Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Getting high from sawdust? ORLY?

Head down to your local native furniture place. Ask if they do their own wood milling, or if not, where they get it from. Whichever source, pose as a super-cheap waste removal company and offer to take away their sawdust en masse. Do your research so you're far cheaper then anyone else in Perth. That way, you can get, like twenty kilos of raw sawdust for about five bucks. Karri dust is what we're here for, because it's lignin can yeild raw syringaldehyde. So, get as much kiln-dried Karri sawdust as possible, and with anything else, burn it, bury it, or press it into peat and sell it to garden stores. Now, for those of you overseas, there are several species of eucaplyptus found in the U.S and Europe which also can be used, but Karri's my favourite so that's what I'm doing here.

With the karri lignin, we need oxidise the crap out of it. Preferred method here is with nitrobenzene and alkali. Simple step, bake that shit in the oven until it's thoroughly dry, oxidise and just clean up the mush and extract the resulting syringaldehyde, which is roughly 5% of the dry weight.

Methylate the free phenolic group on syring. with either dimethyl sulfide and KOH (for large scale synths) or diazomethane (for nano). if you didn't fuck up, this will give you 3,4,5-trimethoxybenzaldehyde. Keeping the rxn hot, say about 70*C can net you as good as 60% yield. Next phase is a Kindler/Peschke with bisulfite, giving us 3,4,5-TMB Cyanohydrin, which we reflux with acetic anhydride to give us the acetate salt.

This sounds complicated - And it is. If you're too dumb to know what I'm talking about, you're too dumb to do it. That being said, Any chem major could pull this particular reaction off, and I'm sure there must be at least one of you out there in the interwobs.

With this for our starter, we condense the substituted benzaldehyde with malonic acid and reduce the resulting cinnamic acid. Finally, a Hoffman degradation is performed on the trimethoxyphenylpropionamide, yielding 3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine, aka, mescaline.

With optimum yields, you should be able to get about THIRTY GRAMS of pure mescaline from 10 kilos of sawdust. That's one garbage bag full, in exchange for a moetherfucking OUNCE of pure, perceptive peyote, which is 200 full-blown hallucinatory doses.

Mescaline is nifty stuff. it's like taking reality, and exaggerating it about a zillion times. Perfect for meditation, transcendations or just some serious soul-searching. It's a lovely drug to go to highschool on.

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