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insane yield loss from mescaline hcl wash?

R

rez_runner

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Joined
Apr 13, 2012
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55
I recently did a wash of 950 mg of yellowish/light brown mescaline hcl with acetone and ended up with 320 mg (light green in color). I used magnesium sulfate crystals to dry the acetone before i used it, so i'm pretty sure there wasn't any water in it. I did notice, however, that when i put the mescaline on a coffee filter and poured the acetone on it, i noticed particles floating in the bottom of the jar with the acetone that filtered through. It didn't seem like much, but maybe a coffee filter is a bad idea since some of the mescaline went through the coffee filter?

I would expect a high loss of product if my mescaline was very dirty and dark brown, but it was only slightly brown and mostly yellow in color before the wash. What the hell happened? After the first wash i ended up with around 430 mg, and after the second wash i ended up with 320 mg. I am scared to do another wash because i'm afraid its gonna keep going down until i have nothing left. Can anyone help me out here?
 
A good color doesn't really prove that you have high purity, who knows: maybe there was really 400 mg of mescaline present.
Or: perhaps it was not salted properly and the freebase may still be present?
 
I think i'm going to do a 99% ipa wash next and see what happens, but in the end i want my product to be white/light tan in color with no odor, correct? This is when i know i'm closer to pure mescaline hcl rather than having the rest of the alkaloids present afaik

Freebase mescaline is only slightly soluble in water from what i've read, so if it wasn't salted correctly then i would have gotten very low yielding pulls with the xylene when i mixed the hcl solution with the xylene (but i'm pretty sure what i had was in its salt form). It is also soluble in acetone so maybe i should let the acetone evaporate and see whats left? It just doesn't seem right that i would lose over 2/3 of my product from the wash....
 
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ok, so i did the ipa wash and i ended up losing another 50 mg, but not as much as i did with the acetone. The ipa was still clear, however, after filtering through the coffee filter, so it doesn't look like anything significant came out of my powder. My final product now is a pale, off-green color. Is this normal? My last batch turned out tan/light yellow after my washes so i'm wondering what made it so different?
 
It is a pity to see something like that happen after all that work, but it's certainly possible that your crude hydrochloride was more on the impure side of things. Nonetheless I would keep all the washing solutions, just to be safe (and you could try to retrieve some mescaline from it).

Where did you get your acetone? Did you do an evaporation test on the acetone (greenish colour sounds uncommon)? Was the epsom salt properly dried before you threw it into the acetone?

The particles in the washing solution could indicate that some part of the mescaline got through the filter. How much solvent did you use per wash step? Even if the hydrochloride is hardly soluble in acetone and IPA, a fraction is always washed away, and excessive amounts of solvent are therefore detrimental.
A suitable alternative technique is to put the powderized crude mescaline hydrochloride in a beaker, add some 10-30 mls (depends on amount of material and the area of the base face of the beaker) of solvent and agitate the suspension with a glass rod, gently (!) pressing/grinding the solid against the glass walls to get as much of the co-crystallized (trapped inside of mescaline particles) impurities into solution. Then leave alone until the solids are settled at the bottom and decant/pipette the solution off the solids. At least one repetition is recommended.

If you are sure your techniques and solvents are okay, you have to accept that the crude product was just that impure. Try to see it this way: you got that much garbage out of your crude extract and are left with more pure mescaline hydrochloride than you would be if you didn't clean it properly :)
 
You could try recombining everything and recrystallizing from acetone, if you're sure that mescaline hcl is only sparingly soluble in acetone. Honestly, I would expect it to be very soluble, but I guess there are people on the interwebs that say that it isn't.
 
Why oh why do you want mescaline and not the other alkaloids? I feel that mixed alkaloids can be more worthwhile: for example with synthetic DMT I thought it was going to be the best product and effect possible, yet I felt like something was missing compared to extract. Having had synthetic mescaline as well, I must say that while it felt very pure in action it reminded me more of an awesome 2C-X than of people's reports with cactus or extract.
Synthetic cannabinoids compared with hash or weed again show the same difference: synthetics feel more like a singular entity and this purity can be beautiful, but also quite one-dimensional and less 'rich' feeling for lack of a better word. If you think this is bullshit because you cannot compare them, I have also made isomerized honey oil from weed and again I found it both amazing and disappointing for the exact same reasons.
Maybe I have weak or no evidence to support my theory but I think that often the minor alkaloids can make the experience richer and more sophisticated. You can blame placebo effect but remember that I had high hopes every time for pure products and normally placebo confirms your preconceptions, not disprove them.

Note: this is not a true natural vs. synthetic debate. It's about alkaloid mixes vs. pure alkaloid. I believe if you synthesize alkaloid mixtures it would also be better, at least if you research which ones actually contribute subjectively.

Other than that I agree that either your product purity or your technique is at fault. I don't think it can be the epsom salt because it doesn't seem like hydrated epsom salt could contain enough water to absorb other compounds as well, not unless it looked like a slurry.

Seriously, after 2 washes just stop. Seems like overkill otherwise. The only reason to want pure product in my opinion is to be able to determine a proper dose without having to titrate.

Did you use unreasonably large volumes of acetone?
Was the acetone very cold when you used it? I'm not sure about solubility, maybe I'm thinking of amphetamines and MDMA where the acetone should be cold.
 
