http://wiki.dmt-nexus.me/Lazyman's_tek
This seems very legit and not difficult to do but i just would like some added input from those who have actually tried it. Thanks a lot.
Lazy man's tek? Naw, more like the sloppy hillbilly tek... I'm not calling you yourself out mind you, I'm talking about whoever developed this tek. On the contrary, you're here asking for somebody to double-check if your proposed method is sound, so that's pretty much the opposite of sloppy.
I just read the instructions you linked, and I don't like it one bit. And the dislikes are to be found in multiples, it's not just one thing. Some of the reasons for this follow:
First, just chopping up rootbark is not adequate. You will have a shit yield. What you really need to do is turn the rootbark into a powder. This can be done with various forms of kitchen blending equipment, like the strongest, most powerful coffee grinder you can find. I would recommend getting a brand new grinder for this though, as the bark is tough stuff and the blade will be dulled by this procedure. Thus the better option is to source *pre-powdered* rootbark. I will say no more than that because of the BLUA, but if you have your wits aibout you it will not be hard to locate a source and mail-order.
Second, decanting the naphtha is not the ideal solution for getting the organic layer and the aqueous layer separated. Decantation is simply too crude: there's a good chance that you'll end up pouring some of the somewhat-caustic aqueous mud (bark is a powder, remember?) into your naphtha jars by accident by pouring too much. Worse it may slop onto surfaces nearby. I do not have to tell you to wear gloves during any extraction procedure, correct? But even with gloves you could have a nasty mess of red-staining sludge (rootbark), caustic solution (from the lye), flammable and toxic-fuming (naphtha) shit spilling on yourself or nearby objects, and it will be a seriously shitty bitch to clean up. And even if you manage to avoid spills, you will have to leave some of the goods behind, because to prevent the aqueous layer of dangerous shit from getting into the jar you're pouring into, you'll need to leave some naphtha behind in the extraction jar. Add a lack of practice decanting things (no organic chem training I will guess), non-chemistry-designed glassware, and the tendency of liquids to roll down the side of a jar when you're pouring from it due to surface tension and this method is garbage.
What you do want to do is to use a ground-glass needle-less syringe, or a very large glass turkey-baster, to suck the naphtha off of the aqueous layer since it will float on top. Be careful so as not to suck up any aqueous liquid by either putting the syringe tip / turkey-baster too far down into the jar past the surface of the naphtha. Actually the more common error that results in sucking up some of the aqueous layer is sucking *too hard* with your sucking-implement. The sudden excess of suction can result in accidentally drawing some of the water layer into the sucking-tool, as the naphtha layer for each extraction will be somewhat thin, so as not to use an excess of solvent (more on this in a moment). But think about it, even if you get the nasty aqueous shit into the sucking-implement, you can just squirt it gently back into the jar, wait for the interface between the water and the naphtha to settle back down, and then try again, as opposed to having now contaminated the whole jar of naphtha as you would if you made an error in decantation.
Finally, you want to use the freeze-precipitation method of getting the DMT out of the naphtha. It works like this:
When hot, or at room temperature, naphtha can hold quite a lot of DMT per volume of naphtha. So I'm going to give imaginary values here for the sake of explanation. Thus we will pretend that 1 liter of naphtha (you'll not have anywhere near this much I expect) can hold 100 grams of DMT when it is at 20 degrees Celcius, which is roughly room temperature. Now, when naphtha is cold, it cannot hold very much DMT at all. So we'll give it the fake values that a liter of naphtha can hold 10 grams of DMT at 0 degrees Celcius (freezing point of water). Now, do you see where this is going?
Since naphtha cannot hold nearly as much DMT when cold, we make sure we run the extraction itself at room temperature, or even a few degrees higher (warm water bath as heating perhaps, NOT simmering or boiling though). The liter of naphtha now holds 100 grams of DMT freebase. To get the DMT out of the naphtha, we not put the jar of naphtha with the lid tightly screwed on (naphtha fumes will contaminate frozen foods) into the freezer part of your average fridge. You now are dropping the temperature to at or below 0 degrees Celcius (and the colder you can make the freezer compartment with the little temperature control dial on the fridge the better. Since naphtha can only hold the pretend value of 10 grams of DMT at that temperature, the other 90 grams that were perfectly dissolved at room temp suddenly find themselves no longer being soluble in the now freezing naphtha. That DMT has nowhere to go but to fall out of solution as beautiful white snowflakes of pure crystalline DMT that will cover the bottom of your jar of naphtha.
So lets just review what we just learned vis a vis freeze precipitation, shall we ?
- First, freebase alkaloids aren't really soluble in water, while they're very soluble in organic solvents. Conversely, salts are really soluble in water or other polar solvents, but not in organic/nonpolar solvents like naphtha.
