No, No , No... my friend acolon. Swim has pulled from grasses several times with success. Back in the day (back i think outside the bounds of the US statute of limitations) swim used to pull it in a cut off 3/4 way 55 gallon metal drum over a wood fire... LOL .. yeah like 20 pd bails of this shit would be cooked down into a cake similar to what our friend here spoke of. Then this cake woul be further refined by basifying , pulling with solvent, back extracting into acidic water to defat, recycle the solvent* , add clean solvent, re-basify, pull, and evap. Then further cleaning was sometimes done, tho not normaly needed.
Swim can say with confidence that no two batches of grass were ever the same. They varied so greatly in potency and yeild that each time you did an extraction you had no clue what to expect. At some times he felt "accumulative" toxic effects from smoking these alkaloid profiles. Nausea and such... but this only presented itself in all night smoke fests where one re-hit the bowl as soon as he was able. Swim says there are no acumulative toxic effects from Spice extracted from mhrb or D . Illinoensis or chacruna or chali. So it must have been Gramine or some other unknown. Back in those days swim didn't have the knowledge of how to seperate most of these compounds so it was never tried. He just pulled with various solvents and smoked whatever came out.
He does remember one extraction of a large amount of grass from feild often used back then which yeilded a horrid smoke that was unbearable to the chest, and had no psychological effects whatsoever ... tho swim had purified everything down per normal and had nice beige crystals. it was just what the grass yeilded that time.
The only problem with using this on a regular basis for extraction is the fact you need pounds and pounds of dried dried grass. Thats a lot of grass and our normal vessels and extraction methods used in kitchens will not suffice.
This could be remedied by first making an alcohol concentrate of the grass , then moving that in for further refining. This type of work is more suited to those in more of an outdoorsy, private atmosphere and is not practical for most extractors. Peace and godspeed!
