Reclaiming wash leftovers (and used solvent)

[ermit]

Hi everyone,

I have 2 questions: one "easy" for whose I need some confirmation and maybe a little help, and one harder (for me, but maybe not for a chemist).

#Q1 Reclaiming solvent

I did 2x 100g extractions of MRHB, with a STB tek. I also did some experiments with washing/re-x (more on that later).

Right now, I have some pretty yellowish solvent which still smells of DMT, but that I seem unable to freeze precipitate.


Question(s):
=> How to handle that ? I guess I should make a mini A/B extraction (I have some clear vinegar / acetic acid at hand).
=> Which relative (to the solvent volume) quantity of vinegar should I use ?

After that (extracting the remaining spice), I guess i can try to clean my solvent with activated charcoal, as there is a post in this section about that).

#Q2 Reclaiming washes leftovers

I experimented with washes with my batch results as I though my result was lye-contaminated (furthers tests with pH paper seemed to show it wasn't the case).
I dissolved my batch in solvent, heated it, and washed it in an hotter water with salt and sodium carbonate 2 times.
Unfortunately, I dumped the first wash leftover, and when doing so I found it smelled a lot like DMT, and then I remembered the extraction proverb "if you do not dump anything, nothing is lost" – lesson learned: for the subsequent washes I kept everything in a jar.

The washes experiment was a bit of a failure: I lost 40~50% of my batch.

Now I have a jar with a very alcaline water (pH paper is dark purple), with a lot of sodium carbonate and salt dissolved in it. On top of the liquid there is a floating milky layer full of what it seems flakes/crystals.

=> The jar content smells DMT a lot (this floral/new shoes unmistakable odour).

So I decided to try to re-extract this. Put everything in an erlenmeyer, and put fresh solvent on top of it. Pics below.

NB: the "brown thing" in the flask is a paper filter I tried to use to filter the snowy layer. Seeing it smelled a lot DMT, I decided to put it back in the solution and attempt to extract everything with fresh solvent.

Unfortunately the fresh solvent doesn't seem to work on the snowy layer (it's still here, after few shakes, and the solvent's color didn't change.

Questions:
My guesses are:

• the water is so saturated with salt, lye and sodium carbonate that the DMT floats over it
• for some reasons, the DMT doesn't get pulled by the solvent. Maybe because it is in a solvent-insoluble chemical form ?

=> Is this chemically plausible ?
=> How could I try to reclaim the content of this flask ? (I have 800 mL of this "leftover solution".

I hope that people with greater chemical skills than me can help / have ideas

 

[fractals4life]

Benzoic acid is a good way of recovering DMT from used solvent, it's really easy to tell when you've got all of it in salt form as clouds stop forming when you add more benzoic Acid solution. See here for details:

TEK - The benzoic acid tek

I thought about writing a separate post since benzoic acid has not received much attention so far. The greatest benefit of benzoic acid is that it can be used to detect the presence of even very minute amounts of DMT in the NPS. It also allows one to complete the extraction in a single day by...

forum.dmt-nexus.me

 

[ermit]

Benzoic acid is a good way of recovering DMT from used solvent, it's really easy to tell when you've got all of it in salt form as clouds stop forming when you add more benzoic Acid solution. See here for details:

thanks! This property of BA is quite interesting! I'll check if I can get that easily.
Ultimately I would prefer a less-toxic material, but with a mini AB, the DMT would be re-basified, so no benzoate would end up in the end product.

 

[fractals4life]

I was able to buy pure BA online easily, it's used as a fungicide, apparently!