Test thh that you do not convert yourself

[ava69]

Note: I only do this around 3 times in a lifetime, so I have enough THH to last a lifetime, as I tend to use 300mg at least x 3 times a month. It's a lot of hard work extracting the rue. The harmaline to THH part is easy.

P.S. You don't need a vacuum filtration setup to do the zinc method. 2 people here have said the cotton ball stuffed in funnel does indeed work to remove any lingering (less than 0.5%) zinc dust, and said their resulting THH worked fine.

Merkin said:

I have the exact same mag stirrer, and I was very embarrassed about its condition after a few 'accidents' - nice to see one in even worse nick, lol.

Same here Merkin, my stir plates over the decade look like they have been thru a nuclear blast and survived.

Shadedself said:

Ive adquired some ascorbic acid and intend to try that method soon.

Would vitamin C still reduce harmaline in its acetate form?
I usually add some vinegar in the boiling steps and Im not sure if that would interfere in this case.

I also wonder if it would be more efficient to perform the PCing with ascorbic acid as its own separate step once you have a cleanish extract.

Shadedself, you should use harmaline in it's freebase form. I actually performed the method advocated by Professor8 long time ago, even used an actual reflux condenser cooled with ice to re-cycle the boiling water, and pure ascorbic acid. My results were that the solution of harmaline did not turn from green to blue when a bit swabbed with a vinegar soaked que tip, rubbed on a paper plate, and held under blacklight, indicating 100% conversion did not take place, and I was using pure harmaline only. But I only ran the reflux for 2 hours total, it may just be that a much longer time is necessary for the complete conversion to take place with vitamin C reflux...say a 12 hour reflux? I never repeated the experiment as the zinc method worked in 1.5 hour to convert any qty of harmaline to THH very fast. I wish downwardsfromzero good luck with this, and believe that it is possible, just needs a much longer time, vitamin C is not a powerful reducing agent like zinc in vinegar, but it may still function as a mild reducing agent.

With zinc in vinegar, you can actually see many teeny tiny hydrogen bubbles rising to the top of the solution like champagne as it reduces harmaline to tetrahydroharmine, and a full on color change from dark green to the ending transparent golden-like color on the slow spinning stir mantel after 1.5 hour, indicating the process is done, turn stir mantel off, let it sit 1 hour so all the zinc can fall to bottom, dunk a cue tip in the vinegar and rub it on a paper plate, hold paper plate under blacklight, the smear will be light blue glow, indicating 100% complete conversion to the divine and spiritual tetrahydroharmine, as valuable as mescaline, can't do without her, diamondlike shimmering in her beauty.

 

[Jacubey]

I have the exact same mag stirrer, and I was very embarrassed about its condition after a few 'accidents' - nice to see one in even worse nick, lol.

LOL I was a bit embarrassed at first, but I figure its probably somewhat common. This is my first mag stirrer, and early on I underestimated the bubbliness of things. Cleaning up freshly basified mimosa mush is not fun.


I'm looking forward to seeing more conversions and more people picking up thh. I still have yet to try my product, lead test, and do side-by-side UV comparisons. Hopefully I can do that soon, but my family is in the process of moving. Might take a break for a week or two.

 

[Jacubey]

Img 1: 1mg/ml thh freebase/vinegar
Img 2: 1mg/ml harmaline freebase/vinegar

My thh is a very white powder, so I assume it either has high purity or perhaps I messed up. Anyway, assuming it IS harmaline, the glow has a slight blue tinge, and is somewhat more dim than the harmaline glow. I'm not sure how well it picks up on camera. Provided only one sample, I'd not be able to guess if it was thh or harmaline. Maybe my UV lamp is imparting some blue which makes the harmaline look similar but I'm not sure. The primary indicator would seem to be brightness, not color.

In other words: to distinguish them, I would need to see them side by side, and I'd always guess the dimmer one is thh. The color seems like a poor indicator to me. Maybe my latest batch of harmaline (not used in the Thh conversion) is contaminated with harmine. Or maybe the UV light just makes everything look kinda bluish.

