Have you ever tried making your own crude Salvia divinorum extract at home, and wondered why it looks like a black sticky mess that smokes harsher than a porcupine eating competition? Well, fear not, for this guide will ensure a quality finished product rivalling that of store-bought extracts.

This extract will make approximately 10g of unstandardised 10x extract. Provided you can use a calculator, the quantities detailed below can be jiggled around to make any strength extract you want.

Equipment

100g Salvia divinorum Leaf

You can get Salvia divinorum Leaf all over the Internet.

1x Large Saucepan

Just a regular large saucepan. Make sure it’s clean. No one wants to find the remains of burnt on spaghetti in their pipe.

1x Pyrex Tray

A large, wide, glass dish essentially. You might find a casserole dish fits the bill.

1x Small Glass Container

Anything will do, even a jam jar.

1x Tall, Narrow Glass Container

The perfect tool for the job is a boiling tube, but anything remotely similar will do.

1x Pipette

Not everyone has access to calibrated volumetric pipettes so anything that looks like an eye dropper will do. That means, a thin tube with a rubber bit on the end which you can squeeze.

2lt Propane Based Solvent

No not propane, but either propan-2-ol (AKA Isopropanol, Isopropyl Alcohol, Rubbing Alcohol) or propanone (AKA Acetone). They need to be 99% pure at least. Don’t even think about using nail varnish remover.

300ml Naphtha

The best source of commercially available naphtha in the UK is lighter fluid.

Step 1 – Powder Your Leaf

The first thing to do is weigh out your 100g of Salvia divinorum Leaf. Remove 10g of the best leaves from your stash and set them aside for later. The remaining 90g needs to be powdered using your trusty coffee grinder. It’s high RPM motor and stainless steel blades are no match for your dried salvia leaf. It’s worth pointing out that although the leaves may not instantly grind, you’ll have to give them a few minutes, but they WILL powder eventually. Use the grinder in 1 minute bursts, allowing the motor to cool in between. When you remove the lid from the grinder, unless you want to look like Shrek, do it in a fume cupboard. The coffee grinder will reduce the leaf to a flour like consistency which will billow out as soon as you remove the lid, turning everything in the immediate vicinity a sexy shade of green.

Step 2 – Extract The Salvinorin-A

Now you have 90g of powdered leaf, get it in your saucepan and pour in enough solvent to comfortably cover your leaf. Stir it constantly for 5 minutes and then let it sit for 8 hours or so. After that time, enough of the salvinorin should have dissolved in your solvent, so you can now carefully pour off the liquid in your saucepan into your Pyrex tray, being careful enough to leave all the solids behind.

If you’d like to make sure you extract as much salvinorin-a as possible, you may repeat this step once more.

Step 3 – The Waiting Game

As simple as it sounds, you have about 16 hours in which to twiddle your thumbs, watch some paint dry, or whatever you feel like. During this time, don’t even think about touching your extraction, and make sure it’s in a dark place. Light has a nasty habit of destroying salvinorin-a in solution. The purpose of this step is to let any sediment such as tannins fall out of the leaf which are hard to extract later on.

After the 16 or so hours are up, you may pour off the remaining liquid into the original saucepan, provided you emptied out the powdered leaf earlier.

Step 4 – Evaporating The Solvent

This takes forever, is incredibly boring and will give you terrible stomach ache if you don’t do it somewhere well ventilated. The best, safest and longest method of evaporating the solvent is in the dark, in the absence of heat. Remember, the solvent is flammable, so applying heat to it should be avoided. Blowing air across the solvent will speed things up substantially, so if you have a fan, use it, but again, only somewhere well ventilated. If the fan produces a spark, it could ignite the vapour, blowing up both you and your extraction.

When the evaporation is complete, you should be left with a load of black gunk on the inside of your container. This is as far as most people get with their extractions and is the reason why the end result is a black sticky mess. That’s ok for about 5x or 6x extracts, but any stronger than that and it becomes unsmokable.

