01-28-03 12:21
No 402158
O.k. guys, this is my very first of what I hope many posts and disussions with you all. I'm very VERY new to organic chemistry and I've been intrested in synthesis for a very long time, I want to extract psilocin from myciulum but of all posts I read using tfse I got no anwseres to my question, When extraction is done what would be a marketable and stable way to go about distributing this stuff? I've read over and over that psilocin is highly supceptable to oxidation,so how should I go about making it in a pill and keeping potency over time??? I hope you can all excuse my spelling and stupidity
(Hive Adickt)
01-28-03 12:41
No 402167
Cold, dry and oxygenfree. Iff posible clean the ekstract up (collumchromatography) the enhage the stability alot.
Don't ekspect the ekstract to bee much more stabel than the shroom's itself.
(Stranger)
01-28-03 12:57
No 402171
thanks alot but I'm still not sure how i would go about encapsulating it.How hard would that be?
(Hive Adickt)
01-28-03 14:57
No 402190
It's not the material there is the problem but the proses itself. Makeing pil's is quite hard. Packing the black goo (the ekstract) in gel capsels togeter with sugger/MgSO4 ect. is not so hard *lol*
(Hive Addict)
01-28-03 21:29
No 402273
Use one of the techniques for extracting ergotamine from ergot fungus.
I would recommend blending the wet shroms with DL-tartaric Acid. Then dry in a vaccume dessicator. Wash the dried biomass with a np solvent. Ie.. Toulene Xylene. Dry again and wash with Chloroform. Then you want to make up a solution of alcoholic NH3. Basify the biomass with this solution. FIlter and extract your solution and filter cake with a NP.. EtAcOH or DCM. Remove the NP under vaccume and dissolve the remaining oil in to your chromotography solvent. Elute checking with UV and collect the flourescent blue bands.There should be three bands. one is psilocin one is psilocybin and possible there is some baeocystin. Remove the solvent under vacume. Do not allow the pure freebase to be exposed to air or light. when it comes out it will be clear but as it oxidises it will turn blue purple. DO the next step seperatly for each band collocted. Make up a solution of alcoholic tartaric acidand disolve the freebase in this. to determine how much tartaric acid to use you must weigh your freebase and use an equimolar ammount of acid. It too much acid is used it will be difficult to determine proper dosage as well as possibly harming your product. Remove the alcohol under vaccume and leave the flask in the dark in the cold until it crystalizes.. Now the tryptamine is in it's stable salt form.
Dissolve this in distilled water at a rate so 2.5ml of solution contains 500mgs of salt. In a sweetbreath bottle this will make 100 retail dosages. The chromotography and salt formation are very inportant steps if you want a product that will not degrade. Tryptamine degredation can cause some serious ill side affects Such as vomiting severe headaches and has been known to cause emergancy room visits when unhappy trippers get scared cause they took a drug that made them violently ill. If there aer plans for dsitribution make sure you take those steps so you are not responsible for someone possibly dying. Good Luck
VL
He who holds the LSD holds the keys.
(Stranger)
01-28-03 22:59
No 402287
thank you so much,i understand what your saying but i guess i'm going to have to take some chem classes to further enjoy what i hope will become a new hobby, you people are so smart and awesome, thanx!!!!!!!!
(Hive Addict)
01-29-03 10:31
No 402373
I have not seen a chem class ever in my life. Many of the people here are the same. To attain this level of knowladge all it takes it the desire and love for what you do. All the knowladge in the world is available to anyone what wants to recieve it. "Seek and you shall find."
VL_
He who holds the LSD holds the keys.
(Stranger)
01-29-03 12:36
No 402402
question vibrating lights, could i disolve regular psilocin extract in distilled water and do the sweet breath method? Its just I have no acces or knowlage of chemotography and performing the regular extraction will be chalanging enough, so please get back!
(Moderator)
01-29-03 15:20
No 402455
1. The main alkaloid in Psilocybe mushrooms is psilocybin - which is zwitterionic! The whole procedure
Vibrating_Lights described does NOT work for this class of compounds!
