Before trying this process, inform yourself of the potential dangers of trying to smoke the extract itself by reading a warning at sagewisdom.org going here.
IMPORTANT SAFETY WARNINGS:
ITEMS YOU WILL NEED
DO YOUR MATH
As the quantitative potency of Salvinorin leaves little room for error, it's vital to know the quantities of the substances you are working with.
| A | Quantity of leaf material being used | ___ | grams | |
| B | How much acetone is needed to extract it | ___ | liters | Divide line A by 100 (1 liter needed per 100g leaves) |
| C | How much Salvinorin expected per gram | ___ | mg/g | If unsure, 2.5mg per gram is a reasonable guess |
| D | Amount of Salvinorin expected | ___ | mg | (Multiply line A times line C) |
| E | Number of moderate .5mg doses this represents | ___ | doses | Multiply line D times 2 |
Note:
This process will yield an extremely potent extract and the Salvinorin can be very close to pure. It WILL BE far too strong to attempt smoking it. I only use this process to enhance leaf and I am very careful to keep track of how much leaf I extract from, and how much leaf that I am adding the extract back to. Modifying the process by using a lower temperature solvent, or shortening the soak time can produce a purer extract, but at a greater cost of efficiency. In other words, much will still be in the leaf. As it is, this process will probably leave between 15-20% of the Salvinorin in the leaf.
OBJECTIVES: 1. Getting the salvinorin out of the leaf with acetone 2. Getting the acetone out of the salvinorin 3. Getting the unwanted green substances out of the salvinorin
FIRST OBJECTIVE: GETTING THE SALVINORIN OUT OF THE LEAF
Getting the most of the salvinorin out of the leaf with the fewest impurities is the first step.
Acetone is the best and most practical substance known for getting salvinorin out of the leaf. Acetone also gets other unwanted substances out of the leaf as well, but fortunately, it leaves most unwanted stuff behind. Very cold (0-30 degrees F) acetone picks up salvinorin just as well, but picks up less unwanted substances, so putting the acetone in the freezer is a good idea (it will not freeze).
Pour the acetone over the leaf material, which may be crushed, powdered, or whole. Various reports of other people indicate that all of the Salvinorin should be picked up within 2 to 12 minutes. (See Salvia Divinorum/Purity vs Quantity to help decide how long to soak).
Acetone will dissolve the salvinorin directly into the liquid. Anything that settles to the bottom of the acetone is unwanted, and if you're using crushed or powdered leaves, the vast majority of the material will quickly settle to the bottom. After bathing the leaves in acetone, pour the acetone into another container. You should try to keep only the clearest part of the acetone. Pure salvinorin is clear or white. Any visible green, brown, or black colors are unwanted leaf impurities which you should not keep.
After you pour off the acetone, sediment particles will continue to fall out for hours. Again, these are particles you don't want, and none of them are Salvinorin. Put the acetone somewhere dark (as light ruins Salvinorin when it's in acetone), and cover it so the acetone doesn't evaporate. After several hours, pour the acetone into another glass container, making sure the sediment stays behind. (You can do this several times. It is OK if you waste some of the acetone solution in the process, as the Salvinorin is throughout all the liquid, and not just at the bottom. You really want as much junk out as possible, and as long as something is falling out as sediment on its own, this is the easiest way of getting rid of it that you could ask for, and well worth the time up front.) When dried, the unwanted sediment will usually look like a silty light brown powder.
After you are done, your acetone solution will either be black, brown, or greenish to clear. It is still usable in all of these states - the darker it is, the less pure it's going to be, or the more work (and wasted Salvinorin) it will take to clean it to purity. Regardless of the color, nearly all of the salvinorin is in the liquid and not in the original leaf material anymore.
SHORTCUT
You can use the acetone solution now to enhance some leaf at its current purity, simply by evaporating all of the solution onto a quantity of leaf material. The approximate potency can be guessed simply by dividing the weight of the starting leaves by the weight of the leaves you're depositing it to. For example, if you started with 100g leaves, and you're depositing it onto 20g of leaf material, you're making 5x. Other reports on the Internet indicate that if you want a strength greater than 5x, you'll need to remove more impurities or you'll end up with something that's too sticky to work with (it will clump together and is extremely difficult to pour or smoke).
SECOND OBJECTIVE - GETTING THE ACETONE OUT OF THE SALVINORIN
This part is easy, as acetone evaporates into the air. What's important is to do this safely, where the massive quantity of vapors will not cause an explosion, a fire, or damage to things. Having a fan (with a brushless motor) blow over the container will greatly accelerate the process, which will take several hours. The fan should blow a gentle breeze across the dish. You don't want the fan to blow away any of the very light crystals, flakes, or powder that will form when the acetone is gone.
