Greetings Nexus,
This is my story about the many failed attempts to both make DMT and ingest it, and the oddities that lead up to or directly prevented it from happening.
I bought a kilogram of MHRB from the galactic toad and set out to do an A/B on 100 gram batches. The first batch I used calcium hydroxide in a wet tek and wound up with what looked like grey cement. After adding enough lye and water to make it somewhat viable again I extracted with 3 pulls of heptane, mostly to see if the bark was active, and got 250mg of out it before I got tired of looking at it and tossed it out. I put this very waxy looking DMT aside for a later date.
My second extraction went flawlessly, and planning to recrystallize anyway I combined all my pulls to do a solvent wash. My separatory funnel had a glass stopcock, and in waiting for the liquids to separate the entire amount of solvent drained out of the stopcock, while closed of course, and soaked itself into a cardboard box. What a disaster.
My third extraction saw the destruction of my separatory funnel, it snapped right in half when the stopcock became stuck and I was coaxing it into opening. Impressive glassware I must say, I probably should have destroyed it intentionally when it leaked out the solvent. I also destroyed a 2000ml beaker by simply dropping it while rinsing it off. Also broke a 0-360C thermometer by using it as a stirring rod, then also broke my actual stirring rod. Switched over to the old eye dropper technique after breaking the sep funnel, and when washing this batch of solvent the layers refused to separate. I didn't understand why, added more sodium carbonate to force a separation, and got nothing. I attempted to freeze out the water, which failed, and the final product while finally recovered was completely oxidized and thus an orange GOO. GOO, NOT THE GOO!! :evil:
For my fourth extraction I purchased a new separatory funnel with a PTFE stopcock, a 24/40 Buchner filter, vacuum hand pump, a 500ml 24/40 flask, and filter papers. I needed this to filter Rue/Ayahuasca alkaloids, which never actually happened. During this extraction the buchner filter was destroyed, the 500ml flask had the top broken off, and several improvised funnels were shattered. Glass in my foot for a few days.
I then took a trip to Hawaii, and brought with me through simple means the 250mg of DMT and 500mg of Harmala alkaloids. I split it into 100mg and 150mg of DMT, 250 per for the harmalas. It was a Saturday and I was planning to leave on Monday. The full moon was on Friday the day before, but it was still very much huge in the sky. I was on the beach looking out at the sun, and was fairly anxious about ruining the rest of the trip with a bad experience. I went into the water to swim for awhile... standing there with water to my shoulders... Me: 'Is that my wallet?' GF: 'Yeah haha' Me: 'Damn forgot it was in my pocket... Oh fuck that other thing in my pocket...'
Note to self: Empty pockets before swimming. Also, gelcaps do not resist sea water well.
My fifth extraction went well, but upon freeze percipitating I had in total 100mg. Expecting a gram I was pretty baffled, I did more pulls with Xylene instead of Naptha, a stronger solvent, and left them out to evaporate.
The sixth extraction also went well, and upon reducing the aqueous DMT-salts I saved it to add another 100g extraction. The seventh also went well and I then combined it with the sixth.
On this 6/7th extraction I pulled a total of 9 times, with 60ml of 42C Nahptha per, and reduced down to what seemed like 60ml of Nahptha through evaporation. This time I also combined all pulls and washed them until the Naptha was that familiar yellow/greenish color. I refrigerated for a day, froze for two days, and scrapped to find I had... 100mg. At this point I am coming to one clear conclusion.
Before starting the 8th, 9th, and final 10th extraction I took the 200g extraction I had performed 9 pulls on, and poured 100ml of Xylene, let it sit for 2 days, stirring every 3 hours, and repeated that twice more. I then didn't even both to wash the solvent, combined it with the other xylene I had evaporating and stuck a fan on it. The next morning I went to look at the dish, all the Xylene was gone and there wasn't a hint of anyhting. No oil, no crystals, no gunk, nothing.
That conclusion isn't a conclusion now, it's a hardcore fact. My bark is bullshit.
I took the remaining 300g and threw it in the garbage. I had ~300mg of DMT freeze precipitating in the freezer and that was enough to keep me fufilled for some time so I was not completely butthurt. I collected the crystals and put them on a peice of paper to dry outside. That was yesterday, and I just remembered about 20 minutes ago, before I decided to write this, that I had forgotten the DMT was still outside. It was mid phone conversation with a friend, "Oh shit shit shit hang on man." It was gone. Not a trace.
Somewhere out there DMT is floating around... who knows where.
Thus ends the story of failure.
The morals of this story? Buy teflon sleeves for your glassware, buy stands for your glassware, never buy round bottom flasks, invest in a hotplate with a magnetic stirrer, buy bark that you absolutely know to be fresh, never buy the cheapest bark you can find, and never attempt a lengthly A/B with multiple cooks, filterings, pulls and washes if you haven't done a crude STB to see if your bark is worth extracting on.
Til next time,
CarrierWave
P.S. I considered that the solvent washes may have destroyed the yield, but I've also sat there and rinsed out jars with DMT still in them and seen it not dissolve into water. Also when recrystallizing and watching how warm nahptha has to be, and how much 'in contact' it has to be with the DMT, I don't honestly expect people who let their naphtha sit ontop of the mixture for a week to pull anything at all. But they do, and it puzzles me so. I think nothing short of a hotplate with magnetic stirrer stirring for a few hours per pull would yield anything at all. Yet with Q2121's dry tek the nahptha isn't even stirred from what I remember. Fascinating.
In closing the entire process cost me approx 60-80 hours of my time, and yielded absolutely nothing but experience.