2. Psilocybin and psilocin are NOT fluorescing under UV like ergot alkaloids.
3. Psilocybin is pretty stable under neutral and dry conditions.
4. Psilocin, a minor compound in most mushrooms, is very sensitive to basic conditions and may degrade quickly in a few minutes.
5. That psilocin degradation products may have ANY effects is new to me! Butn I'm sure V_L can provide us with some references.
(Hive Bee)
01-31-03 05:12
No 402924
I have been playing alot with psilly extractions. The purest protocol I have seen so far is posted in the thread Psilocybin crystallization for beginners, post No 397222
The crystalline endproduct is most likely a mixture of urea, psilocybin, psilocin and perhaps traces of a few other things.
I have asked and Googled and TFSE'd around but haven't found a supersimple low tek method to separate the urea from the rest. TLC may be the only option.
But even if a simple method exists (a method which doesn't need special types of paper and -reagens) then extracting mushrooms to get crystal psilocybin may be as useful as extracting blotters to obtain crystal LSD.
I can see a reason to get mescaline out of a cactus (the cactus is far to big and yukky tasting to eat whole). I can see the need for crystallization of Salvinorin A or DMT or Ibogaine. In all cases the plant matter is too bulky or too yukky to be used as is.
But mushrooms are an exception. leave them as they are and they are just fine!
bibliopharmacophile
(Distinctive Doe)
01-31-03 09:15
No 402983
I'll link that post
Post 397222 (Yachaj: "Psilocybine crystallization for beginners", Tryptamine Chemistry)
Boiling absolute ethanol should separate the urea.
One gram of Urea dissolves in 20 mL absolute ethanol or 1 mL water.
Psilocybin is "difficultly soluable in ethanol" and 1 gram dissolves in 120ml methanol or 20 parts boiling water.
Then recrystallize the Psilocybin from boiling H2O and you should get a very pure product.
(Stranger)
01-31-03 11:49
No 403037
Wouldn't using boiling water degrade the alkaloids? I thought psilocybin was very sensitive to heat.
(Hive Bee)
02-01-03 15:27
No 403439
my understanding here is that it isn't the heat that ruins you chems, it's the oxidation, the heat merely aids this process. also, like mentioned above, there is an unequal stability of psilocin and psilocybin...
see you auntie
(Hive Bee)
02-03-03 03:15
No 403939
Thanks for the urea hint :).
It is oxidation yes, but a biological one.
In the A/B extraction of Casale (see the psilocybin crystallization for beginners thread) the psilocybin was converted into psilocin first (needed because PSOP freebase is water soluble and PSOH isn't). This first step of degradation is caused by mushroom enzymes.
To my knowlegde a short intense heating period (pressure canning) destroys those enzymes but only slightly harms the psilocybin.
In 2 classic cultivation books of the seventies (Magic Mushroom Cultivation of Pollock of 1977 and Psilocybin Cultivators Bible of Hongero Press of 1976) the authors recommend to pc watery mushroom extracts to enhance tenability.
Without such a treatment mushroom orange juice looses its power in about 48hrs at roomtemperature. But pc'd & in the fridge it stays good for months.
Yachaj
bibliopharmacophile
(Hive Bee)
02-06-03 07:08
No 405092
pardon my possible ignorance...
But, what about leaving the psilocybin et al, extracted from mgso4 dried alcohol out of mushrooms, in the alcohol. If this isn't effective, what about alcohol+acid. Since psilocin doesn't like alkaline conditions. Certainly acetic acid is well known for preventing oxidation of food products.
Okay, maybe this is going really far back - but what about getting swim's alcohol extract and dissolving in honey? That honey stuff has been known to last a *damn* long time without chemical changes.
McKenna even hypothesised this crazy idea that the first use of alcohol came about from mushroom using cultures storing their psilos in honey and the honey (perhaps too hydrated) became mead, or something similar, and thus gave way, over perhaps a few hundred years, to the reverence of alcohol as a form of intoxication as opposed to psilocybin mushrooms.