When the acetone is completely gone, you will have one or more of the following:
Salvinorin will be present in all of them, so don't throw any of it away.
THIRD OBJECTIVE - GETTING UNWANTED SUBSTANCES OUT OF THE SALVINORIN
Pour naphtha into the bowl. If there is any material stuck to the bowl, the naphtha will unstick it. Let it settle at least half an hour, just like you did to the acetone. However, the Salvinorin is in the sediment, not the liquid. You will remove the majority of the naphtha by pouring it off, so transferring it into a tall container instead of a bowl is desirable at this point.
As long as the naphtha is getting dark, it is removing unwanted garbage from your Salvinorin. After letting everything settle, pour off the top half of the naphtha solution and discard it. Add some fresh naphtha, stir lightly, and let it settle. Keep repeating this process until the naphtha no longer takes on color. Once you're done, you can separate the naphtha by pouring off the top half, and then evaporating the rest away with the fan, just like you did with the acetone.
At this point, you most likely have one of the following:
Both of these can be used to make 10x extract. To deposit it back onto leaves, redissolve the material in acetone and evaporate it onto the leaves as described in the Shortcut above. (And, by all means, if more dark gunk starts falling out of the acetone, then discard it.)
When I did my first extraction using this method with 200g of leaf, I had let the extract completely dry and then put all of my dry crusty crystaline extract into about 30 ml of Reagent Grade Methanol. Immediately, the Methanol took on a dark green color and I could see crude Salvinorin that contained lots of small crystals fall to the bottom of the container. Because of this, it was obvious that I had some highly purified extract to begin with. Although Methanol will work fine to remove the green, I should have used Naphtha instead of Methanol because Salvinorin is far less soluble to Naphtha. This way, I loose less of the Salvinorin to the solvent when I later pour it off from the Salvinorin concentrate laying in the bottom of the container.
Naphtha is also used in a process called partitioning. It is used to clean up extremely impure extracts that contains so much chlorophyll that the extract appears to be made of black wax. This is the kind of extract that you will get if you try to extract from powdered leaf for more than just a few seconds with either Acetone or Isopropyl. You can also get it if you soak whole leaf in either of these solvents at either room temperature, or for too long a period of time. If you were to use the partition process to clean up a Salvia Divinorum extraction, you would first completely dry your extract out and then reconstitute it with 100% Methanol. Then, after completely dissolving your extract in it, you would mix the Methanol with an amount of water that would add 20% to its total volume (80% Methanol, 20% water). This is then mixed with an equal volume of Naphtha inside of a glass container called a Separatory Funnel. A Separatory Funnel is just a cone shaped sealable glass container that has a drain valve on the bottom. Basically, the partition process is used to remove an undesired component of one solvent by transferring it into the other. The whole jug, with its two layers of solvent is agitated, or shaken to get the two solvents to temporarily mix together, something that they normally won't do without shaking it up. When you stop shaking the funnel, the solvents will separate into two distinct layers again, which could take several hours, the bottom layer of solvent is then removed by opening the valve in the bottom of the container. To get your cleaned up extract, the lower layer of fluid is the one you want to keep, it will pour off first. You then evaporate off all of the Methanol and you should have a much nicer extract, at a cost, since you will loose some of the Salvinorin. In the partition process, about 10% of the Salvinorin is lost to the Naphtha, but it also removes a large percentage of the green waxy substances from the Methanol, leaving a much cleaner extract.
If you use Naphtha to quick wash your high concentration extract (I'm not talking about the partition process, just a quick wash with Naphtha), you are likely to loose some of the Salvinorin, the same as with the partition process, but I doubt that it will be as much, but I just don't know if it is more, or less. When the Naptha is used to clean up a dry extract from this cold extraction method, I wouldn't bother trying to recapture any lost Salvinorin out of the Naphtha. Just add the Naphtha to some leaf that you later intend on making some 5X out of. It can't hurt, but might help. When having cleaned up an extract from a large amount of leaf, be very careful, it may add for more than I have any idea of. You will be working in untested areas when you do this.
