Hello,

I'm backsalting 100 mL toluene with 0.0531 mol/L HCl (this concentration is such that 100 mL will salt exactly 1 g of DMT), added in 25 mL steps and pH measured after each step (titration). The intension is to precip freebase directly out of water with ammonia in the next step.


After 200 mL was added, pH dropped to 4-5.
It's my first time ever doing titration. Started with 100g MHRB (powdered), so I guess >1% yield.

Now my question: My toluene + water mixture has a toluene phase (on top), and a "soapy" water phase:

Is this something to worry about?

Btw, the water phase looks yellow on this photo but it is colorless in real life.

It seems that the more acid was added, the soapier the whole thing became. When shaking the mixture, there are many small bubbles in the water phase. Letting the mixture sit, the bubbles become larger over time, until they look no longer like bubbles but more like long threads, "spiderwebs" in the water phase.

Another thing that I may have done "wrong" is only using 0.57g of NaOH per 1g of MHRB. Also, why is it that when pulling NP from basic soup, plenty of NaOH is reported to break emulsions, even though it causes saponification?

After mixing of toluene with basic soup, it is important to wait till toluene becomes clear, this takes few hours after it separates from basic water. if it's milky or cloudy, you will backsalt some impurities to acidic water.

Titration needs to be done to pH 7 or maybe 6, otherwise this saponification occurs. But no real harm is done, this threads in water are quite normal. You are going to purify it anyway.

Amount of base is ok, I always used this ratio and it always worked. Do not forget to wait few days to allow base to digest the bark.

Thanks for the info.

I did not wait for the toluene to turn clear. I'll re-base the acid, and redo the pull.

Re-based and re-pulled toluene and re-acidified to pH about 7, separated toluene from acid.

Much clearer separation between toluene and acid this time. Acid slightly "soapy". Dirty looking thin soapy separation layer between toluene and acid (not visible on photo):


The next day the acid was looking much clearer. Separated mostly with pipette (sucked up the acid phase) and finally a separatory funnel for the last tiny bit of acid.

Left: toluene, right: DMT HCl solution, looking very slightly yellowish under the right light:

Finally, 10mL ammonia 12% (6.8M) was added to the DMT HCl solution:

Video

I find it strange that the white clouds seem to rise up instead of fall down. Is this normal?

The mixture is now resting in a fridge, covered with a lid.

50 hours after basifying, crystals became visible:


Another picture 60 hours after basifying:


Perhaps it takes this long because the volume of water is relatively large (400 mL) compared to the expected amount of DMT (1 to 1.5 grams)

Seems ok to me.
Why such high amount of water? When I use this approach, I work with ratio 30ml of acidic water to 1g of spice.

Larger amount of water made it easier to separate from the toluene and soapy layer in between without too much loss.

Still have to decant and ammonia-wash, weigh and smoke the final product.

Decant, ammonia wash, decant, dried with hairdryer. Scraped DMT freebase with spoon and weighed: 810 mg so 0.81% yield. Not great (bark is rumored to be of good quality), but the best result I've gotten so far.


Slightly yellow, slightly sticky

About 10 mg was smoked in a crack pipe and confirmed to be of awesome quality

Since the yield is quite low, I suspect the decanted water from the first step to still contain DMT. Probably because the volume of water is quite large (400 mL) as doubledog commented and the pH "only" 11. So the decanted water was not thrown away and 10g of NaOH was added straight to it, and (dmt?) clouds began to form again as the NaOH dissolved. The mixture was stirred, looked milky and pH was measured to be 12 (quite low, don't you think? maybe a measurement error).

If this doesn't yield any extra DMT, I'll do another toluene pull from the basic soup which I still have.

That amount of NaOH should bring pH of already basic water to higher level.
I think NaOH will precipitate all remaining spice from water.

Useful small trick for good separation:
If you have some traces of toluene in water after separation (I always have some), just mix some kind of fat, which solidify in room temperature and is liquid while hot, into the water, warm it, mix it and cool it.
I use ghee and it works perfectly. It mixes with toluene, solidify and water is clean.

Yes the pH should be close to 14... Maybe it was a bad measurement. I'm using pH paper and only submerged it for a couple of seconds in the solution. The manual says "immerse for 1 minute".


Thanks doubledog, you're so helpful I will definitely try this next time!!

Will this trick also get rid of the soapy stuff?

Continuing with the decanted water suspected to still contain DMT...

The water should only contain the following things:
- about 0.0093 mol HCl
- about 0.068 mol Ammonia (=10mL 12%)
- about 0.25 mol NaOH (=10g)
- between 0 and 0.0063 mol DMT (= between 0 and 1.2g)
- traces of other alkaloids from plant material
- other undesired impurities, like soaps or fats, perhaps traces of toluene

I measured the pH again, and again the color indicates pH between 12 and 13... Very weird!

