Vaporization Temperature of DMT / 5-MeO-DMT / 5-OH-DMT / Harmalas / Salvinorin

[RoundAbout]

I am curious about the mechanism of DMT vaporization.

It can be argued that DMT is too bulky to boil at atmospheric pressure without decomposition. So whatever people inhale may not be DMT vapor in its gaseous form but liquid DMT droplets taking a ride on hot air and smoke from DMT burned underneath.

I think it seems likely. Even the boiling point of THC is fairly high... yet you can vaporize it at atmospheric pressure fairly close to the boiling point at 0.05mmHg (~160°C). Aerosolized droplets, just like our favourite virus?

It may not be smoke, but some sort of thermolysis anyways.

 

[downwardsfromzero]

Even solids can have a vapour pressure. Consider how carbon dioxide passes directly from solid to gas phase (at standard pressure, anyhow). You may recall this process being known as sublimation. Of course, DMT melts below the temperature of any vaporization device so this is not strictly relevant there although some of the other substances in the thread title have rather higher melting points.

What we may also consider is how rain puddles evaporate even though the ambient temperature is well below the boiling point of water at normal atmospheric pressure. There is for each substance a saturated vapour pressure at any given temperature and pressure - the upshot of this being that if a stream of air flows over even a slightly volatile substance, that substance will slowly evaporate as long as the incoming air contains less of the volatile substance than the amount required to reach its saturated vapour pressure.

Cooling of the vapour/air mixture lowers the amount of volatile substance that can be carried, leading to some of it condensing to droplets or resubliming - the reverse of subliming - to solid particles, depending on the physical properties of the substance in question.

The term thermolysis strictly applies to a chemical decomposition of a substance through heat, forming one or more simpler substances. However, the boundaries do become blurred when considering oligomerised DMT, whereby the DMT oligomers will indeed undergo thermolysis to single DMT monomers, as far as we know.

 

[IridiumAndLace]

I am curious about the mechanism of DMT vaporization.

It can be argued that DMT is too bulky to boil at atmospheric pressure without decomposition. So whatever people inhale may not be DMT vapor in its gaseous form but liquid DMT droplets taking a ride on hot air and smoke from DMT burned underneath.

I highly doubt it. There are plenty of VOCs of similar or greater molecular weight that evaporate (or sublimate) at room temperature just fine. A liquid's boiling point is a function of its vapor pressure, and vapor pressure is determined by a molecule's intermolecular forces rather than by its weight. Those forces increase as molecules get larger, but DMT is still plenty small enough to boil off at atmospheric pressure.

The "smoke" we see is just like steam rising off a pot of boiling water. In that regard you are correct, what we breathe in is an aerosol of microscopic DMT droplets/crystals. If you were to fill a flask with liquid DMT and heat it, you'd be very rich, but you'd also be able to observe it happily bubbling away. In theory you could even purify it through fractional distillation.

Best do that under a fume hood though. One snootful of that vapor and you'd blast off to Where No One Has Gone Before!

 

[IridiumAndLace]

The "smoke" we see is just like steam rising off a pot of boiling water. In that regard you are correct, what we breathe in is an aerosol of microscopic DMT droplets/crystals.

That is of course not to say that people don't still overheat and burn their DMT, and breathe in the resulting mess of DMT particles, combustion byproducts, and soot. I suspect the irritation and "harshness" of smoked DMT is at least partly due to this burning of spice and impurities; very pure DMT, properly aerosolized, is quite smooth indeed.