THC-acid extraction

[wage.]

THC extraction is nothing like a DMT extraction, this all makes no sense.

Why didn't you just dry out all of the material and soak it in Naphtha whilst stirring for 20 minutes, filter the liquid and evaporate onto a Pyrex Dish. Of course you're going to get a low yield, Acid Base extractions are pointless with Cannabis.

 

[Infundibulum]

THC extraction is nothing like a DMT extraction, this all makes no sense.

Why didn't you just dry out all of the material and soak it in Naphtha whilst stirring for 20 minutes, filter the liquid and evaporate onto a Pyrex Dish. Of course you're going to get a low yield, Acid Base extractions are pointless with Cannabis.

Why pointless? How do you then explain lysurgeon's observations?

Briefly, he pulled cannabinoids with naphtha, he then migrated some cannabinoids in aqueous layer and then he pulled them out again with fresh naphtha to give him a smokeable, psychoactive product.

Wouldn't you agree that he's onto something? Granted, the necessity of all this base and acid stuff he did is not convincing yet, but still doesn't what he did look promising?

 

[Ambivalent]

Briefly, he pulled cannabinoids with naphtha, he then migrated some cannabinoids in aqueous layer and then he pulled them out again with fresh naphtha to give him a smokeable, psychoactive product.

once the cannabinoids are dissolved in a non polar like hexane or naphtha, i thought they would tend to stay in the non polar layer rather than migrate in the aqueous. what am i missing ?

 

[Infundibulum]

Briefly, he pulled cannabinoids with naphtha, he then migrated some cannabinoids in aqueous layer and then he pulled them out again with fresh naphtha to give him a smokeable, psychoactive product.

once the cannabinoids are dissolved in a non polar like hexane or naphtha, i thought they would tend to stay in the non polar layer rather than migrate in the aqueous. what am i missing ?

Lysurgeon claimed that something that makes you stoned migrates from naphtha to water and can be recovered from fresh naphtha. THC-acid is reported (unconfirmed, internet sources) to be water-soluble and he may be doing just that to get THC-acid in the process.

 

[Ambivalent]

yea, its a bit clearer now. i ignored the fact that lye can form salts with some substances. it would be interesting to see the results of this tek with few control steps implemented like you mentioned.

 

[lysurgeon]

Alright, so here is what the experiments proposed by Infundibulum look like:

1. Started with recycled naphtha from the previous pictorial to extract another 20g dry fan leaves pictured here in its filtered resplendence

2. (left) 250g water (right) 1g NaOH in 250g water

3. adding approximately equal amounts of solvent to each jar, the lye water pulls this orange substance while the neutral water does not

4. and it looks pretty

5. stirring the jar with neutral water

6. stirring the jar with basic water

7. there is a clearly visible difference between pulling from the nonpolar using neutral water (which is unsuccessful) and using basic water (which is successful)

8. here is the basic water containing the theoretical thc-acid/sodium salt, split in twain

9. a small amount of naphtha is applied to each half

10. the jar on the left was acidified with HCl and the one on the right was not. both were shaken

11. the naphtha from each (left acidified, right not acidified)

The color appears different on camera than in person; the naphtha from the non-acidified extract was lighter colored, more yellow than orange. It was evaporated to yield very small amount of yellow paste that smelled like....plant? it was clearly chlorophyll or some similar ubiquitous leaf component.

the base-water which was extracted to yield chlorophyll was acidified and extracted to yield the desired cannabinoid product.

so the two questionable elements of the extraction, treatment with base and treatment with acid, do turn out to both be necessary for the procedure to work. pH matters!

 

[Infundibulum]

I guess that strongly suggests that pH matters, good job!

I am very curious about other chemist's input about explanations for lysurgeon's observations. Benzyme? Dr Sister? In Motion?

 

[Mindlusion]

From what I can see, the THC and cannabinoids are being de-protonated by the NaOH.

THC for example, it isnt an alkaloid, but It can still be de-protonated.

the proton on the phenyl group can be removed, forming the phenoxide anion. (The OH on the aromatic) The same place you would form an ester with a strong acid.

Im guessing... because of this deprotonation, it could grab a charge, an cation, from anywhere and become polarized, being the reason it becomes soluble in water. Sort of like a salt. I doubt this could be isolated in this form, though.

 

[Infundibulum]

^^
well, yeah, deprotonation of THC-COOH (and not THC as you have it in your diagram) was sort-of the premise for doing such experiments fiddling with high and low pH. But do the other chemists consider the process, given the results presented here, credible and succesful?

