Kaboom - DMT lab goes up in flames

c-doc · Oct 22, 2010

First of all: Hi! I'm new here.

Not sure if I should post this to Drug Chem or DMT, but here's a little story from the past, bluelight deleted the thread a while back, the responses I got there were lovely (when consequences were still uncertain; one person actually offered financial support). Unlike on some other forums where I received massive criticism and quite personal insults.

Well, since I just found out how hip this place really is, I thought I'd give it a go and do a repost, at the same time see what people are like over here. This happened in late Aug 2007 if I remember correctly.

Here's the original post:

Hey there guys!

I recently extracted a large amount of DMT (10kg bark). I had done a cleaning procedure with IPA and activated charcoal on it and after evapping the charcoal I am left with a white powder. So usually this is followed by a quick recrystallization which is done by dissolving in petroleum ether and evapping the solvent.

I first heated the solvent in a hot gravel bath. The gravel was heated with an electrical hot plate. This was done right next to an open window with a large fan blowing the fumes outside. I took the solvent out of the bath and added the DMT . So now I had about 50g DMT dissolved in 1.5liters Coleman Fuel, all inside of a beaker. For evaporation I poured the solvent into a flat dish when suddenly...

WHOOSH, all the dishes that had solvent in them caught fire. I dropped the beaker and another fire was lit on the floor, the carpet started to burn. I grabbed the solvent containing dishes and threw them out of the window, hereby burning my hands pretty badly. I then switched off the fan which was blowing fresh air (and therefore oxygen) into the flames. Since it didn't stop blowing right away I decided to throw the (burning!) fan out the window as well, smashing the glass of the window.

I then considered it to be the right time to get some water to pour over the flames, but had to realize my shoulder and hair had caught fire as well. I threw myself to the ground (like I had seen it done in movies before) without much luck. So the sheet was pulled of my bed and used to wrap around my torso and head, success, the fire was out.

I went on and got some water, put a seat of fire out, ran otu of water, called my dad for help. He came with water and put a few fires out himself. When he went back downstairs to get more water I put the last seats of fire out with the sheet I had previously used. The only thing burning now was the wall which was emitting thick smoke without flames being visible. All we could do now was to wait for the guys from the fire department to arrive which was, along with an ambulance, long alarmed by the neighbours.

It was by this time that I realized why all the time I could hardly see anything at all. I had obviously inhaled quite a large amount of DMT vapors (20-30mg) and was tripping pretty hard. I sorta started panicking and ran up and down the stairs for a minute or so, not knowing what to do. I ended up in the bathroom, realizing my pupils were dilated to infinity and skin was hanging off my face, hands, arms, shoulders. There were blisters up to the size of a human fist, filled with liquid all over the burn sites.

Then the pain started to kick in and I hid underneath the shower, turning the water to cold.

It took 15 minutes for the ambulance to finally arrive, they injected me with some ketamine and I passed out. I woke up the next day on an ICU in a hospital that specializes on victims of burning accidents.

In the protocol I found out that I had cooled my body down to 31°C (88°F) and at a later point stopped breathing. When I woke up my life was not acutely threatened anymore, but I had a fever of 39.8°C for another three to four days which I spent on the ICU. 8% of my body surface was burnt, ranging from second to third degree. It felt what I consider as extremely painful.

Anyway, I spent a few more weeks in the hospital after I was released from the ICU after 5 days and pondered what could've caused the accident. I came to the conclusion that the fan or the hot plate must have emitted a spark on the inside. The room was very well ventilated, but somehow the fumes must have reached a critical concentration in the air when I poured the liquid out of the beaker for them to be able to be lit by a spark like that. I'm still not certain, but this is about the only thing I could think of.

The Criminal investigators interviewed me, I told them everything, I might be going to jail.

But hey, life goes on...

Peace
Click to expand...

Later vice wrote an article about it, I didn't even get sent an issue for it (english language version isn't available over here).