Oh, before everyone thinks to make psilo extracts and putting them into honey, be sure you're using organic honey, because - and possibly this is significant to honey's lifespan - enzymes are destroyed in the conventional honey processing business during the 'boil it so it doesn't crystallise' thing that is done to most honey. Maybe this is unrelated...
And there is another thought - sugar - sugar is known to cause things to escape oxidation for long periods of time. I mean sucrose/glucose/fructose.
a stab in the dark in case somebody can fill in the details about sugar and it's preservative properties.
I know naaaathing.
(Hive Bee)
02-08-03 11:11
No 405668
Dear Dr. Shulgin:
A friend of mine performed a Soxhlet extraction of 12 grams of powdered Psilocybe cubensis, using 95% ethanol. When the 60 mL of extract cooled to room temperature, many small transparent, colorless crystals had formed on the bottom of the container and did not redissolve on agitation. Do you know what these crystals are? -- Journeyman
Dear Journeyman:
There is a fascinating report in the literature that gives a quantitative measurement of the efficiency of extraction of both psilocybin and psilocin from the mushroom Psilocybe bohemica. The citation to the article is Kysilka, R. and Wurst, M., Planta Med. Vol. 56 pp. 327-328 (1990). These Czechoslovakian scientists studied the efficiency of both methanol and ethanol as solvents, each containing varying amounts of water. The results were, to me, both unexpected and most provocative.
The isolation of psilocybin seemed to be quite reasonable. This alkaloid is reasonably soluble in boiling water from which it can be nicely crystallized. It is less soluble in boiling methanol, and almost insoluble in boiling ethanol. And the extraction efficiency is optimum with methanol and almost as good with ethanol. With both, the less water present, the better. The compound is, after all, a perfect example of a zwitterion, the internal salt of a phosphoric acid and an amine base.
But the numbers with psilocin are strange. With aqueous ethanol, the optimum extraction was with a 70% ethanol concentration, and the extraction efficiency dropped almost to zero when there was no water present. But methanol was extremely inefficient regardless of the amount of water present in it. These researchers were apparently surprised by these findings, as they explored further and uncovered other clues. Time is a factor. Psilocin is extracted at a much slower rate than is psilocybin because it is contained intracellularly in the plant, and thus slower to be gotten out. They conclude that many of the low psilocin assays of mushrooms are due to this difficulty of getting the alkaloid out of the plant and into the extracting solvent. Using this information they determined that the levels of psilocybin and psilocin are substantially the same in Psilocybe bohemica, in conflict with the published literature values where very small amounts of psilocin were observed.
Efficient extraction apparently requires patience.
As to the identity of the crystals that were drifting around in the cooled Soxhlet receiver, from their being insoluble in ethanol, and white, and transparent, I would guess that you are seeing pure psilocybin.
--Dr. Shulgin
Here's the link: http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/shulgin/
PB
(Hive Bee)
02-09-03 06:57
No 405951
Urushibara is right. Psilocybin extraction can be done a lot easier. The shortest write-up I have seen so far for it is to slice 25 grams of freshly harvested cubensis mushrooms, put them in a milkpan along with 100ml of fruit juice. Ad a crushed tablet of vitamin C against blueing.
Heat until it boils, then remove pan from heat source. Add more vitC. Store overnight in fridge at about 4 centigrade.
Then pour the liquid through the pulp (placed in an empty teabag) via a funnel into a 250ml soft drink bottle. Put the pulp back in the pan, add 150ml of fruit juice&swirl, then filter/add this to the content of the bottle. Drink on empty stomach.
The problem of this approach is that the mushrooms need to be grown in a similar style (in the example the pf tek was used), at a similar temperature and harvested in the same growth stadium. Only then 100ml of this liquid is always of nearly the same potency (comparable to 10g of fresh mushrooms or max. 10mg of psilocybin).
Psilocybin crystallization enters the picture if one wants a standarized consumption, but the potency of the starting material is unknown. Having 100mg of pure psilocybin to dump into a liter of juice is the solution.
I am not completely persuaded by the described soxhlet method. A soxhlet is nice to have by hand but is expensive to buy. And the crystals may not be pure because the mushrooms contain many more materials. It works pretty well because the psilocybin is so much less soluble in alcohol than the rest of the gunk (I am still thankful for the little hint in this thread), but psilocybin is very well soluble in the liquid component which gives mushrooms their odor. And that component will always collect in the primary alcohol extract.