 

[CosmicLion]

But do the other chemists consider the process, given the results presented here, credible and succesful?

I feel it is analogous to pulling DMT out of Lye Water using Isoprpyl alcohol...

Does it work? Yes... Is there a huge mixture layer that causes a lot of the product to be lost? Yes... Does it ultimately yield the same product, but in a less efficient way? Yes....

SO...

#1. Does it yield more product then existing methods?

#2 Is it EASIER then current methods?

#3. Is the quality of the product any better/worse/UNIQUE, enough to justify lower yields?

#4. Is the use of substantially more carcinogenic solvents ideal given it returns a similar product but with much lower yields?

Some food for thought...

If these question cannot be answered clearly then it seems new random methods stand as nothing more then a learning/discussion catalyst allowing us to pontificate about possible un-verifiable bio-chemistry operations done by layman...

Other then that, without the stated qualifications, I don't see much use in a new method...

 

[CosmicLion]

Other then that, without the stated qualifications, I don't see much use in a new method...

Not to discredit the value of trial-and-error...

Just sparking an intelligent bio-chemistry conversation AND yielding SOMETHING smokable means it was at least worth the time to try :thumb_up:

Just might not be some new tek to run home about...

 

[Mindlusion]

Just sparking an intelligent bio-chemistry conversation AND yielding SOMETHING smokable means it was at least worth the time to try :thumb_up:

^^
There are no bad experiments.

 

[lysurgeon]

I did some reading about this and found that deprotonation can occur at both the COOH group (as originally theorized) and at the free OH group. So it could potentially pull decarboxylated THC. However, trying the process using butane hash that had been treated for many hours with heat to remove butane resulted in very low carry-over of cannabinoids through the lye water, and most of the weight was retained in the initial nonpolar solvent. The leftovers (from the initial nonpolar being evaporated) were a red oil that was nasty and mostly induced sleepiness rather than actual highness. This indicates that the pH of lye water being used is sufficient for extracting still-acidic cannabinoids but not useful for extracting heat-treated cannabinoids.

In response to cosmiclion:

1. No, in fact it consistently yields less weight than butane extraction or acetone extraction

2. No, it is substantially more difficult and there are more variables to dial in.

3. Yes, the quality of the product is amazing. It has absolutely no stickiness and pours freely like sand. The flavor is unique, it is good but some call the flavor "transparent". It completely lacks any pine, skunk, or mint flavor. I think it has somewhat flat of flavor. Also it requires substantially less weight of this extract than of butane extract to achieve the same level of effect, and the overall effect lacks sedation and mental cloudiness but still has the undeniable "being high" feeling and thought flow.

4. Specifically due to concerns about toxicity of solvents involved, I am attempting to develop a method using only food-grade solvents and reagents, beginning with experiments to switch out the source of sodium ions from hydroxide to carbonate. Many kinks to work out with this one. But so far so good, the theory has proven solid so far, with larger amounts of plant matter yielding proportionately larger amounts of extract.


One thing this method does have in its favor besides the quality of the extract is the relative safety of extracting near pilot lights as compared to butane. Still wouldn't recommend extracting near a pilot light or any source of open flame. Strangely enough, lighter fluid is also flammable!

Here is a higher quality picture of the extract

 

[landfishd]

Yield is ten times less than that of a typical extraction. I'm thinking the product is giving a placebo effect maybe. Otherwise there should be more of whatever you extracted. Unless the starting material was indeed fan leaves with no visible tricomes.

If you were attempting an experimental dmt extraction and you miraculously yielded 10% would you believe that to be the same dmt that you normally extract?

 

[landfishd]

And I realize that the goal was to get something different, but if it's that different I don't think it's worth any more cannabis.

 

[highRvibratoryfreq]

I really dont want to knock what your doing but i just cant see the logic in it!

do you like smoking good hash? if you want a clean pure product with maximum flavour then look no further than refining your dry sieving skills, there are people who can make full melt dry sieve hash, you just need to know your strain very well only use high quality close trim leaf from the buds, and figure out which micron range of trichomes you wish to isolate with the correct size sieves.

the reason your hash tastes of nothing is because your washing away all the terpenes & flavinoids, this happens with water hash, even bubblehash loses most of its character for sake of easily obtained purity. god knows what it must taste like after exposure to solvents and bases.

if you can extract something perfectly without the need for any solvents then why bother.

if it aint broke dont try to fix it!