2 explanations come to mind:
- the excess of NaOH causes much of the ammonia to go from ion form (NH4 + OH) to gaseous form (NH3), gaseous ammonia is still polar and therefore remains in the water, but somehow disturbs the pH measurement
- for some reason that I can't think of, much of the NaOH remains undissolved even after stirring and letting the solution sit for a night in the cold.
I am not a chemist, therefore have no clue if any of these explanations are close to the truth.

Here's a picture of what the re-based water looks like after stirring


After a night in the cold, it looked like this:

There's a thin yet dense layer of what looks like undissolved powder (DMT? undissolved NaOH? or some insoluble salt that formed from the products in solution?) floating near the bottom of the container.
Could it be that with the added NaOH, the water's mass proportion to volume has become so large that DMT doesn't "sink" to the bottom?

Also, there seem to be a few needly crystals floating on top, most likely DMT:


Not visible on the photo, but there are also (few) needly crystals at the bottom.

It is normal that some crystals are floating in the water even after cooling.
What I have never seen is that layer of relatively clear water at the bottom of your container. Crystals above it looks exactly the same as my crystals of spice precipitated by KOH from water.
The layer beneath them are probably water layer with some salt as a product of reaction of hcl, ammonia and NaOH.

Actually I think I have found an explanation:

Based on the following facts:
- Both phases (upper and lower) must be water, since that's the only liquid present in large enough quantities
- The fact that a powder floats between them must mean that the phases have a different density

An explanation for the difference in density is trivial: Most of the ammonia will be dissolved as just NH3, not NH4+ because the excess of Na+ ions (coming from NaOH) which are much 'stronger'. Because NH3 is not an ion, it will not distribute itself equally throughout the water, instead it's lighter than water and rises up until some equilibrium appears where an upper phase of the water contains NH3 and a lower phase does not. It is still a polar molecule and strongly attracted to water, so most of it does not escape.

That makes the thin layer of 'powder' indeed DMT freebase, lighter than NaOH containing water and heavier than NH3 and NaOH containing water. Maybe after some time when the crystals grow bigger, they will be dense enough to sink.

Only the pH of the upper phase was measured. I still don't understand why that pH is between 12 and 13. Maybe the NH3 pushes out much of the NaOH somehow?
I got a feeling the pH of the lower phase must much higher and in fact close to 14.

Another possibility is that you've recreated the Solvay process in miniature. While resting overnight, the ammoniacal sodium chloride solution has absorbed CO2 to form sodium bicarbonate which has a relatively low solubility. This would surely require more than the usual amount of atmospheric CO2, however.

Does the apparent formation of a lower layer have anything to do with the shape of the side of the jar, which seems to be slightly convex near the bottom?

Not really, it's mostly like this:

(Slightly exaggerated drawing)

It keeps getting more interesting...

Solution was stirred and left to sit in the cold again for another 48 hours.

37 hours after stirring:

More crystals at the top and also at the bottom.

46 hours after stirring:

There you have a layer again, this time it looks like a skewed SOLID plate, seems to be coming from the top and slowly sinking under its own weight...

Another 2 days later, the "plate" of crystals has almost completely sunken to the bottom.

Looks like a decent yield. Hopefully I have time to separate it tomorrow.
I'll need some kind of filter to separate those crystals floating at the top. The NaOH will probably eat through a regular coffee filter, maybe some kind of homemade plastic filter.

In the end, pH was measured again and now close to 14. Maybe not all the NaOH had dissolved yet when pH was 12? Very strange cause you wouldn't expect this a few days after NaOH was added and stirred! Total mystery...

Crystals were separated from solution and washed with ammonia solution. The ones that sticked to the glass were scraped and weighed: another good 700 mg . So about 1.5% yield total so far. A sample was smoked and confirmed to be DMT

UPDATE: crystals were still wet. Actual yield only half of what's reported here... see next post




The ones that were floating were caught by a coffee filter. The filter seemed to remain intact even in the presence of such a basic solution. Next ammonia solution was poured through the filter to wash it, dried, and then acetone dissolved the DMT. Acetone is now slowly evaporating outside in a tiny beaker with a lid and a small hole on the side. Curious what will come of this. Once the acetone is evapped, a small puddle of water will remain and hopefully some DMT crystals in there that will be easy remove.

A satisfying result. This extraction was a STB. Next time I will try the A/B method with the same bark. With multiple acid pulls, filtering and reducing of course.

Also I wanna smoke DMT on a full stomach of harmala extract.

So much fun to have with this chemical