A route to pure psilocybin is to extract&filter the mushrooms powder in 140 proof or 70 percent alcohol, evaporate to 1/10 of the volume, remove undesired components with pet ether (twice) acetone (twice) and 95 percent alcohol (cold) and then extract the remaining dark stuff in 95 percent ethanol (boiling), filter out the dark granules and cool the ethanol until white crystals form. Perhaps it can be simplefied (see for instance http://www.fanaticus.com/mycoalki.htm) but I rather remove the amber colored undesired stuff than let them contaminate the crystals. Another problem I see with the super-simple pf 'magic liquor' technique is that, if a soxhlet is not used, the mushroom powder needs to be extracted in boiling 190 proof ethanol. Suppose that you have 100 grams of dried mushrooms or so. That needs a lot of 190 proof alcohol for extraction - and all of that needs to boil because otherwise the psilocybin refuses to dissolve in it. Nah, then I would prefer using 140 proof ethanol. In that, the mushrooms can be extracted at low temperatures (and I have a gutfeeling that cold extractions are always better, especially with fragile compounds like these). In the fridge even. But 140 proof can not be used for immediate crystallization. Hence the evap down, subsequent cleaning up with nonpolar solvent and acetone and recrystallization in a few ml of 190 proof ethanol.
OK. For a successfull biosynthesis of 1+ gram of psilocybin, my best guess for the ingrediënts is:
- 200 half pint jars (hole in the lid filled with cottonwool), each containing 100ml of medium.
medium recipe:
1.2 Kg maltose, 100g British Marmite, 20,000ml of water. Boil until everything dissolves. Fill all jars&sterilize.
Inoculate each jar with a bit of mycelium which grows on something which floats (pinch of sawdust). Wait 3 weeks.
Pour contents of the jars through sieve. Harvest 4000-5000 grams of fresh mycelium. Cold desiccate to less than 500g dry material. Extract two times, each with 750ml of alcohol, evap down to 150ml, use 100ml of naphta and somewhat more of acetone to clean it up, boil the residue in 300ml of 95 proof ethanol (denatured is fine) and yield 1+ gram of psilocybin.
This is a slight modification of American patent 3183172 and 3192111. But... WHOA!
That is a lot of ingredients and solvents! Cause: Hofmann's mycelium was just 0.2 percent strong. I bet the mycelium was harvested prior to pinning.
With a pf tek setup I guess you need 120 grams of dried unopened carpophores (the harvest of 2 full spore syringes, used for 20 jars). Plus some three quarters of a Kg of brown rice and about 1/10 as much of all named solvents compared to Hofmann's approach.
But OTOH - the Hofmann approach is alot more simple if only the mycelium would be of a higher potency. Waiting until the mycelium pins is one option, another is to use something else than cubensis mycelium. How about mycelium of Psilocybe azurescens or Panaeolus cyanescens for this? I have read somewhere that these mycelia are of 2/3 the potency of Psilocybe semilanceata mushrooms.
How interesting! I hope the Hive doesn't mind I have shared my brainstorm session of today!
bibliopharmacophile
(Hive Addict)
02-09-03 07:02
No 405955
That was an interesting answer from the old geezer Shulging. Thanks!
Accept No Imitations, There Can Only Bee One; www.the-hive.ws
(Hive Bee)
02-09-03 08:36
No 405967
from:
http://jeremybigwood.net/JBsPUBS/JBScien
We obtained quantitative extraction of psilocybin and psilocin from powdered freeze-dried mushrooms after stirring for 12 hours in methanol at roomtemperature. The standard (...) indicated 90 +/- 5% recovery for both psilocybin and psilocin. (...)Extraction at higher temperature or in a Soxhlet extractor led to partial or complete loss of psilocin although loss of psilocybin was generally less than 20%. The methanolic extracts could be stored in a freezer at minus 5 centigrade for over 1 year with little change, although storage at room temperature led to complete loss of psilocin and some loss of psilocybin within a few months.
bibliopharmacophile
(Hive Bee)
02-09-03 14:59
No 406048
Where I live, the only form of absolute alcohol readily available is 'methylated spirits' which I believe are approximately 5% water, 10% methanol and 85% ethanol. On the bottles it always says 'ethanol', which must be bs, because it has a slightly sharper nastier smell than ethanol. But I could be wrong. My chemistry teacher told me that methylated spirits, as sold here, is usually just ethanol with some bitter shit that makes people vomit.
ah, so who do I believe, what is the real answer?
