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Page 4 of 5 Making tincture
If reconstituting extracted salvinorin A into drinking alcohol keep in mind that ethyl alcohol holds only 1.8 mg of salvinorin A per ml. For comparison's sake, Daniel Siebert's tincture is said to contain about 1.36 mg of Salvinorin A per ml. It might be useful to aim for 1.4 mg per ml, and then dilute this to 50% alcohol in an aqueous solution. This will allow fairly rapid buccal absorption without the tissue damage that can be caused by 195 proof liquors such as Everclear. Keep in mind that 80 proof (40%) alcohol is common, and 80 proof vodka is the easiest, cheapest source of drinkable ethanol for most persons. As alcohol holds 1.4 mg salvinorin per ml, and water holds practically none, and a ml of 80 proof vodka holds only 40% ethanol, one might presume 1 ml of 80 proof vodka would hold .56 mg of salvinorin. An ethanol / water mix is likely to have different solubility characteristics than the average of water and alcohol though. Refer back to how adding 20% wate! r to methanol suddenly made that substance immiscible with naptha. It should be easy to take pure salvinorin crystals and calculate how much dissolves per ml, then aim for 50% of that (to prevent spontaneous crystallization in the solvent). I lack these numbers however. Email me if you find them. Solubilities:
It has been suggested that a warm or hot water pre-wash of dried salvia leaves could remove as much as 1/3 of their salvinorin content. Generally a pre-wash is not required, and is not recommended. However if you feel the need for it, use cold water in order to err on the side of caution. The data for the following table was collected using 15 grams of solvent for each gram of salvia leaf. Each involved a 16 hour soak at approximately 27 degrees C. All weights given are in gram units.
Salv. A, mg/ml @ 27C +/- 10% | Solvent | starting weight of leaf | salvinorin extracted | ratio of leaf to salvinorin extracted | | acetonitrile | .6 | .12 | .2 | | isopropyl alcohol 91% | 4 | .18 | .045 | | acetone | 2.7 | .19 | .07 | | ethyl acetate | 2.8 | .13 | .046 | | dichloromethane (DCM) | 3.3 | .16 | .048 | Acetone and isopropyl alcohol are at least as useful solvents as other more difficult to acquire chemicals. Acetone is appears to be significantly more effective. Acetonitrile is very effective, but very toxic and more difficult to acquire. [Editor's note: These solubilities were taken from the 'net. I've not attempted to verify them. A claim has been made that ethyl acetate should be a better solvent than is depicted here, but I'm not sure if this is true or not.]
salvinorin A solubilities, mg/ml @ 27C +/- 10% | solvent | capacity | comment | | acetone | ~23 | best solvent choice identified thus far | | methyl alcohol | 3.15 | ie. methanol | | ethyl alcohol | 1.28 | else where in this article this number is reported to be 1.8, anyone know what the real deal is? | | isopropyl alcohol | ~0.74 | this low carrying capacity indicates that this might be better used for cleaning the crystals rather than as an extraction solvent | | cold water | negligible | keep in mind that as water warms, it carries significantly more salvinorin | Larger crystals were formed by the solvents capable of holding more mg/ml. It is interesting to note that ethanol has about the same solubility at -3C as at 27C. That is to say that changing the temperature seems to have little effect on the solubility of salvinorin in methyl alcohol. Also note that as a general rule, the slower a warm solvated chemical is chilled, the larger the resulting crystals. Please note that the presence of other impurities, such as those sometimes co-extracted from leaves, can vary the solubility significantly, and often making crystallization difficult.
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