So, does this mean that if one soaked some dried plant material, properly ground, in a non-polar solvent, that the weak nature of the acidification would release the alkaloids?
SWIM thinks it needs a bit of a base kick to get it fully out, so he is trying out using turpentine and ~pH 12 water together to get the alkaloids out of a plant. However, an experiment he did previously, pre-extracting the plant material with ethanol, then dissolving the extract into a solution with one part demineralised water and the other part naptha, orange went into the water, green stuff went into the np, the orange had nothing in it, but there was mild activity in the stuff taken out of the np fraction. does this disagree with what you have said? It is possible that SWIM didn't treat the h2o part properly though. Further experiments need to be done at some point. Me and SWIM are intent on finding the most effective and OTC methods of extraction that take the least time and result in the cleanest possible alkaloids. A/B works, but other things may work too. A/B makes messy large volumes of aqueous extracts which are hard to work with and don't yield their goodies as quickly as other chemistry experiment results that SWIM has seen, so having successfully A/B'ed meth from rp/i/e reaction, but not from plants, he wants to see if there is better ways that aren't so goddamn messy.
