So SWIM has been messing around with carbonate extractions and has this to report. A test batch of a carbonate-containing solution (400 mL) was evaporated. He let it take quite a while because he wanted nice xtals, and he was happy to see white solid forming in his collection dish. All scraped up, the flaky white crystals weighed about 0.054 g.





Here's the catch. This carbonated solution was never mixed with a freebase alkaloid-containing organic solvent. It was a control run with nothing but off-the-shelf seltzer water. The image above is not actually from the experiment SWIM performed, but it is similar enough. The point of this is that 99.9% of kitchen chemists have only a vague idea of what they're consuming, and that it is not enough to look at the results of your latest extraction hoping that they're pure, and pronounce them as ">90% pure" to all of the internet. People need to be more careful about what they consume & more rigorous in their skepticism.

huh? wouldn't that be the carbonic acid from the seltzer? what are you talking about? Is this just an attempt to scare people for no reason whatsoever?

Eh...

True, SWIM never evapped plain seltzer to see what would happen, but SWIM also wasn't ever worried about consuming the contents of commercial seltzer water sold for consumption...

He also never noticed the minimal drop in potency this might imply, so whatever...

He likes acetate much better nowadays anyway. It comes on a lot faster, and is more potent because of this. It's awesome.

But yeah, carbonic acid couldn't really exist in solid, powder form. It's probably just minerals and junk in the water, like tap water.

No, carbonic acid only exists in solution. This residue is something else. Selzer or other carbonated bottled waters can very often contain a fair amount of other salts. What does the Selzer label write? Usually mineral waters contain information about their ionic composition.

In any case, these types of control experiments are very important. Thanks Wombat's SWIY for doing such a test run. This is good science.

I also agree with you that most of the estimates thrown around on the internet like >90 pure or >95 pure or 99% etc are pure rubbish. Without some analytical accurate quantitation method it is pretty difficult to know. They are however useful lingual descriptions for rough estimates, e.g. a claimed "99% purity" basically means a fairly pure product which in real life may lie between 95% and 100%. And so on.

ahhh, w0mbat, I sincerely apologize. please excuse my ignorance. Thank you for the explanation Infundibulum.

SB

It was Polar Seltzer water. The nutrition information says 0 sodium, 0 carbs, 0 calories, 0 protein. Nothing but carbonated water. The website, however, also says "natural flavors" - perhaps that's what the white stuff is. Either way, I recommend other people's friends use different brands of seltzer if they are attempting to make mescaline carbonate, and to be sure to do a control as well.

To me this also reinforce the importance of using only food-safe reagents. Since these impurities were in supermarket seltzer water, the only thing they could do was throw off yields. However, if you're using acetone or MEK or something else from the hardware store, there's no telling what could be in your final product.