Just wondering and sorry if this is a dumb question but could you basify reduced cacti tea and pull the mescaline with naphtha then add vinegar/water to the naphtha to salt it back out?

fb mesc is insoluable in naptha, dlimo bro, get you that citrus goodness. its reusable and great for cleaning!

mescaline is soluble in warm naphtha, which has a partition coefficient similar to limonene; thus it would be silly to suggest that mescaline is soluble in limonene, but not naphtha. it's also soluble in toluene, xylene, dcm, tce, chloroform...you get the idea, bro. all of those solvents are reusable.

use whatever you have at your disposal. you don't need to go buy limo or xylene if you have naphtha, just heat it in a water bath, and do multiple pulls.

Did you try it before, benz, to extract mescaline wth naphtha, or are you talking about theretical calculations regarding xlogp? Because i remember reading of people trying and getting 0 yield.

If you tried, is the yield decent in any way?

perhaps they didn't do it properly?

I tried it once, yields were not as nice as with xylene, but I did get off-white crystals after adding HCl and evapping. heat, and do multiple pulls.

but first and foremost...lyse those cells completely. otherwise, your yields will be low, regardless of what solvent you use.

Making a paste of cactus powder and calcium hydroxide is sufficient for this, yes?

i'm not familiar with that method. conventional wisdom would suggest there exists a minimal volume of water (Kd...dissociation constant) needed to reach an effective concentration, to reach the desired pH. some have tried the paste method, and results reports are mixed.

calcium hydroxide has difficult solubility in water as it is; as a paste, I'd imagine the pH would not be sufficiently high enough to lyse cells, nor convert all mesc salt to free base.
I have not tried this, so I can't speak from experience.

the most common approach would be using physical methods, that is, boiling the acidified cactus marc, or pressure cooking. the mesc salts have a b.p. above 180C, so degradation should not be an issue.