Okay, so after reading mr shulgin's excellent information, I am thinking of another way to do it:
start with vodka. Vodka is close to 50% ethanol, 50% water. Psilocybin is soluble in ethanol, psilocin soluble in water. Using this should get everything.
take fresh mushrooms, fill a blender, add enough vodka to cover, add an amount of ascorbic acid (which can be gotten as powder) to prevent oxidation, and leave in a cool dark place for 5 days.
Filter mixture thoroughly, evaporate, wash resultant material with naptha, then acetone, recrystallise in the freezer with just barely enough vodka to get it all dissolved. Should, after about 4-5 days (assuming a basic distillation rig is used to evaporate with, result in differentiated crystals one psilocybin, one psilocin. the crystals could then be mixed with a small amount of ascorbic acid and sugar added, just enough to get the whole mixture into a sticky mass, then (messily) place what should be an adequate quantity for a dose or half a dose into an O cap and store in the freezer.
The sugar will prevent oxidation, as will the ascorbic acid, and in the freezer should last well over a year. The process is done long and slow to ensure full take-up of the psilocin
I know naaaathing.
(Hive Bee)
02-10-03 03:26
No 406166
I think the described simple soxhlet method indeed produces big transparent crystals. But they are of urea, not psilocybin. If I am correct (lilienthal feel free to correct me), the urea is the first alkaloid which is taken up by the condensed (no longer boiling) 190 proof ethanol in the soxhlet tube, and it is the last crystal which precipitates in the collected solvent.
I have a nice jpg of the large (half inch) urea crystals which were obtained with a simple soak for 5 minutes at roomtemperature in 96 percent ethanol.
(what was extracted was the residue which remained after the extraction of cubensis powder in 140 proof ethanol (of pH3 with HCl), evap down, cleaning with pet ether and acetone)
The residue was washed twice with cold 190 proof (96 percent) ethanol. The first wash made the ethanol yellowish, the 2nd wash remained transparent.
The solvent was removed from the residue by use of a balloon pipette, chilled to minus tenty centigrade (after soaking) for about 12 hours. Tiny crystals formed. Then the solvent was placed at roomtemperature again and the yellowish transparentcrystals grew over a period of three days (still submerged in 96 percent ethanol).
Then the crystals were filtered out, dried, photographed and placed in an oven. They melt somewhere between 150 and 160 centigrade. After cooling down, all what remains is a tiny bit brownish foam. Crystals are gone.
Unfortunately I do not have a website to link to, so if this forum is interested in the photo of the crystals please describe another way to post it (I can reduce the pic to less than 50Kb).
White (probably psilocybin hcl) crystals were obtained after the cold ethanol wash of the residue: the residue was extracted with boiling 190 proof ethanol. The ethanol was removed with a pipette and cooled to 4 centigrade. Then it went milky white. The dust-fine crystals showed an orange color reaction with freshly prepared Marquis reagent.
The lesson which I have learned today - again please correct me if I am wrong - is that it is really easy to get fooled when you try to obtain pure alkaloids from mushrooms. The nice big transparent crystals which are so easily obtained are of urea.
But urea is simple to recognize. If the mushroom extract is acidified with HCl, all alkaloids which crystallize from it are HCl salts. Urea HCl is yellowish, no matter how many times it is cleaned with something nonpolar. Psilocybin crystals are white.
bibliopharmacophile
(Moderator)
02-10-03 04:27
No 406176
That color thingy doesn't proof anything about the identity of your crystals. Until you do some (simple) tests on it, it could be everything.