If you have partitioned your extract, the larger portion of the lost Salvinorin can be recovered out of Naphtha by doing a process called "back washing" the (green) Naphtha with a fresh mixture of Methanol/water, added right back to the Naphtha in the separatory funnel (After the Methanol w/Salvinorin? has been drained off). For those of you who don't know, when Naphtha and Methanol/water are mixed together in a separatory funnel, the Naphtha floats on top of the Methanol because adding water to the Methanol makes it immissible to Naptha, otherwise they will mix. If you were to try to add strait Methanol and Naphtha together, they would readily mix and no partition between the solvents will occur. Crystallization Notes:
The refined process, with two soaks is just for extracting out somewhat pure Salvinorin, to use to make your own extra-strength leaf, such as I make by putting 1.5 mg of Salvinorin on only 20 mg of leaf. At this concentration, you don't want ANY black wax. That is the only reason I always do this process using two separate extractions, to get one extract that is very clean, which will not require further cleaning. The second quick extraction *might* have some black wax making it unsuitable for use with very small quantities of leaf, such as 25 mg or less. As I explained above in another paragraph, even if you do end up getting some black wax in either your first, or second bowl, there is a way around the problem by putting the dry extract in some Naphtha (Rosinol lighter fluid) and then pouring off everything but the layer that will settle out on the bottom of the container. Obviously, you need to let the container set so that the crystaline material will settle out. You may want to let it sit several hours, or even a whole day or more before pouring it off because I have found that you loose less Salvinorin this way. When doing an initial cleaning of a high cocentration extract, I always let the Methanol sit for at least 24 hours because a new layer of crystal will often form on top of the initial settlings hours later, but it can also take more than 24 hours for it to form, up to several days. If you are using either Methanol, or Isopropanol to clean your extract, then it is very important that you never throw away the fluid that you pour off. This is because although the Methanol will have more green in it than I want to put back on extra-strength leaf, it will also have lots of Salvinorin in it too. I just use it to enhance leaf to make some 5X to 10X, or what ever. When I last extracted 200g of leaf, the dried extract weighed about two grams. When I added all of it to just 30 ml of Methanol and let it sit for a few hours, most of the pure extract fell to the bottom of the container.
Because I limited the amout of Methanol to just a few ml, the Methanol was completely saturated with Salvinorin, or had far more Salvinorin in it than it could hold in the dissolved state. If I had used a large quantity of Methanol, all of the Salvinorin would have then dissolved into the fluid. Because of this, it is very important to use only the minimal amount of Methanol needed to get the green out. Methanol can hold far more many mg of the waxy impurities than it can hold Salvinorin. When I poured the green stained Methanol out to separate it from the clean extract in the bottom of the glass, about 75 mg or more of my Salvinorin went with it! You don't want to use too much Methanol to clean up your extracts because it will hold at least 3.15 mg of Salvinorin per ml when using pure Salvinorin, but, when the Methanol has other substances that were also extracted from the leaf in it, a friend of mine found that it can hold much Salvinorin per ml than if your just working with pure Salvinorin alone. Because of this, use your Methanol very sparingly, it may have many more mg of Salvinorin than you think!
One of the tricks that people use to grow crystals is to warm Methanol up and then add crude Salvinorin to it. Because Methanol will hold much more Salvinorin when it is warm then when it is at room temperature, the crystals slowly start to form as the liquid cools. In some circumstances Salvinorin will just drop out of the fluid in a crude form, without crystalizing. Sometimes you need to seed the fluid with a crystal from a previous extraction, this can kick things off. Even so, I have seen Salvinorin just drop out of the fluid as a non-crystal substance, even as white or light-green flakes. It can look like small sandy particles, flakes, a fine sludge, or crystals. If pure enough, it will be greenish, grayish, white or translucent with a yellowish green tint. One of the most pronounced things about Salvinorin in solvent such as Isopropyl, Ethanol, or Methanol is that it loves to stick to glass. Unless it is a flake, or even individual crystals which sometimes won't stick. In crude form, it will usually stick to the glass, but can be easily swished away by jiggling the solvent in the glass around. When I cleaned up my last quick Acetone extraction by pouring the dry extract into Methanol, the Salvinorin that fell out into the bottom of the small 50 ml glass container was almost all crystalline, mostly greenish translucent crystals, but the crystals didn't stick to the glass at all, until I poured all of the Methanol out, then they just all stuck together to form a greenish gray sludge because they had not dried. They didn't look like crystals at all after I removed the Methanol. One of the methods used to keep crystals from adhering together is to pour out the Methanol, or what ever you used to grow them in, and then pour in a small amount of Naphtha to keep the crystals from sticking together. Then, you can more easily separate the individual crystals for drying, since Naphtha doesn't like to hold Salvinorin, it will just evaporate off without dissolving your crystals away.
