I will be using nomans tek, and I am paranoid about residual lye in my final product. A lye/water/mhrb solution is to be mixed in a jar. Doesnt this stuff stick to the sides of the jar after mixing? Once naptha is added and seperation occurs, isnt there residual basic material on the sides of the jar that will end up in the naptha pull? I know you can wash the final product through a sodium carbonate solution, but does this remove lye? If so what is the chemistry behind it?

Thanks for your time.

I think sodium carbonate wash is your thing. Look at wiki

tele youre the dude!


anyone whos interested: washing spice

Thanks. Personally I prefer lime teks because it works at least equally well and it's safer than lye as a base, but if I would be doing first lye extractions, I would make sure to wash it, just to have peace of mind.

Lye can be dangerous at high concentrations and its very healthy to respect its potential to damage people and things... but lye at low concentrations is simply an antacid. It is not toxic unless it is contaminated. It does not vaporize until a very high temperature. Besides, it's easy to simply make sure none of the aqueous layer comes across during pulls.

good luck

What is a lime TEK that you have used, Tele?

don't fear lye.

get some epsom salts from the grocery store or pharmacy. pour your separated naptha in a jar with the salts, then pour off the naptha into another dry jar. any residual basic water that was in the naptha will bind to the salts.

q21q21's white DMT tek

which is going to be hard to do consider i have a thick slurry that is all over the walls of my HDPE put 500 MHRB in


EDIT: added more water, and made things right as rain.

from what ive noticed, a simple decant does the trick, the sludge just sticks to the bottom of one of the jars. Is there a chance that there is lye that isnt brown and sludgy? or is lye polar?

lye is polar, and sludge has a mix of polar functional groups. thus, yes...it can attract the basic aqueous phase

which is why I mention drying the solvent over salts. I'm not just blowing smoke, I said it for a reason. drying the nonpolar phase over sulfate salts is a common practice in organic chemistry.

benzyme's epsom salt technique seems useful (though I've never tried it). Magnesium Sulfate Heptahydrate is cheap, easy to find, and would probably do the trick with minimal loss of goods. I don't know what kinds of minerals or chems might be introduced into the NPS this way... but benzyme tends to know his chemistry.

That said, I see absolutely no reason to bother with cleaning spice at all.

First off, minor amounts of lye are not a problem... even if they could actually make it into the final product. 1) Lye vapes at ridiculously high temps... nowhere near the DMT vape temps 2) People ingest lye all the time. Pretzels are made with lye. As are dozens of other baked goods.

This might be controversial, but generally the stuff that gets removed with washing is good stuff. Mimosa oils and mysterious potential jungle alks are not contaminants. When you toke your first toke of some sweet honey spice, you will wonder why you would ever want to remove those oils. Sure, some clear pointy crystals are nice to vape, and the clinical, sci-fi clarity they give is worth experiencing... but the honey and jungle are where the love is. If you are not using harmalas or making changa with harmalas, you might be stoked to leave those oils in there. Even if you are fully harmala'd out, those oils are rather nice. (subjectively speaking)

At any rate, if you evap your solvent slowly (and are using a solvent that selects for DMT well) you will get white or even clear pointy crystals without any extra steps or loss. Naptha that contains toulene will pull some jungle with it, but mineral lamp oil (parrafin extra pure lamp oil) as well as many non-zippo napthas will produce clean crystals with no effort. Another benefit to the lamp oil is that it doesn't stink up the place, is far less toxic than naptha (actually ingestible to some degree), and it is cheap. Here is the thread where I found out that it works. It evaps slow as hell, but that just ensures that you have nice spiky crystals waiting for you when it is done.

Are you implying that sodium carbonate wash removes "mimosa oils and mysterious alkaloids" ?

benzyme: What kind of ratio epsom salts to solvent are we talking about ? 5g per 100ml (1:5)?

I dont think sodium carb wash removes a lot of oils, it would remove polar compounds (like lye) and oils should def preffer the non-polar layer. Whether oils are active or not is a hypothesis (which I personally dont agree with but thats just my opinion based on non-blind bioassays and limited chemistry/pharmacology knowledge)... I think thus far there seems to be only one unidentified alkaloid in mimosa according GC-MS and im still not sure whether it is an artefact or a real alkaloid present. Also, it is in such minute quantities that I doubt it will really affect the experience, but thats also speculation from my part. NMR also showed jungle spice to be basically DMT, the rest was in very trace amounts. When LC-MS is done, Ill post results in this ongoing jspice analysis thread.