 

[Infundibulum]

I really dont want to knock what your doing but i just cant see the logic in it!

do you like smoking good hash? if you want a clean pure product with maximum flavour then look no further than refining your dry sieving skills, there are people who can make full melt dry sieve hash, you just need to know your strain very well only use high quality close trim leaf from the buds, and figure out which micron range of trichomes you wish to isolate with the correct size sieves.

the reason your hash tastes of nothing is because your washing away all the terpenes & flavinoids, this happens with water hash, even bubblehash loses most of its character for sake of easily obtained purity. god knows what it must taste like after exposure to solvents and bases.

if you can extract something perfectly without the need for any solvents then why bother.

if it aint broke dont try to fix it!

Posts like this often come when one considers extracting mushrooms in particular or weed in this case.

Here we like playing around with stuff just for the sake of it. Something good may come out, or maybe not. The main thing is that we have fun playing with chemistry. While doing so, we might come with few things revolutionary. Of course there is nothing broken and nothing to fix.

Anyway, lysurgeon is not so much about extracting, but rather purifying or isolating. Big difference among those words people. Lysurgeon had a strange approach to isolating cannabinoids and so far he is doing a good job. Both repetition (by others) as well as a more formal analysis will be essential for determining the validity of the process. Granted, yield is poor, but then again people should be aware of the correlation between yield and purity; the higher the purity, the lower the yield.

I have one question:
wouldn't you expect the final product to be more oily, sort of like matching what commercial THC looks like? Isn't the solid, crumbly consistency more not quite right?
Could you have transformed cannabinoids to something else?

Most importantly, if, as you hypothesize it to be THC-acid, could you decarboxylate it (in the oven, 100 C for some time) to give you THC? Would that make your product more oily?

 

[highRvibratoryfreq]

thats a fair point i understand this is about experimentation, but if purity is one of the goals that last picture doesnt look right to me, if he burns it slightly to show it melting or bubbling i would be more sure of its purity, it looks contaminated with sodium hydroxide maybe? when it is pure it looks beautiful. i would still suggest using high quality close bud leaf trim, from good genetics that is harvested at the correct time, if you start with low quality shade leaf your final product is always going to be low quality.

and yes you can end up with oil or crumbly sandy, it all depends on the maturation of the stalked capitate trichomes you start off with, they vary in size and atleast from what i know of purity for high grade resin it comes from isolating a narrow band of say between 70-80 microns in size. if you pull the smaller undermatured trichs along with over matured altogether youll never get the highest quality, and the sweet spot is different for different genetics and the time that there harvested. if you really wanted to test purifying further then start with a narrow profile of trichomes and refine them instead.

 

[Infundibulum]

It's hard to to imagine that this is NaOH contamination, given that it was pulled with naphtha, especially at the time when all the aqueous solution was made acidic (= no sodium hydroxide present at all at the time this product was pulled).

It could be the case that this is thc-cooh. which would also be consistent with the time of maturation as you mention. I think that lysurgeon, amidst the lack of some other analysis of his product. should really try to see whether his products can be turned to an oily substance upon a hypothetical decarboxylation in the oven.

 

[InMotion]

Ideally this would be done under an inert atmosphere or rather quickly. Distilled water would be far better then tap. There are so many cannabinoids it is ridiculous. To speculate that this is only THC-COOH or only the THC-Sodium Phenolate seems a bit absurd.

Cannabichromene, cannabidiols(two hydroxyls), cannabigerols, etc. Check this wiki for some more details... Cannabinoid - Wikipedia All of the cannabinoid species have a at least a slight acidic nature. Even some terpenes could form salts. For all we know what is pulled with the base isn't the same as what comes out of the acid. Cannabinoid chemistry is very finicky and harder to work with then then say tryptamines.

It could literally be anything, although a stronger acid moiety such as a carboxylic acid would definitely be far more preferred in water. Sure a quick oven cook may decarboxylate it but what is being decarboxylated?

Using a very clean BHO solvated into a solvent(rather then leaves) or similar extraction it would be interesting to see how much weight is lost from said extraction following this procedure. Would be a lot more interesting with some TLC, and even better with some GC-MS, HNMR, or IR.

One thing I would try to improve your procedure is, after adding the acid, make sure there is very good mixing before pulling with the solvent. Similar to soaps you may be extracting not fully acidified species and this could definitely lead to the emulsions you experienced and may but may not explain why your compound is a powder rather then a hydroscopic puddle as most cannabinoids are.

edit - another interesting idea would be to decarboxylate the cannabis sample prior to doing a BHO extraction for another comparison. That's actually pretty ideal anyways.