Goal: to obtain from syrian rue, an orally consumable mixture comprising mostly of Harmine and THH. Extract can be crude, doesn't have to be ultrapure.

I would like to explore this in more detail, but strictly without the use of ammonia. I have mostly exhausted the other threads on this matter, including the VDS threads but that was not very helpful, because they use zinc and ammonia. There are a few people who also used magnesium, but then separating the magnesium salts also required ammonia. I will outline a few possible routes, and would appreciate some discussion of their feasibility


1) Zinc, Sodium Carbonate
Zinc salts can be removed by acetone (I read a report here of someone who has done this) but this is not a great method because it requires a large amount of solvent because zinc carbonate isnt very soluble

2) Magnesium, Sodium Carbonate

3) Magnesium, Lye

4) After reduction, manske to crash out the alkaloids and filter out the magnesium or zinc salts
Sub questions:
-Does THH manske out?
-Is there additional products formed here?

5) Using route 2 or 3, then finding separating out the metal salts with xylene/DCM/methanol etc.

6) Based on my research, magnesium/zinc salts dont precipitate out in ammonium salt solutions. What if we base out the harmalas with sodium carbonate first, then add ammonium carbonate to the mixture. Would this cause the magnesium/zinc salts that precipitated along with the harmalas to dissolve back into the solution?

I did not perform this conversion yet, but I think there could be an easy way of finding out if you could just replace ammonia with the carbonate:

Dissolve zinc powder in acetic acid, maybe just leave overnight if you dont have a stirrer.

Add sodium carbonate.

Now just check if you see any clouding, then it would mean zinc carbonate will precipitate. If nothing happens you should be safe just exchanging both I guess.

Same thing goes to Manske. You could simply check out what happens if you add excess nacl to the mix without any alkaloids and check if only zinc gives you clouding.

Regardless of clouding I guess THH would also be "mansk-able" just like harmalas, as it shares many solubility traits it seems.



If it turns out that zinc will crash out with with the carbonate then I dont think you will have any luck adding a "potential soluble" partner for the zinc(2+) afterwards. In a mix of a metal ion with anions which would render it either soluble or insoluble, the metal will catch up with the insoluble and precipitate, the "soluble partner" will not bring it back into solution. That is because the precipitated salt (in that case it could be zinc carbonate) will escape the equilibrium between both forms and ultimately lead to 100 % zinc carbonate and 0 % zinc hydroxide (this is what you get when adding ammonia).

I did this years ago. Didn't test it chemically, but bioassay felt about right and aligned with much later experiences with Calliandra sp. (which probably contains THH) and B. caapi (which contains harmine and THH). I just precipitated the alkaloids with sodium carbonate, dissolved in white vinegar, and dropped in a magnesium ribbon, which released an abundance of hydrogen gas. I don't remember the specifics, but I think there was a visible change that occurred in the solution, of color or opacity.

Magnesium and sodium carbonate is a bad route. It creates too many salts that are difficult to separate better off with ammonia. In terms of conversion percentage of magnesium and ammonia I don't know, nor have I done it. However, there are some fresh results for the zinc and ammonia route coming soon. Percentage was only about 50% conversion from my understanding.

Being very curious to try THH a few years back, I reduced my harmaline->THH with zinc and vinegar, and based with sodium carbonate. I could not get access to ammonia to safely remove zinc contamination so I did several manskes on the supposed THH which worked well, although I have no idea how well the salts where removed so I only did this once a small batch. I found it to be quite clear headed and much cleaner then harmaline, vaping DMT on a larger oral dose didnt extend duration like harmaline/harmine either so I assumed the conversion was partially successful. I would would like to try THH again if I could safely remove zinc without ammonia