Psychedelia.dk

Ok, i'll try and expand on the extraction method from a to b. I should point out that this was a spare of the moment slop-job. I didn't actually weigh or accurately measure anything or take notes. Rather, I just went by feel and made it up as i went along (the way i cook most things when i'm on holidays [Wink]

First, I went out into the garden and saw that my Sceletium had grown a lot while i had been away at EB and was in need of a prune [Wink] We had guests staying with us and I thought it would be appropriate to prepare some material for the nights festivities. I cut it back and ended up with a couple of large handfuls of leaves and stems fresh off the plants. I don't have a food processor so i just chopped the green stuff as finely as possible with a chefs knife making sure not to lose any of the juice. The whole lot of mush was transferred to a stainless steel saucepan with ~500 mL of distilled water (the coles variety) and gently simmered for ~1hr or so until the water was opaque and olive green. I squeezed a few teaspoons of lemon juice into the saucepan at the very beginning also. After simmering, the mixture was filtered through a buchner funnel with a Whatman filter paper (can't remember what grade). My memory of the basification step is very hazy (probably due to it being overshadowed by my spilling dozens of little lye beads all over the kitchen area). I can't remember exactly when i added the NaOH but i do remember it was a about a teaspoon into the 500mL of aqueous extract. I didn't calculate this amount or measure the pH but just took a punt as to how much was enough to get the pH right up above 12 or so without going overboard. It is not usually advisable to add solid NaOH directly to your extract due to huge localised spikes in pH causing unwanted reactions in your products but i was in a hurry and was being asked to get out of the kitchen. A precipitate formed but this was not the stuff in the final active extract since it remained suspended in the aqueous phase even after repeated extraction with methylene chloride.
The basified aqueous extract was transferred to 1L separatory funnel and extracted with ~100mL of dichloromethane (aka DCM, methylene chloride). This involved gently swirling and inverting the sep. funnel to get good mixing. I got a bit of an emulsion at first but this cleared up soom after i added some saturated NaCl solution to the mix. The DCM layer was drained off and the DCM recovered by distillation over a homemade steam bath (ie. kitchen steamer on electric stove - This is quite safe to do since DCM is not very flammable). The DCM recycled in this way was used to re-extract the aqueous solution still in the sep. funnel and the process repeated ~5 times. Each time the DCM extract was returned to the distillation flask so that the residue left behind each time would add to the previous residues. By this time, a small but significant amount of yellow residue had built up on the bottom of the distillation flask (1L). The problem then was how to get the miniscule layer of yellow stuff somewhere we could smoke it. I dissolved it into ~10mL of acetone and transferred the yellow acetone to a 100mL beaker. The acetone was then evaporated over the steam bath with the above-stove extractor fan going on full. The yellow residue was now accessible. I used i bread knife to scrape up as much of it as possible. So, faced with a bread knife loaded with a match-head sized lump of oily yellow goo, we decided hot-knife action was in order. The remainder of the yellow residue in the beaker was transferred to a 2x2cm piece of filter paper as decribed earlier.

I can't wait to try this on a larger scale. The main limiting factor is plant material since it doesn't really take much longer to work on a larger scale, just need bigger glassware in the early stages.

The advantage of making freebase is that snorting is a pain in the arse (or nostril) and people with blocked noses can't do it. Smoking piles of plant material is shit for your lungs. Small Paper Legal Chemical Adsorption Surfaces (SPLCAS's: previously referred to using the B word) make calibration easy and while they don't produce much smoke, give quite a big psychoactive punch. The freebase actually has quite a pleasant taste and i didn't even think i'd gotten any until it kicked in a second or two later. The prospect of a sublingual solution of freebase is very interesting and this is quite often my preferred mode of ingestion when plant material is plentiful.

I think the next major move in the mesembrine department should be the exploration of readily available Aizoaceous weeds like Carpobrotus spp. I have isolated a conspicuous yellow oil from Carpobrotus edulis simply by putting ~1kg of fresh material through a juicer, adding the juice and pulp to a saucepan with a little distilled H2O, simmering for a while, filtering, adding ~1 tablespoon of CaCl2 to the filtrate and boiling right down until a yellow oily stuff dropped out of solution in the form of a yellow slime on the bottom of the saucepan. There was a layer f water over this and some CaCl2 had also dropped out by this stage. Unfortunately, I didn't know what i was doing or looking for and through the whole lot down the sink. When i later found out that mesembrine is yellow, i kicked myself and made plans to repeat the experiment when i have some more time. Carpobrotus is available by the tonne if you go and harvest it yourself. At todays exorbitant prices for these alkaloids, you could make millions from selling carpobrotus extract. A more responsible thing to do though would be to bring relief from depression via mesembrine into an affordable price range for the broader community. I've never been able to rationalise spending $10 or more for less than a gram of crude fermented plant material with somewhat dubious action lasting for only a fleeting moment. A useful medicine like this should be available to all that need it.

Regarding the issue of mesembrine SPLCAS's being mistaken for acid SPLCAS's... I would LOVE to see that! Hehe. I can see it now, perhaps the police officers would be convinced when you smoke one up in front of them or even better pass a cigarette of the things around and give them a go. Perhaps they could distribute them thru the police force and prison system where it is probably needed quite strongly [Wink]

Cheers,

Fractal