Ronue said:
69ron, can your friend or anyone else test whether the fumarate salts of other psychoactive alkaloids (i.e. 5meodmt and jungle spice) show similar acetone insolubility?
Yes for bufotenine (5-HO-DMT), but not right now. His lab and several other adjacent rooms are being remodeled. The floors are being replaced, walls are being moved, new pipes are being put in, new sinks, everything is under construction...it is a mess! SWIM can't do any experiments until the construction is complete. Maybe two weeks more to go and it should be done, well most of it anyway.
I would assume that all of the citrates that are insoluble in acetone would also be insoluble as fumarates. Fumarates are in general less soluble than citrates in all solvents. If DMT fumarate is really insoluble in acetone as your tests show, I am willing to bet that 5-MeO-DMT, "Jungle Spice", bufotenine, and all the N-Oxides are also insoluble in acetone as fumarates.
Once SWIM’s lab is useable again, he can very quickly test this out with bufotenine. He’s been dying to know if bufotenine fumarate is a solid, because bufotenine citrate and bufotenine HCl are clearly not solids (they are goo like DMT citrate and DMT HCl).
SWIM no longer has any pure 5-MeO-DMT to play around with. He doesn’t have “jungle spice” either.
SWIM has lots of DMT to play with though.
SWIM was playing around with the idea of salting out DMT HCl from mimosa using JUST WATER, HCl, and salt. SWIM found out that it works and was excited to refine the tech, but had to stop because of the construction.
SWIM’s ultimate goal is to find an extraction tech that works for DMT that uses no messy emulsion plagued A/B extraction steps, no dangerous solvents (acetone is naturally found in the human body), and is efficient. The salting out of DMT HCl from water and table salt is a great new find and SWIM is excited about that. The yields were low, but SWIM’s mimosa might have been poor quality. It was cheap after all.
SWIM likes acetone. It evaporates fast, distills fast, is naturally present in the human body, and is very cheap and easy to get. If an acetone based tech for DMT could be had that is easy to do, it could greatly help out lots of people. And if sodium hydroxide could be avoided, that’s even better. Sodium hydroxide is almost impossible for lots of people to buy now in many places around the world. Calcium hydroxide is as strong of a base as sodium hydroxide is, but not as water soluble so it can’t be concentrated enough to reach a pH higher than 12.4. This makes it safer to use. Calcium hydroxide is also sold for cooking and is generally easier to get than sodium hydroxide. This is why most of SWIM’s techs use calcium hydroxide. The other base SWIM uses a lot in his techs is sodium carbonate which is also easy to get and much safer than sodium hydroxide.
Here’s another theoretical idea. I believe that DMT acetate is soluble in acetone (I know it’s soluble in DCM). One could extract DMT acetate from mimosa by using vinegar. Then evaporate the vinegar. Once completely dry, dissolve it in acetone, and then add fumaric acid. Fumaric acid will convert the DMT acetate into DMT fumarate and it should precipitate out of solution.
Of course this all assumes that DMT acetate is soluble in acetone and that the DMT present in the plant can be converted to DMT acetate. If it’s present as freebase then there’s no problem, but SWIM’s tests show its present as some sort of salt, not freebase, because it is easily extracted into pure water from the plant. SWIM has no idea what salt form its present as. Maybe DMT carbonate? Is that possible? I know that mescaline carbonate exists (mescaline has a pKa of 9.56) and bufotenine carbonate exists (pKa of bufotenine is 9.67), but I don’t know if DMT carbonate exists (DMT has a lower pKa of 8.68 and that might be too low).
NOTE: bufotenine carbonate forms from freebase bufotenine if it's exposed to air for too long. This causes it to turn dark brown, with a shiny tar like look, and all the powder gets stuck together as one hard lump. Bufotenine carbonate is more water soluble and less hallucinogenic than freebase bufotenine. So if this happens, you’ll need to freebase it again to regain the potency. Another problem with storing bufotenine is that it also forms bufotenine n-oxide which is barely hallucinogenic at all.