 

[merkin]

Hey Jacubey, have you ever tried using some Marquis reagent? It is one of the commonly available tests for substances such as MDMA etc. When used with harmine, harmaline and THH you get three different colours and THH is very different to the other two. While this is a simple presumptive test (indicates presence not anything else like amount or purity) its a lot more obvious than the colours you are grappling with? Definitely worth a try and easy to make really (95% sulphuric acid and 5% formaldehyde) if you have the ingredients.

My THH is usually whitish mostly but I've also gotten some pink too!

In pic on left is Harmine top left, Harmala alkaloid mix before manske Mid Right, Harmaline Bottom left. On right is THH from zinc reduction with Harmaline source. No question imho this confirms a change from Harmaline. Slight bit of yellow there too is probably residual Harmine/DHH? All freebase form. Note re: reagent colors from nexus somewhere...

*Edit - sorry the mixed harmalas were pre-manske, not post.

 

[Jacubey]

Pink is probably oxidized harmine contamination, or something similar. Harmine fb seems to produce a reddish/pink powder after some time.

I have these reagents. I have no idea why I didn't think to use them. Lmfao

 

[Jacubey]

Haven't gotten around to reagent testing yet. Still in the midst of moving.

I did find something "new" though. Something I was doing with the Thh conversions turned blue. I don't remember leaving this in the fridge, but I do know it was something from a thh conversion process. I found it while moving. I'm fairly certain this was the glass with the reddish precipitates.

I can not over state how deep of a blue this is. I am tempted to try to use it as dye or something, but of course I have no idea what it is or how dangerous it is.

 

[ShadedSelf]

Tried the PCing + Ascorbic Acid, used 15g of acid, about a liter of water and a bit over a gram of mansked freebase rue extract, PCed for about two hours, which might not be enough.

The solution glows a bit paler and a bit more towards indigo under UV light compared to the shiny cyan that rue usually is for me, I assume from indigo(harmine) + green(harmaline) giving cyan.

Its also a bit more hazy, like light has a bit of trouble going through for some reason.
Not sure if this would "hide" harmalines green, or if the solution is genuinely less green now.

First picture is before, second is after.

Ive basified the solution and waiting for alkaloids to settle, it hasnt gone clear though, it is now a brownish red.

I will compare their glow to rue extract from the same batch once the alkaloids are cleaned, but for now it does seem like some sort of conversion might be going on.

 

[downwardsfromzero]

Tried the PCing + Ascorbic Acid, used 15g of acid, about a liter of water and a bit over a gram of mansked freebase rue extract, PCed for about two hours, which might not be enough.

The solution glows a bit paler and a bit more towards indigo under UV light compared to the shiny cyan that rue usually is for me, I assume from indigo(harmine) + green(harmaline) giving cyan.

Its also a bit more hazy, like light has a bit of trouble going through for some reason.
Not sure if this would "hide" harmalines green, or if the solution is genuinely less green now.

First picture is before, second is after.

Ive basified the solution and waiting for alkaloids to settle, it hasnt gone clear though, it is now a brownish red.

I will compare their glow to rue extract from the same batch once the alkaloids are cleaned, but for now it does seem like some sort of conversion might be going on.

Thanks for trying this. That second pic sure seems to be bluer and less intense. This is a reasonably strong indication of removal of some harmaline in some way. The harmaline fluorescence is strong and overwhelmingly dominant in mixtures of the three (H/DHH/THH).

What metal is your PC made of? Did you cook directly in the PC without any other (glass) reaction vessel?

With my repeated PC ascorbic cooks on whole rue seed, all twelve were only 20 minutes each, making a total of 4 hours cooking time plus heating and cooling - this latter one being considerably longer in duration than the cooking. Each cook had at least ten grams of vitC added. And the eight cooks prior to the last one were done on alternating halves of the kilo of seeds.