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There is a chance the acetone had some water left in it, so i'm going to go buy regeant grade acetone from a chemical supplier near me and throw away the stuff i got. I actually evaporated the acetone from my washes and ended up with a dark orange powder which i then decided to try and wash again, just to see if there was some mescaline left in it. After my wash, almost all of the powder except for maybe 20 mg of light tan powder dissolved which made me feel better knowing that pretty much everything in there was the non-mesaline alkaloids.

I'm pretty sure that either i did something wrong during my extraction or the powder i got just has very little mescaline in it. Either way, i think i'll try a different extraction tek next time and see if its the powder. Still, 950 mg to a little less than 300 mg kinda sucks but now i know why my last trip on 800 mg was really weak, ha.
 
^^ And to solipsis, yeah i agree that there can be a much more profound trip on taking the whole plant and not just an extracted alkaloid. I actually tried making a tea a couple times but i think i just didn't use enough, because the trip was pretty weak. I'm actually a pretty bad hard head when it comes to anything, so when i try something new regardless of what it is i always start with a dose thats a little bit less than what's recommended by most people and i end up finding out finally in the end that i need triple the dose everyone else does for some reason to actually get the effects. I guess one reason i wanted to do an extraction was that the thought of drinking any more tea than the last time i did seems unpleasant but i probably will soon because i want to be able to differentiate between that and an extracted mescaline trip.

Also, the last trip i had on the 800 mg was nice but i got alot of the other unwanted effects from the other alkaloids like vasocontriction, upset stomach and nausea, cramps, etc. which from what i read is usually not present when doing mescaline alone. So in the end it seems like washing the end product gives a much cleaner trip with less side effects and body load but if the trip is less profound as opposed to consuming the other alkaloids as well then i can definitely understand what you're sayin =D
 
I totally agree with you on that matter, Solipsis :)

But one more factor to think about are the solvents involved in these extractions. Toluene, xylene and limonene seem to be the most popular.
The first two are aromatic hydrocarbons and although not nearly as nasty as benzene, the extracts should be spread out and left in a well ventilated area to evaporate as much as possible, if no further wash step is planned. Especially xylenes have high boiling points.
Limonene itself is said to even have beneficial health effects in low dosages. But the formation of limonene epoxides and carvone can happen in the presence of air (oxygen) and these substances are known irritants and skin sensitizers. Some of them have high boiling points, so a wash step with IPA (IME IPA is just easier to aquire than acetone in good qualities) should be considered as harm reduction.
 
If the acetone is warm or if you are using a lot of it for the wash, that could decrease your yield. Mescaline solubility in acetone is low, but it's not zero.
 
rez_runner said:
I'm pretty sure that either i did something wrong during my extraction or the powder i got just has very little mescaline in it. Either way, i think i'll try a different extraction tek next time and see if its the powder. Still, 950 mg to a little less than 300 mg kinda sucks but now i know why my last trip on 800 mg was really weak, ha.
Click to expand...

I haven't had good yields with the powder. Eventually I stopped doing extractions and moved on to the tea. I was worried about the stomach discomfort but if I drink it on an empty stomach I can keep it down long enough for all of the mescaline to absorb. Since you've already tried some of the extract and didn't trip that hard I would say try a foot a cactus and see how it goes.
 
Drinking it over the course of about an hour instead of all at once is also supposed to decrease the load / nausea.

FYI with synthetic mescaline I still had to vomit, but it was very much like it can sometimes happen with MDMA: there was nothing uncomfortable about it, it came out of nowhere and the relief was also instant. I spaced my dose in 3 portions with 15 minutes between portions. So vomiting chances will not be zero, but that's not a problem. Hours of GI discomfort like 5-MeO-DiPT or certain 2C-T-X can do, I would consider that getting in the way of things.

Extract and tea seem to be different in how much it upsets the gut, IIRC. Doing an alcoholic extraction on cactus powder gives you gunky stuff but perhaps it's much better than ingesting actual cactus tissue material. I can see how that would be hard to digest.

I was too lazy to refine my extract, didn't have good expectations for the yield of the cactus powder I used so I kind of gave up on it, hoping that I would get quality extract or even synthetic product at some point. Took some patience but I was in luck.
 
I decided after the ipa wash to dissolve my powder in water and re-crystallize to further purify and wash it up, which is supposed to get rid of any excess xylene or hcl, correct? I think between that and the acetone and ipa washes i have a decently pure product (but not perfect ofcourse).

I wish i would've paid attention in chemistry class in high school and college, it would really come in handy now. For some reason i thought it was the most insanely difficult and monotenous crap on the planet but now i can't get enough of it, ha. Gotta give it up to chemists and suppliers out there makin all these chemicals for us, they must be some incrdibly patient people 8o
 
Most of the xylene probably went away with the first acetone wash. The excess HCl evaporates off, as the powder dries.
Is it still greenish in colour?
I know how much fun this kind of work can be but you should find a balance between reasonably purified product and inevitable loss with every cleaning step.
 
yeah, still kinda green colored but thats ok, its odorless and still has alot of white in it so i'm sure its fairly pure, i would guess at ~75% mescaline right now. I agree that too many washes will just be a waste, as i'm sure 1 or 2 acetone washes and an ipa wash is probably good enough. I've seen pictures of completely clear mescaline crystals that looked amazing, but the method they used in the tek to make it was too much of a pain in the ass, so i'm just gonna stick to the simple washes i'm doing now.
 
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