So just recently I started a STB extraction on san pedro powder doing something like this:

1. 300g lye in about 3 quarts water stirred in gallon HDPE vessel
2. after basic water cooled I checked pH with pH strips. It was somewhere around 14.
3. I placed ~95g of dried san pedro outer green flesh powder in the vessel.
4. I added ~1 quart of xylene and shook for about 2 minutes.
5. after 24 hours I pulled most of the top xylene layer off with a thumb wheel pipet. Note: there was a half inch thick white-ish tan bubbly layer right beneath the xylene.

6. I placed the xylene in a glass bottle and mixed 2g of citric acid with 120ml of distilled water in a separate beaker.

7. 20ml of the citric acid water was added to xylene in the glass bottle and shaken for about 30 seconds. This is where I got confused. The citric acid water became frothy like an emulsion of some kind after shaking it. I waited about 15 minutes and the froth did not separate. What could have caused this? I did notice that under the cap of the HDPE vessel there was a small ammount of glue holding a HDPE seal into the cap, but the glue did not seem to have been completely dissolved ( or enough to matter anyway). I discarded the froth (probably a mistake)

So basically I have repeated steps 1-7 getting less and less frothyness each time, but this time collecting the acidic water + mescaline.

Heres the other problem: Theoretically, the mescaline should bind with citric acid and become mescaline citrate salt. this should be able to be precipitated out of the acidic water when nearly frozen. I placed the collected citric acid water in the freezer and while nearly frozen, or even frozen and thawed out, but no crystals precipitated.

Do I have any mescaline? if so is there away to separate the mescaline citrate from the excess citric acid that did not react?

any advice would be greatly appreciated.

-Johnboi

just evaporate it and see whats there

and emulsions are normal try heating it in very hot water to help break it up, if its still looking like salad dressing just pass the emulsified water through a cotton filter in a funnel, this will seperate it nicely filter again and youll be set.

also maybe try using hcl or sulphuric acid instead of citric, youll get nicer xtals and they will be easier to clean.

Citric acid is harder to work with. I had spectacular results with pharmaceutical grade citric acid and no decent results at all with 3 different brands of food grade citric acid.

I only got some crystals crashing during the freeze, my best results were doing a slow evap at about 100* F, crystals would typically fall oput of solution before the solution had all evaporated and then I would pour off the excess solution and use very cold water to rinse. sometimes this did not work well though and I had to evaporate all the way to a lacquer like material and then take a few ml of boiling water and put that on the laquer like material, which would usually immediately form crystals.

Citric acid salts of mescaline are often not very soluble in water in my experience and I have many questions about the different forms citric acid can take... anhydrous or monohydrate

fun to work with, i have seen some really good results, but have not made a habit of suggesting this salt form.

try a slow evap and see what happens

So basically because the mescaline citrate is not too soluble in water the crystals will crash out when the volume of solution is reduced?

About the lacquer material: so the solution is completely evapped to get the sticky citric acid + possibly mescaline goo and boiling water is added to the goo to form crystals? How does this work? Is the water dissolving the mescaline and then evaporating forcing the crystal to form?

thanks for the filtering advice, i will try that (:

I will probably try HCL next time for salting and probably use D-limonene instead of xylene because xylene is too stanky. Plus i feel like d-limo would not soften the cap of the HDPE containers like xylene does.

The problem with evaporating straight from here is that most of the product will most likely be citric acid and there will be no way to know the dosage

I have seen this happen, yes, but not always.

I honestly am not sure how it works, I only noticed it when I evaporated one time and got a lacquer like material (zero goo with pharm grade citric acid, but often goo with food grade) and I squirted 3-5 ml of boiling water onto the petri dish I was evaporating in and instantly crystals crashed out.

I also noticed that sometimes a freeze would not work, but then I would evap and add boiling water and then re-freeze and get crystals crashing out. I never had much luck with this though and don't consider citric acid convenient or easy to use.


In my experience when crystals do crash out from evaporation you can rinse with cold water and the mescaline citrate does not dissolve while the citric acid does. The resulting material should not taste sour at all, but mildly bitter and a bit chalky. It should however be plenty active at the usual dose ranges for mescaline salts. 300-400mg should be plenty and 50mg should give threshold effects of stimulation and mild euphoria.

Yeah, Ill probably be using pharm grade acids from now on. Btw My latest pull has around 50mg crashing out from freeze precipitation. It could have to do with mescaline concentration in the pull.

Thanks for the input. guys

it would make sense that the more saturated the solution the easier the crystals will crash..

ive tried both xylene and limonene and they seem to work equally well, apart from xylene smelling horrible its considerably cheaper and has much more reusability, whereas limonene apparently doesnt work quite so well at pulling the alks after a few uses and usually needs distilling.

i would recommend 96% sulphuric acid + distilled water ph3 saltings (approx 2 drops will bring a good cupfull to ph3), reduced till its syrupy and bubbling and crashed with acetone. to get opalescent flaky white mesc

i havent tried hcl on this tek so i cant comment, however sulphuric is a lot nicer to work with whereas diluting 33% hcl that shit fumes like anything.

It is pretty likely that by discarding that froth you lost considerable alkaloids, hopefully it didnt ruin your yeild too much. Citric acid products Swim has found dont want to crystallize as readily and are quite sticky. Would recommend acetic acid, hcl, or sulfuric acid over citric.

Needless to say I'll probably use a different acid for salting next time.
I did, however, manage to get a decent amount to crash out as crystals with the freeze precipitation. I also evaporated the other pulls and got lots of citric acid and mescaline.

No problem few tums cant solve I suppose .

I did a potency test and it seems to be very active in the 200mg range.

Thanks for all the help guys.

I have some questions:
1. So d-limonene should work perfectly except i should discard it after a few pulls? or did you mean a few extractions (which would be a larger amount of pulls)?

2. So for salting you are saying 96% sulfuric acid doesn't fume as bad when diluting as HCl, and I should salt with the dilute solution (pH 3) and reduce said solution which contains mesc sulfate until its syrupy and bubbling then add acetone to the syrupy bubbling solution?

Do the crystals crash out of the solution or go into the acetone or what? could I just evap the solution and wash with acetone?

3. Have you tried acetate? I'm curious about this one and wonder the difficulty of salting with a acetate solution (pH 3) and evaporating the solution to yield M. acetate