Recrystallizing mescaline HCl from acetone

[DrSeltsam]

I would like to share my experience as I recently tried to do this. I could not find anything about this online and only one thread in this forum where someone asked. Regrettably I am not allowed to put my answer there

I took 666 mg of slightly yellow mescaline HCl (extracted from Peruvian Torch) and added 40 mL of acetone. Using an oil bath at 110° C I bought this up to a rolling boil. The solution turned slightly yellow but the mescaline HCl would not go into solution to a significant degree. I added about 5-6 drops of 99.9% IPA, which had no significant effect. After this, about 10-12 drops of IPA:H2O 1:1 was added, which had no significant effect.

At this point I thought that this might just not be mescaline HCl. So from the boiling acetone I removed a bit of solid, dried it and ran a Marquis test on it. It was positive for mescaline HCl.

I cooled the solution gradually and at some point at room temperature small crystals began forming at the side of the flask. The amount of crystals was very low or the majority grew on the remaining mescaline HCl. Finally I put it in the freezer for 24h.

I removed most of the solved by decantation and caught the small particles in a filter. The solids were dissolved in dH2O and dried.

This yielded 575 mg (86%) of slightly off-white crystals. I guess this was just a better acetone wash in the end. There was some cleaning but as the crystal structure was mainly untouched it was not as big as it could have been.

Perhaps one needs way more acetone to dissolve the mescaline HCl in it. In this case crystallization becomes pointless as the concentration of material is too low to get decent crystals.

I guess the next time I would try IPA/acetone.

Any comments on this? Otherwise I would put this here for documentation for others to learn from it so that no one tries to do this as well.

 

[benzyme]

I think you've got the right idea, using a binary solvent mixture.
60:40 acetone/water worked well for sulfate salts, freeze-precipitating, then vacuum filtered while pouring cold pet ether over them. that step (pouring a cold, completely nonpolar solvent that readily evaporates) probably helped immensely to resolve them.

 

[DrSeltsam]

Hello benzyme,

Thanks for your quick reply

I would rather refrain from a 60:40 acetone/water mixture for mescaline HCl as the HCl salt has an excellent solubility in water, even at low temperatures. The sulfate salt is radically different as it forms crystals out of water near the freezing point. This is also confirmed here.

So why did I do this? I was looking for something easy to give to some people who are not familiar with complicated procedures and thought this could be converted into an easy tek.

Washing with pet ether might also be a good option but as i do not have a lab with an easy possibility to get rid of toxic solvents I would rather not use such solvents. I like the environment too much to simply flush it down the drain so I have to bring the solvents to some kind of pubic place where they collect chemicals. Going there too often might cause suspicion

 

[benzyme]

nothing particularly complicated at all about procedures such as these, and like anything else in the art, there are advantages and disadvantages. the advantage of using small amounts of pet ether is that none of it would need to be poured down a drain...it evaporates. we're talking less than 10 mL. it isn't even that toxic, certainly not due to acute exposure. acetone/iso should be fine, or MEK, for redissolving

 

[Gone-and-Back]

If your goal is to clean it up and have nice crystals, have you thought of doing a dual solvent crystallization? I attempted this once with decent results, I just didn't have good enough filter paper to catch all of the crystals, they come out very very fine. It's almost like the consistency of talcum powder when scraped up.

Anyways, the way to do it is to have your mescaline in freebase form, and have it dissolved into whatever NP solvent you used. In my case I used d-limonene. Once you have your solution with your freebase dissolved into it, you then want to make a FASA solution, and add this to the NP solvent a few ml at a time. You will notice everything will cloud up as the fumaric aCid reacts with the mescaline causing mescaline fumarate, which is not soluble in both acetone and d-limonene, so it crashes out.

Filter and enjoy snow white mescaline fumarate. 200mg had me feeling really good all day.