In light of this, it may be better to add the ascorbic acid in increments to the reaction mixture. It may be better to heat the mixture to only 80°C as this lessens the decomposition of the ascorbic acid. The only reason for using a PC at the lower temperature is that it fairly effectively limits the amount of atmospheric oxygen that can get into the reaction.

 

[ShadedSelf]

Im pretty sure its stainless steel, I cooked it directly without any other sort of tools or vessels.

I am a bit confused now though, I took some of the PCed alkaloids, compared their glow to regular rue extract and I couldnt see any noticeable difference.

I still want to give this another shot next time I extract from seeds.

 

[Jacubey]

Finally getting settled and beginning to resume my experiments.

The Thh I converted tests positive for lead, but with the reassurances I've gotten so far, I suspect this is because I layered coffee filters rather than a proper buchner filteration setup with #101 filtration disks. I probably just allowed particulate zinc and lead through the filters and in to my product. I will get the proper filtration set up and do it right next time.

Do not skimp on filters!

 

[ShadedSelf]

Interesting.
I had this thought, if one washes the zinc dust on coffe or high flow rate filters before the reduction, that might wash away some of the finer lead and other particles, so when you are properly filtering the final THH containing solution there might be less particles small enough to get through.

Did you ever try the magnesium route?
Ive been doing a bit more research and Ive found a magneisum ribbon analysis and some vendors that claim no lead at all.

 

[Jacubey]

I haven't gotten around to doing the magnesium route yet. I want to get through my experiments with zinc first.

Next thing I'm going to try is cotton filtration (since I've seen it mentioned several times now), and check if it also winds up with lead contamination. After that I'll do a conversion with proper lab filters.

At this point I've made enough mistakes that I may as well exhaust all the simple mistakes to see how it effects outcome.

I'm still super curious about the insanely vibrant blue liquid I produced.

 

[ava69]

Downwardsfromzero, is there anyway we can promote shadedself to full member? I love his posts a lot, really good, and he reads a lot, very informative and intelligent posts...

 

[Jacubey]

Apparently this ava69/69Ron/traegar/Professor8 person has been a bad actor. My attempts at running a thh conversion are entirely based on his astroturfed bullshit. On top of that he repeatedly talked down my concerns about lead, which should've been a red flag.

To anybody following this, I recommend running lead tests after doing any conversion to thh. Sure, I was not using the correct filters when I got lead, but there is reason to believe there may be lead even if I'd filtered it properly. Make sure you're using pure reagents and test everything.

I am likely going to end my pursuits with thh, and leave it to people like downwardsfromzero to refine the process for us. In the meantime I am reasonably sure the things ava69 has said to promote thh (wondrous amazing visions dissimilar to harmaline) are bullshit and I'm unlikely to be missing out on much.

I believe hpbcd may still be an interesting thing to explore, to improve bioavailability.

 

[Bill Cipher]

Bad actor, indeed. I promoted you from the Nursery for your troubles.

 

[Jacubey]

Bad actor, indeed. I promoted you from the Nursery for your troubles.

Thank you Bill, I am honored . I've been lurking since Covid and this site has really changed my life.

I sincerely hope people didn't read this stuff and come to believe using lead contaminated zinc is absolutely safe.

 

[ShadedSelf]

Blue.magic did claim to end up with non lead contaminated THH, so proper filtering might be effective.
Did you ever run you THH through cotton in a funnel or paper filters and test it? I feel like that could be valuable data for this topic.
Also, what are you using for your testing?

Another possibility might be to look into cleaner reductants, Magnesium does seem to have less lead as far as I can tell, I remmeber reading about Aluminium and Iron being another possibility in some thread, Iron would be a good candidate since it seems to be available free of any heavy metal contamination, not sure if this was already tested at some point though.
NaBH4 can be found quite pure too:
(Cl): <0.2%
(Pb): <0.00043%
(Cu): <0.00015%
(Cd): <0.0001%

 

[Jacubey]

Blue.magic did claim to end up with non lead contaminated THH, so proper filtering might be effective.
Did you ever run you THH through cotton in a funnel or paper filters and test it? I feel like that could be valuable data for this topic.
Also, what are you using for your testing?