Regarding lye, hyperspace fool is right for the most part, that there lye is used in the production of food, but often the food will also have natural or added acids for different reasons which would neutralize at least part of the lye, and the overall content will not have a very high caustic pH. Its true that lye does not vaporize at lighter temperatures but unvaporized solid particles could come across suspended in the vapor/smoke, and this could potentially be very irritating to the throat and lungs. So if one is having trouble with DMT smoke, at least consider doing a wash to see if it helps.

there's no ratio involved, it's just a thin layer of it to absorb any residual water in the solvent; think of it as a desiccant, because that's essentially what it is. it will bind any of your polar aqueous phase. Since the free base alkaloids carry a net neutral charge, they will be completely in the solvent, and not bind the salts.

I always use this method when doing extractions, sometimes a small bit of emulsion ends up in my nonpolar phase; it breaks up and release the solvent that was trapped in the mycelles as soon as it's added to the salts, leaving chlorophyll and other hydrophilic molecules in the basic water attached to the salts at the bottom; you can easily pour off the solvent.

I know we've been down this road, and this is not the thread to revive the old Jungle Spice debate... so I will just agree that Jungle is predominantly DMT... with the caveat that it is obviously colored and oily with something that isn't n,n DMT... and that piles of subjective experience reports claim that whatever that other stuff might be, it affects the journey in a positive way.

This is in addition to the whole yellow debate. Oxidized? And a lot of people prefer that stuff over the pure as well.


I agree wholeheartedly. If you are having trouble with your DMT smoke, by all means wash away. I didn't want to suggest that just because lye is used in pretzels that makes it safe in the relatively concentrated solutions that DMT Teks call for.

I have never heard of anyone personally who thought they had inhaled unvaporized solid particles, but it is a possibility I suppose if your vaporizing setup was anomalous.

Given the ease of benzyme's epsom salt method, I am sure that my FOAFs will be attempting it in coming extractions. The minor loss of solvent that might cling to the salts or the glass would be trivial and could probably be retrieved anyway. (Everytime you transfer anything from one container or glass to another, there is some minor mechanical loss and the stray drop or three that just wont migrate.)

I think I had that once - incredibly caustic to the throat and lungs, certainly not DMT or even burnt DMT. This product was from STB, freshly evaporated naphta, unwashed. The same stuff lost that causticity rather quickly, I think because the NaOH residue was converted to carbonate by CO2 in the air. This always happens to strong bases, they can't last for long when exposed to the air.

It's actually quite hard to prevent that from happening: I have (had ) a large stash of lime but over the years it's been converted to carbonate significantly, despite being covered by plastic.

In other words: if you think your product might contain lye residue, just leave it exposed to the open air for a day until use.


And thanks for the lamp oil tip HF, I didn't know that!

I wouldn't worry much about that, the surface of glass has negatively-charged siloxy groups under alkaline conditions, which are polar. water clings to glass more strongly than naptha. loss in alk yield is negligible

Oh, I am not worried. It is relatively easy to see how much gets left behind in collection jars or precip jars for example... You just let the jar dry thoroughly and then scrape it out. It is pretty easy to recover as much as 10mg or more from a jar that looks mostly empty (depending on how much NPS was inside of course).

This is not overly significant, but it is a decent low threshold journey if you have good smoalk technique, and if you are already on mushrooms or ayahuasca, it can be a pretty good hit.

Sadly, in such low concentrations, it is difficult to retrieve all the goods by scraping. For these situations, a bit of ethanol swirled around will mop up the goods for making changa... though you will probably have to add quite a bit more DMT to make any decent amount.

It is also possible to swirl some vinegar around in the jar, a touch of hot water... and when the goods have been well dissolved, toss in a knife tip or more of coconut cream (the good fairly solid kind is best). When swirled up together, the freebase turns to DMT acetate, and you can snort this thick fluid to get a fantastic, burn-free DMT flash. I posted about this discovery on one of the insufflating ROA threads. [note: it is awesome]

Again, 10mg is probably an insufficient dose for insufflated DMT if you are starting from dead sober. It is rather noticeable, though, if you happen to be on ayahuasca. You can increase the dose, use a nasal spray, even nebulize the stuff if it strikes your fancy... but don't underestimate the nasal ROA. There is a reason it is the 1st choice of a number of very knowledgeable Amazonian indigens.