yes I think that should work and it is probably the easiest way to go about it. I don't know if it is the most effective. I think other salts could probably be used to make the acetone anhydrous as well, though I am not to sure which ones would be the best.

Make sure you add an excess of magnesium sulfate to get all of the water.

All I know is that calcium chloride reacts with amines and alcohols...i'm not sure if this would cause any problems with mescaline hydrochloride because it's a salt.

How does it react with amines or alcohols, especially amines? Sounds interesting. Perhaps it complexes with them, as it does ammonia, and with alcohol, as it does with water?

^ I haven't heard this.

http://designer-drugs.com/pte/12.162.180.114/dcd/chemistry/equipment/dryingagent.html

...that's a ref. for the incompatibility issue but I'll still post a ref. for why it doesn't work if I come across it.

You probably can't find anything because it's somewhat shrouded in boring-ass inorganic texts, maybe even analytical.

My one professor told me some time back but I can't remember. I'll go out on a limb and say that it's because the calcium dissociates in one way or another to the less electronegative nitrogen pairs such as amines/amides and hydroxyl groups(because of the oxygen bond) such as phenols and alcohols. My reasoning for this is because CaCl2 works fine on halides which are extremely electronegative but not so much the lesser electronegatives such as oxygen and nitrogen. Try looking under dipole movements in an inorganic lab book. That's probably the only way you'll find a word-for-word answer.

MgSO4<3

Every time I've tried drying acetone with MgSO4 I've found a little bit dissolved in the acetone. MgSO4 is a very effective laxative, BTW.

I haven't tried Ikowit's suggestion of using NaCO3, but you can buy NaCO3 at the grocery store where it's known as washing soda.

PP

I have to agree with you about the dark room gurus. There are several around here. One told me the other day that I could take my nasty drain cleaner H2SO4 and make it look great by adding a dash of H2O2. It took about a day to oxidize the nastiness out of it, and it now looks like lab grade.

I often wonder how these guys come up with this stuff!

Too bad about the A&H washing soda. I depend on it for a lot of things, but I think they have it in 20 lb bags at the pool store. Not under the same name, of course, but I believe it's added to balance the acid demand. (Buffer the pool?)

PP

hey are acquired easily and cheaply OTC

... any hints as to where?

I have to agree with you about the dark room gurus. There are several around here. One told me the other day that I could take my nasty drain cleaner H2SO4 and make it look great by adding a dash of H2O2. It took about a day to oxidize the nastiness out of it, and it now looks like lab grade.

I often wonder how these guys come up with this stuff!

Too bad about the A&H washing soda. I depend on it for a lot of things, but I think they have it in 20 lb bags at the pool store. Not under the same name, of course, but I believe it's added to balance the acid demand. (Buffer the pool?)

PP

No, really though.  It works. 
The equation:

2 NaHCO3 ----> Na2CO3 + H2O + CO2
168.014 g         105.99g

What I did:
Used a 100g reference weight to test the accuracy of my scale.  Reading: 100.01g
Weighed out 168.02g of Baking Soda purchased from the 24hour corner store.
Placed on frying pan, made of stainless steel or other fancy alloy.
Heated for 10min.  Almost nothing seemed to happen except strangely colored flashes apeared by the flame.
I let it cool, placed on the same scale:  105.6g


Suspicous of foul play, due to it being too easy, and too perfect, I made 2 solutions of distilled water, one with a pinch of baking soda out of the box, one with the obtained product from the above experiment.  Added Red Cabbage extract.  There was a very noticable difference in color, where the solution suspected of being Na2CO3, was much more greenish/yellow.  The baking soda solution, much stronger hue of blue/purple.

yes i'm the boiling in water method I've used before, often a procedure requiring Na2CO3 calls for doing this instead of sourcing washing soda or whatever, esp. where direct ingestion is to follow, like with GBL ->NaGHB.


I think another reason this was preferable was because there is a visual indication of the reaction finishing, because CO2 stops bubbling out.  It takes about an hour, was it?  Maybe a half hour.
This method, on the other hand can cause worry, cause even though CO2 must and will be released by the reaction, there is no liquid medium for the gas to bubble through, so it's invisible.

This was why I did some experimenting by calculating the molar weight.
In reality I didn't discover how immediate this was, it was heated for an hour initially, etc. etc. But looking closely I started noticing that little subtle hints of a reaction where happening for only a few minutes after turning the heat on, and then nothing more.  I discovered a new subtle hint yesterday:

The reaction does produce H2O, so once you turn the flame on, if you take a spoon and stir the NaHCO3 around a bit, youll notice it clumps for a few moments, and then with a bit of heating becomes dust-like grainy.  If you do this you can actually see the CO2 escaping,. it looks like little comets of powder shooting up, and then disappearing, pretty cool actually.

This could ofcourse be done on borosilicate glass as well, it'll just take a bit longer.

I do it for about 5 minutes now, yet I still suspect that I'm heating for maybe 5 or 10 times longer than necessary.