I used a 3m lead test from the home depot. They're very expensive (2 for 12$). The cheap ones I could find had bad reviews about false negatives.

I could run the Thh through cotton, but it's a freebase right now presumably with freebase lead as well. I'm not sure how I'd dissolve the Thh in to a liquid for filtration without also dissolving the lead (vinegar would form thh-acetate and lead-acetate I think) . I'd have to rerun the whole experiment, which I could do... I'm just not particularly invested in thh anymore. I don't see many posts outside of the 69ron family that talk about thh as fantastically as he does.

Maybe I'll test my magnesium for lead and if it comes back clean I'll try again. Or maybe I'll find the motivation to do it with the zinc again and filter properly. Really not sure right now.

Another possibility might be to look into cleaner reductants, Magnesium does seem to have less lead as far as I can tell, I remmeber reading about Aluminium and Iron being another possibility in some thread, Iron would be a good candidate since it seems to be available free of any heavy metal contamination, not sure if this was already tested at some point though.
NaBH4 can be found quite pure too:
(Cl): <0.2%
(Pb): <0.00043%
(Cu): <0.00015%
(Cd): <0.0001%

Aluminum oxidizes instantaneously with exposure to air, so I'm not sure about that one. Wouldn't the oxide layer prevent it from working as a reducing agent?
I don't know enough about reducing agents to comment really, besides to say that using a heavy metal free reagent is the way to go, in my opinion.

 

[nb6SnZ]

Hi, I'm a new member and I am reading the forum for more than a decade. I ended up applying for a membership because I'm interested in THH more, than I get out of mere reading.

I have done a lot of research (literature) about THH outside nexus and I believe it to be a very interesting substance no matter what the 69 guy says. Also I know curanderos with scientific backgrounds who are convinced the brews with more THH are the more heartopening ones. Makes sense considering the SRI properties of THH.

Soon I'll try a conversion my self. I'll probably try both, zinc and magnesium. I just wanted to chime in here for a moment to say: don't dismiss THH just because of mistrust in one member here. Also I believe, apart from the possible lead contamination, the procedure proposed does sounds sound to me.

edit: Also, how much of a problem really IS the lead contamination? Hear me out. So for example mg ribbons, not particularily pure https://www.thermofisher.in/chemica...reagent-ribbon-99-thermo-scientific/413380250
have 50ppm of lead. Assuming you make an extract with 5g harmaline and use 5g of magnesium (that is more than needed as far as I know.) you will end up with 250ug of lead in your process. Assuming you can filter out only 50% of that you will have 125ug left in some 4g (not sure about that) of THH. Assuming you consume 200mg of it, which depending the source is a lot or certainly enough, you have 6.25ug of lead in your THH dose.

depending the source the daily intake of lead through nutrition is in the 100-200ug range.

Sure, that is all ballpark at best, but even if I make the numbers 10fold worse, it doesn't seem like such a big deal for rare consumptions. Am I wrong?

 

[ShadedSelf]

Yes, the math does say that you would end up with less heavy metal contamination per dose that the max daily intake levels for adults that I found on google, even assuming every last bit of lead makes it into the final product.

I think this could be deemed safe specially if you intend to take this very sparingly.
Though obviously you dont want to take any heavy metals if possible.

Still, it might still be worth to do some reseach as to how to make this as safe as possible since you are the one making it, for example:
Does either HCL or vinegar or perhaps other acid dissolve lead slower than the other proportionally to how fast it carries the reduction?
Is cotton in a funnel enough?
Does diatomaceous earth help?
Is there a way to precipitate heavy metals before precipitating THH?
Etc...