Greetings. I'm active over at mycotopia and have been lurking around here for a couple years. I've been pondering a very lucid dream for a while now, and figured it would be a good time for a first post.


Last spring I had a dream about a large batch of bark that came from a galaxy, far, far away.
In that dream, the STB extraction outlined here (http://forums.mycotopia.net/dmt-spice/34478-clean-easy-stb.html)
was performed with amazing success (5.6g fairly pure from 6 pulls on 445.9g of bark ~1.26% w no wash/re-xtal).

Now for my predicament:

A couple months later swim was graced with visions of another extraction on some bark from the same batch (roughly the same amount). The process was the same, however, instead of doing naphtha pulls right away, the bark was allowed to soak in the basic solution for 2 days before pulls were attempted. After 4 initial naphtha pulls, swim was left with ~3g of oily dark yellow crap (this was cleaned & yielded like 1.2g light yellowish crystal). 2 more pulls were attempted, but were only successful in pulling a worthlessly small amount of oil.

So...where did all the spice go?

Now, I have been doing a bit of research into DMT-N-Oxide, and have formulated the hypothesis that the 2 days of "stewing" caused the majority of the spice in solution to oxidize.

From my understanding, N-oxide is very insoluble in naphtha--which would explain why the pulls in swim's vision were unsuccessful.



Now, hypothetically of course, If swim could still dream of this extraction, it would be in the form of a basic/bark solution with a pH of 13.1 (I know this isn't quite high enough for an initial extraction, but I think it probably got more acidic after sitting around for 5 months.).

The solution is contained in an hdpe 1-gallon water jug, and there really isn't any room to add an aqueous acid solution. Swim would like to keep it in this container if possible so he doesn't have to deal with basic bark sludge.

SWIM was thinking of using ascorbic acid powder (seems like it would be easier to deal with) to bring the solution down to a pH of 3.5, then adding ~5-7g of zinc dust for the reduction. The solution would then be returned to its basic state and pulled with naphtha.


Does this seem feasible? If not, does anybody have any suggestions?


Thanks in advance for your time

(sorry for the long post)

It will probably work, but it's best to use hydrochloric acid for the reaction with zinc. The reaction will be much faster, about 2 hours and should be mixed constantly. By using an acid like ascorbic acid, the reaction may take all day, but I'm not sure about that. I know vinegar takes much longer than hydrochloric acid does.

Also, ascorbic acid itself might work without zinc. Ascorbic acid is a reducing agent, and can pull oxygen off of some other molecules.

so ascorbic acid would be strong enough to lower the pH to the necessary level (3.5ish?)

This could be dangerous.

Why? I don't see how it's any more dangerous than a normal extraction.

This could be dangerous.[/quote]


Why? I don't see how it's any more dangerous than a normal extraction.[/quote]


Could produce lots of heat.
The worst case scenario i think of:

You add the powder , your brew starts cooking , your container meelts and gets eaten
and so on

^^use glass add zinc slow should solve any over heating problems or an ice bath.

And add the Acid slowly !!

SWIM was planning on doing this little by little over the course of a couple hrs. He will most likely use an ice bath as well.

You could have mentioned that if you already included it in your plans . Its important to give safety advice , in case someone wants to copy your procedure.


I'm pretty interested in your results though

Good point.

I'm not sure when I'll be dreaming, but i will definitely post the results.


Thanks for the tips.