, they do not completely dissolve the impurities. The impurities cannot be dissolved in acetone if they are trapped in the structure of the insoluble (in acetone) mescaline HCL? However, to sidestep this problem we can dissolve the mescaline HCL in water. When molecules dissolve their either separate into individual atoms, or into individual molecules. Mescaline HCL breaks apart into molecules, which increases their surface as close to 100% of maximum as anyone would care. This frees the impurities allowing them to actually come into contact with the acetone and dissolve. This step completely bypasses all grinding and crushing and far more effective. The acetone/water mixture would then need to be removed from the Mescaline HCL precipitate and the process repeated a couple of times to remove all the non-precipitated Mescaline HCL still floating, but not dissolved, in the acetone solution.
Forum Chemists, am I super fucking wrong?
The only way this cat can imagine the mescaline HCL dissolving in the solution is if it were 80%+ of water and only a small portion of acetone.