Notes about Acetone and Black Wax:
I don't want you to think that getting black wax means that your extract is ruined, it isn't. You just won't get the purity that makes enhanced leaf easier to smoke. For me, this is important. Before smoking Salvia I had never smoked anything and due to this I have a low tolerance for smoke of any kind. Since I only smoke this once a month, usually less, I am not building a tolerance for smoke. A regular extraction with 99% Isopropanol isn't bad at all if your making some 5X, at that concentration it isn't hard to smoke, but go higher and it gets too sticky. For making your own 10X you need to get the Salvinorin out without the gunk. If your considering using industrial or hardware store Acetone, I would N E V E R consider using hardware store bought Acetone. I have tried, but have not found one brand of industrial Acetone that is worth considering for this use. They all had dangerous contaminates. In my personal opinion, I only recommend reagent grade (or higher grade) Acetone. If you use reagent grade, then there is very little, if any, residue from the solvent left behind once it is all evaporated off. There are only three kinds of Acetone that I would consider using; Food Grade, HPLC Grade and Reagent Grade.
HPLC grade acetone is guaranteed to not have trace impurities that will affect transmission of light over a certain spectrum. It is not necessarily purer than reagent grade acetone, but it often is. What one looks for is a "Food Grade" solvent. It isn't necessarily purer than Reagent Grade, it just has fewer toxic impurities. Food Grade chemicals and solvents are not very common. However, in my opinion and the opinion of many others, Reagent Grade Acetone has so minutely few impurities that your splitting hairs when choosing between regular reagent grade and food grade solvents. Although, if you can find it, I would obviously choose "Food Grade." I have heard of it, but I have never actually seen it. This isn't to imply that any amount of Acetone should be left in your leaf, it is still poisonous. That, and it is more flammable than regular gasoline! No electric or static sparks, or open flame! Although you may not see the sparks, many types of fans produce sparks that are hidden from view inside of the fan housing. Because of this, most fans are hazardous to use around solvents like Acetone. If you must use a fan to evaporate out the Acetone, find the type designed for use in explosive atmospheres. If nothing else, keep it outside away from anything that might burn, including your own body.
The greater portion of what I know about Salvinorin, and everything that I know about the solubility of Salvinorin in different solvents came from a chemist friend of mine. Without his help, I wouldn't know much of this and I am doubtful that I would have ever found out about these processes.
Cut and Paste from another individual: Salvinorin Solubility - Methanol - Ethanol - Isopropanol:
I have finally finished some real solubility tests for pure Salvinorin A in A.R. grade methanol, ethanol and Isopropanol. I killed 2 birds with one stone as I simultaneously checked the re-crystallization of salv. A.
3x3 mg of reasonably pure salv A was soaked in .5ml of each solvent. Heat was applied to dissolve the crystals. I noted that isoprop had a harder time and may have not dissolved the salv. A completely.
After cooling to room temp of 27C, microscopic sized crystals formed in all 3. The larger ones were from the methanol, then ethanol followed by tiny ones in isoprop.
All 3 were cooled down in the fridge to speed up the crystallization. I let them warm to room temp for an hour, with occasional stirring. They were filtered and analyzed. Here are the results: Salv. A, mg/ml @ 27C
Methanol: 3.15 Ethanol: 1.28 Isopropanol: .74
It is interesting to note that ethanol has about the same solubility at -3C.
Please note that the presence of other impurities, such as those sometimes co-extracted from leaves, can vary the solubility to a very large extent, generally increasing the solubility and sometimes making crystallization impossible. I use ethanol for crystallization, but it looks like Isopropanol could also be effective.
Here is a standardization procedure so that you can add Salvinorin back to leaf. This came from a well known Salvia Divinorum researcher:
The method is simple: Dissolve a measured quantity of Salvinorin A in a solvent, and then absorb it onto a measured quantity of crumbled salvia leaves. Evaporate off the solvent, and Wha-la! Here is a more detailed explanation:
To make salvinorin A enhanced leaf that contains 15 mg salvinorin A per gram of leaf, dissolve 12.5 mg* pure salvinorin A in 1 ml of warm acetone, and then add 1 gram of crumbled salvia leaves and stir. The leaves will absorb the salvinorin A-containing acetone. Place the container in a well-ventilated location and wait for the acetone to evaporate off. Stir the leaves occasionally during the evaporation period. Make sure that the acetone has evaporated completely—there should be absolutely no smell of acetone left on the leaves.
I strongly advise against smoking leaf that contains more than 15 mg salvinorin A per gram unless the individual doses can be accurately weighed. At this concentration, the amount of smoke produced provides a certain amount of safety because it makes it difficult for a person to accidentally inhale too large a dose in a single inhalation. If you have a precision balance that can accurately weigh small doses, then stronger concentrations are preferable since the amount of smoke can be minimized without compromising safety.