- Naphtha is the organic solvent in any naphtha-based extraction tek. The extraction itself is the process by which the DMT migrates from the aqueous layer into the organic layer as a result of the NaOH (lye) having rendered said DMT to the freebase.
- If naphtha is the solvent, then anything dissolved in it, namely DMT, is the solute. The level of solubility is a measure of how much of a given solute (DMT) will freely dissolve in a given amount of solvent.
- The solubility of DMT in naphtha is high when the naphtha is warm or at room temperature, and the solubility of DMT in naphtha is low when the temperature is also low.
- Therefor, performing the extraction at room temperature will result in lots of goods being dissolved in the naphtha. Once that naphtha is separated from the semi-caustic aqueous sludge, putting it in the freezer will reduce the temperature and thus the solubility of DMT in naphtha. This means that the solution of the goods in the solvent that was perfectly happy being at equilibrium now has more DMT in it than the naphtha can hold, and the solution is referred to as supersaturated. As a result, DMT will come out of solution, and as each molecule of no-longer-dissolved DMT falls out of solution, it ends up linking to other DMT molecules, forming a regular repeating pattern, which is the definition of a crystal.
- The values of naphtha being able to hold 100 grams per liter of DMT when at room temp and only 10 grams per liter when at the freezing temperature of water are made up for ease of understanding the concept of freeze precipitation. You can try and track down what the actual solubility curve of DMT in naphtha looks like but I don't think you'll find the information you seek; if I remember I tried to do the same before I did my first extraction and failed to find any relevant solubility data.
So now to conclude this very long post. Why do you want to freeze precip instead of evaporate? There are several reasons.
First off, when you evaporate it, any impurities or compounds besides the DMT will remain in the evaporated extract. This is not ideal. While it is true that freeze precip will not yield DMT that is 100%, or even 99% pure, that is to be expected, and even a 90% purity is likely higher than what you'd get out of an extraction.
This is because as crystals grow, say, by molecules attaching to the growing crystal as they fall out of solution, they exclude any other chemicals. That is to say that a crystal by definition is made up of generally speaking only one compound, though there are some exceptions that aren't relevant here. Because crystals grow by having free-floating molecules of the compound attach themselves to the existing crystalline structure, the growing crystal ends up being relatively pure *on a molecular level*, because generally speaking only molecules that match the composition of the crystal will attach (so a molecule of DMT will stick to a DMT crystal, making it grow ever so slightly, if there were 5-MeO-DMT present it would not stick to the crystal because it has a different structure and cannot properly align itself with the regular, repeating crystal structure.)
Second thing: were you to choose to use the inefficient, imprecise, time-consuming, etc etc method of evaporating solvent instead of just precipitating it out in the freezer, where would you be evaporating it? This is critical, because the tek serves no purpose if the goods remain stuck in naphtha, and put simply, evaporating naphtha is a pain in the ass. Why would it be any more of a pain than water you might ask? In actual fact, it even evaporates faster than water you might say, so why not utilize this property of the solvent?
In a word: fumes. Naphtha smells just like you'd imagine a probably carcinogenic, definitely toxic, highly-flammable, very volatile organic solvent would. It is an inhalation hazard: the fumes will do bad things to you, like make you dizzy, make you pass out, even kill you if the concentration of vapor in air is high enough (luckily extractions don't really involve the quantities necessary to do that). But it's still toxic, immediately/acutely dangerous, irritating to the skin and every mucous membrane, and very much explosively-flammable!
Why work with the stuff then? Well, it's an ideal solvent for this process of extraction due to the high solubility of DMT when the solvent is warm/room-temp and due to the very low solubility when it is cold, permitting freeze-precip to be a valid option to get the goods out of solution. But if you try and evaporate it in an enclosed area, you are an epic fool and have to business ever touching chemicals or even using drugs ever again, for life. Seriously, this shit must be worked with in a well-ventilated area. Even if naphtha fumes weren't the massive nuisance I just described, your mom would smell it in a house no matter how briefly any naphtha was exposed to the air. So really though, I'm dead fucking serious: well-ventilated areas only.
That means outside. And outside is fine for the transfer of the naphtha containing the goods to its jar prior to freezing it. In fact every step should probably be performed outside since you don't likely have access to a safe workspace for chemistry, even so basic of chemistry as this.
The problem though as I said is not finding the well-ventilated space for performing the extraction, as the outdoors is *perfect*. However if you try to evaporate the naphtha outside you will get bugs (seriously, bugs seem to LOVE naphtha vapors, attracting a massive swarm within minutes, many of which will dive headlong into the liquid naphtha), dirt, leaves/plant matter, dust, pollen, pollution, etc etc into the evaporating dish full of naphtha (and the dish should have as much surface area as possible were somebody to in fact try evaporation, so that's all the more surface area for shit to land in your drugs). Basically everything you don't want to smoke will land in the dish, and despite your most vigilant attempts, some shit will be too fine, too tiny and microscopic and floaty to filter out, and that's using actual professional grade chemistry filter paper instead of a coffee filter etc.
