using lye in extractions ..saftey question..

[starway7]

i recently did a rue extraction and used 100 percent lye to freebase the harmala ..

I extracted from 30 grams of crushed seed,,the basic acidic boil ...filtering...and freebasing of the rue alcaloid using 100 percent lye ..[ the kind bought in hardwre stores]

Well he said i may have j heavy metal in the technical lye and i should have used food grade lye for saftey...?

Well after extraction and many filterings using 100 percent lye...i went out of my way and rinsed the extracted material on bottom of jar MANY times with distilled water knowing that lye loves water...lye is extreemly soluble in water...

Should i worry about any heavy metals if i rinsed the very light colored rue many times ..now im drying the paste on bottom of jar after many rinses/

Any easy way to makeit more pure and more clean than that?

 

[downwardsfromzero]

Rue extractions very much tend to be aqueous-based without an intermediate non-polar phase so theoretically it is possible for heavy metals to precipitate as their hydroxides or oxides with sodium hydroxide (well, seeing as they come with the lye itself, they'll already be in that state) and then redissolve with the acetic acid.

Thus, repeated A/B cycles wouldn't do much to sort that out apart from the possibility that the alkaloids will dissolve in the acetic acid much more quickly than the heavy metals. That would still likely entail ultrafiltration of the acidic solution to remove really tiny amounts of metal (hydr)oxides. (Filtration of all but the most dilute of sodium hydroxide solutions is a horrendous idea.)

Most heavy metals would precipitate from a neutral solution with hydrogen sulfide but hydrogen sulfide is acutely much more dangerous than the small amounts of heavy metals that would be present so this method is out of the question for anyone outside of a suitably equipped chemical laboratory.

You would need to assess a realistic upper limit of the likely heavy metals content of your lye as well as the subsequent alkaloid yield and apply that to your likely intake of harmala alkaloids. Would this figure exceed safe exposure limits for each individual metal concerned?


PS a Manske cycle or two would remove some proportion of some heavy metals as well.
If you were really concerned about the contamination it would probably be best to simply ditch your alks and start again with food grade lye. 30 grams isn't that much of a sacrifice (where I live that would be about 75 cents' worth).

Unless of course you feel like experimenting with vacuum sublimation of your freebase alkaloids.


PS a Manske cycle or two would remove some proportion of some heavy metals as well.