Step 5 – Purification

When your black gunk is completely dry, you can scrape it out of your container and place it into a tall, narrow container. To this, add 50ml or so of naphtha. The naphtha dissolves the green/black waxes but leaves behind the salvinorin-a. After you add the first lot of naphtha, allow the container 30 minutes or so to settle, then pipette off two thirds of the naphtha and discard it. Repeat this process at LEAST 5 more times until your salvinorin-a is no longer a black colour. If you keep washing with naphtha, it will eventually turn white, however that kind of purity isn’t necessary for making 10x extract. If you were making something like 40x or 60x (not recommended), then the higher the purity, the better.

After the last naphtha wash, remove two thirds one last time and this time, allow the naphtha to evaporate off, leaving you with relatively pure salvinorin-a. DO NOT try and smoke/ingest this, as even a tenth of a milligram can be too much for some people.

Step 6 – Fortification

Now we have the salvinorin-a from 90g of leaf, we shall add it back to the 10g of quality leaf you set aside in Step 1. Although not completely accurate, you can see this is why it’s called 10x extract, as there’s 10x the amount of salvinorin-a in the finished product.

To do this, we place the salvinorin-a we produced in the previous step into the saucepan and add to it the same amount of solvent we used in step 1. Stir it round for a few minutes to ensure it has all dissolved. Next, add the 10g of leaf to your small container and pour the contents of the saucepan over it.

You can now evaporate off all of this solvent as before, until all of the solvent has evaporated.

The finished product is approximately 10g of leaf, looking a little darker than normal, 10 times as strong.

Sick of that nauseating feeling and blurred vision from eating Morning Glory (Ipomeia violacea) seeds? Why not try making your own hallucinogenic vodka! Investing a bit of time and money into your Morning Glory seeds will result in a much more refined experience, keeping negative side effects to a minimum.

This relatively straightforward process will give you about 10 trips assuming 6g of seeds for a standard dose.

Equipment

100g Morning Glory Seeds

You can buy Morning Glory seeds all over the internet or find them growing naturally.

1lt Good Quality Vodka

Since you want to enjoy this, don’t cheap out on the vodka. Ensure at least 40% alcohol by volume.

600-1000ml Naphtha

The best source of commercially available naphtha in the UK is lighter fluid.

Filters

If you have lab filters, use ‘em. If not, a coffee filter. If you can’t find them, use a tea towel.

Pint Glasses

Don’t worry, you won’t be drinking your product out of these, we’re just using them to hold liquid. If you have access to lab beakers, use those.

1x 2lt Bottle

This can be a plastic pop bottle or anything. You’ll be using it for shaking things up.

1x Coffee Grinder

A small handheld coffee grinder, used to powder coffee beans. You can also get away with a pepper grinder but it takes forever.

Step 1 – Powder Your Seeds

Simple enough. Take your 100g Morning Glory seeds and grind them into a powder using any means necessary. If you have a coffee grinder, use it. If not, empty out a pepper mill and try that. It might take an age, but the finer ground they are, the higher the quality of the end product.

Step 2 – Get Rid Of The Nasty Stuff

Take your 100g of ground seeds and pour them into your 2lt pop bottle. To this, add your 600-1000ml of naphtha and shake. Shake for as long as possible. Let it sit in the naphtha for about a day with as much shaking as your arms can handle.

Step 3 – Filter And Dry

Yes, it realy is that easy. Filter the contents out using your filter/beaker tea towel/pint glasses and let the seeds dry until they no longer have the slightest scent of petrochemicals about them.

Step 4 – Extract The Good Stuff

First off, clean that 2lt bottle out with plenty of water, then take your litre of vodka and pour it into the 2lt bottle. Add to that the dry seeds from the previous step. Just like step 2, shake this up until your arms hurt and let the seeds sit in the vodka for three days this time, shaking it whenever you can.

Step 5 – Filter

Just like step 3, filter the seeds again. Squeeze all the vodka out of them then throw them away. By this time your vodka should be looking a little cloudy and brown. It will also have developed a somewhat nutty flavour. Let’s hope you like nuts.

Step 6 – Serve Chilled

Measure out 100ml of your vodka and drink it however you like. With coke, over ice or through your eye. You can now enjoy your LSA trip without wanting to throw up.