So thus, freeze-precip. Even if evaporation yielded a totally pure product in a very short amount of time, and the resulting extract was solid instead of an oily liquid (see next paragraph), evap still would be a shitty idea and a last resort at all costs due to the complications inherent in performing the evaporation safely without fucking up your product or getting busted by your mom (my parents busted my methcathinone synthesis when I was 15 and using reagents and glassware stolen from my high school, so trust me, I DO know how much it sucks and you do NOT want to be in that position!)
Third, when you evaporate the naphtha, often the resulting extract is in the form of an oil. This stuff is basically impossible to turn into a solid without subjecting it to a *purification and recrystallization* process. And it just so happens that recrystallization is performed by using a hot solvent to dissolve the object of purification. When the solvent cools, the gradient of solubility (the difference between how much substance the solvent can dissolve hot as compared to cold) makes the solution supersaturated (provided you use the right solvent at the right maximum and minimum temperatures and use the proper volume of solvent). That means the chemical falls out of solution as crystals.
This process of cooling a solution to recrystallize something is exactly what freeze precipitation is, except that the gradient of solubility is so steep for DMT and naphtha that you don't need to heat it. The difference between how much DMT the naphtha can hold at room temperature compared to when very cold is large enough that initial heating as would be used in a proper recrystallization is not needed. So, if you're gonna have to recrystallize/freeze-precip the oily extract once evaporation is complete just to get it into a solid form, better to just freeze-precip the shit in the first place instead of evaporating the naphtha and risking getting an oil you would have to submit to the exact same process anyway.
In my above short summary of what recrystallization is and why you may have to do it if you evaporate the solvent instead of freeze-precipitating it, I mention *using the proper amount of solvent*. Since recrystallization and freeze-precipitation are both using the exact same mechanism of differences in solubility of a compound depending on temperature, this caution applies to freeze-precipitation just as much as recrystallization.
Think of it this way: freeze-precip relies on the concentration of DMT in the naphtha being at a certain value, so that there will be a lot of dissolved DMT when at room temp (high concentration). Thus when the temperature is dropped, the crystals will begin to fall out of solution when
the concentration of DMT exceeds the amount that can be freely dissolved at that temperature! So the concentration of DMT doesn't change, instead the process relies on the naphtha being able to hold that concentration when at room temperature but not being able to hold a concentration that high when cold.
So, thus if you use too much solvent, using too much naphtha for the extractions, the volume will be larger, but the amount of DMT extracted with each pull will stay basically the same. Therefor there will be the same amount of DMT, but more solvent, thus the concentration will be by definition lower than if less solvent were used.
And since the freeze-precipitation process relies on ensuring that the concentration is high enough that the naphtha cannot hold it all when cold, if you use too much solvent, the concentration will be low, and thus even when chilled the naphtha may still be able to hold all the goods.
If you don't get what I'm saying with that, or with anything else, please feel free to ask questions. I know this is a long post, but I really wish that somebody with plenty of experience in the process had educated me before my first run. I got lucky and everything worked find but it easily could have gone the other way and the thing would have gotten fucked up somehow. Furthermore the first extraction was run with formal training in organic chem, and I still could have really used the advice of somebody who had done it before me.
If you understand all of the above, let me know, and I will post about what pKa is, how it relates to pH, and how knowledge of these concepts will allow you to plan your own extractions without paying more than cursory attention to previously-posted teks. It gets into extraction theory, but trust me, extractions to SO much easier when you conceptually understand them, and furthermore instead of having to learn/relearn teks for every different compound (ie DMT, mescaline, psilocybin, etc) you will be able to apply your theoretical knowledge so that you understand that all extractions are basically the same process, regardless of tek or compound extracted.
EDIT: In the above paragraph, I wish to reinforce the phrase 'if you understand all of the above'. While everything I said about learning the theory being ideal still stands without caveat, I want to point out that there's no point in trying to cram a bunch more stuff about pKa and such into your mind if you're still struggling with the concepts presented above. You'll just get confused, and that's perhaps worse than simply being uninformed in the first place.
Chemistry is complicated, and if you don't understand everything at first blush, there's no shame in that at all. My mind happens to be the sort that rapidly absorbs any and all information related to the sciences. Abut on the other hand my brain sucks wangs with calculus/complex math, and I'm just about the worst sports player of all time. We all have our various strengths and weaknesses, and just as I said, there's no more shame in being bad at sports or math and admitting it than there is in not understanding chemistry on the first go!
Hope that all helps!