 

[Mindlusion]

If your goal is to clean it up and have nice crystals, have you thought of doing a dual solvent crystallization? I attempted this once with decent results, I just didn't have good enough filter paper to catch all of the crystals, they come out very very fine. It's almost like the consistency of talcum powder when scraped up.

Anyways, the way to do it is to have your mescaline in freebase form, and have it dissolved into whatever NP solvent you used. In my case I used d-limonene. Once you have your solution with your freebase dissolved into it, you then want to make a FASA solution, and add this to the NP solvent a few ml at a time. You will notice everything will cloud up as the fumaric aCid reacts with the mescaline causing mescaline fumarate, which is not soluble in both acetone and d-limonene, so it crashes out.

Filter and enjoy snow white mescaline fumarate. 200mg had me feeling really good all day.

This is not the same as a dual-solvent recrystallization, this is A/B precipitation. Dual-solvent recrystallization is more like what benz suggested with the 60:40 acetone water. Though this system might work better for sulfates.

You dissolve your crude product in the first solvent where your product is highly soluble (water), preferably at an increased temperature, then add the second solvent (acetone) until you just start to see clouds of precipitation, warm it up again to get everything dissolve, then allow to crystallize by cooling to room temp or placing in the fridge/freezer.

Generally when you recrystallize something you want the process to go slowly, slow growth of crystals is always better. This is different than adding a large excess of acetone to crash precip the salts back out. Can also crash out impurities.

Same with FASA, though that process can be tweaked to give nice crystals too. Better yet, re-x the fumarates themselves in boiling IPA.

 

[DrSeltsam]

benzyme, sure evaporation is a good idea

Gone-and-Back, I got the same powder form when I cooled down the acetone and IPA from the washes I performed. The solvents had room temperature and I guess the IPA dissolved some of it.

I guess if you had the same results with the powder you either need to concentrate the solution very strongly to have bigger crystals or go with a different solvent system. If you concentrate too much you will have much more impurities in the crystals as there was more impurities in the solution.

Mindlusion, I agree with the precipitation. This will not really clean up the product when you did an extraction from a cactus as everything you have was washed from a NP solvent.

Any other ideas how to recrystallize the HCl salt? I would rather stay with the HCl salt as the salting is so easy and you do not need to care about the pH so much as the excess HCl will just evaporate.

Thanks a lot for your answers!

 

[Gone-and-Back]

If your goal is to clean it up and have nice crystals, have you thought of doing a dual solvent crystallization? I attempted this once with decent results, I just didn't have good enough filter paper to catch all of the crystals, they come out very very fine. It's almost like the consistency of talcum powder when scraped up.

Anyways, the way to do it is to have your mescaline in freebase form, and have it dissolved into whatever NP solvent you used. In my case I used d-limonene. Once you have your solution with your freebase dissolved into it, you then want to make a FASA solution, and add this to the NP solvent a few ml at a time. You will notice everything will cloud up as the fumaric aCid reacts with the mescaline causing mescaline fumarate, which is not soluble in both acetone and d-limonene, so it crashes out.

Filter and enjoy snow white mescaline fumarate. 200mg had me feeling really good all day.

This is not the same as a dual-solvent recrystallization, this is A/B precipitation. Dual-solvent recrystallization is more like what benz suggested with the 60:40 acetone water. Though this system might work better for sulfates.

You dissolve your crude product in the first solvent where your product is highly soluble (water), preferably at an increased temperature, then add the second solvent (acetone) until you just start to see clouds of precipitation, warm it up again to get everything dissolve, then allow to crystallize by cooling to room temp or placing in the fridge/freezer.

Generally when you recrystallize something you want the process to go slowly, slow growth of crystals is always better. This is different than adding a large excess of acetone to crash precip the salts back out. Can also crash out impurities.

Same with FASA, though that process can be tweaked to give nice crystals too. Better yet, re-x the fumarates themselves in boiling IPA.

That is how I had dual solvent crystalization explained to me by a few individuals here, can't remember who. Nice to know that it's something different. It still worked though.