KA-POOF!
What Happens When Drug Labs Explode?

It may seem like exploding meth labs are a recent phenomenon, but the exploding drug-manufacturing facility predates modern science. Chinese alchemists discovered gunpowder while searching for the elixir of immortality. Moonshine explosions have been a common diversion in rural life since the discovery of distillation. And when Albert Hofmann discovered psilocybin in magic mushrooms, he found that he could only synthesize the psychedelic using a highly explosive reagent. Each time he made a batch, he risked losing his laboratory in a giant flaming mushroom cloud.

Should the meth cook blow up in his trailer and burn on a pyre of paint thinner and nasal decongestants, is he any different than a Buddhist monk self-immolating for religious freedom? The meth lab is a phoenix. From its ashes rise new trailers with crystal plumages of radiant truth. In a more enlightened age there will be great monuments to the meth men and women who gave their lives to free your dopamine from the shackles of American drug laws.

But this phenomenon is hardly restricted to meth—there have been incendiary cathinone labs and cooks who ended up serving themselves accidental dishes of PCP flambé. What causes these explosions, and what does it feel like to have your body engulfed in flames fed by a powerful psychoactive drug? The closest I have come is setting my hair on fire while lighting a joint, so in order to answer these questions I called up my friend Horst in Germany, who is painfully experienced in the matter.

Vice: What happened?

Horst: I was running out of money and I was in school, so the idea was to distribute DMT on a large scale. At first I thought I was going to cook up a couple grams for some friends and make a buck or two. But the idea started growing on me that I really ought to make it available to a larger population. The problem was nobody really knows about DMT in Germany. Sometimes I couldn’t even give it away for free.

Then why stick with large-scale extractions?

Well, eventually I met these two drug-distributor guys who were in the Goa trance scene. They said they could sell the stuff and make it popular. By then I had no money to get materials, but they started to finance my extractions. They claimed to have buyers who would take 100 grams or more a month, which is quite a lot—about 2,500 doses.

How were you extracting the DMT?

I was experimenting with a lot of techniques, usually straight to base. I sent some of my product to a friend who worked at a laboratory in Boston. He’s since died of a fentanyl overdose, but he used to do NMR and mass-spectroscopy analysis and he said the purity of my DMT was close to 99.9 percent. My methods just kept getting more and more efficient. In the end, all of my extractions were done on at least 10 kilos of mimosa bark. Once the DMT had been separated from the bark, I used a vacuum cleaner to suck off the solvent containing the DMT from the surface. Kind of like a siphon, right?

Wait, you were using a vacuum cleaner?

Yeah, it was my own idea. You get inventive with all the DMT, you know? In retrospect, that was very dangerous because of all the sparks generated by the motor. It was probably my most reckless behavior during that entire time… except for an incident where I was boiling pots of gasoline over an open flame on a stove—that was also very risky.

Indeed. So tell me about your accident.

Well, I got an email from the business guys saying they wanted 20 or 30 grams the next day to see some profit, you know? Something always goes wrong when you’re rushed and I was trying to finish the extraction under pressure. All the windows were closed, and there was a fan blowing on the solvent/DMT mixture. Then it just made this sound. You would describe it like a poof? It was a strong poofing sort of sound. At the same instant as the poof I realized all these things around me had burst into flames: The walls were burning, jackets behind me were burning, the solvent with the DMT was burning, and the fire was spreading. I opened the window and threw the flaming DMT dish out with my bare hands, which also caught on fire. I was throwing everything in flames out the window. I looked and realized my fan was on fire, so I picked up the flaming fan and threw it through the glass. Then there was fire and glass everywhere. I also realized that my shoulders and hair were on fire, so I threw myself to the ground the way you see people do in movies, where they roll on the ground to put a fire on themselves out? I wasn’t very successful.

Wait, “stop, drop, and roll” didn’t work?

It does not work at all, it didn’t do anything! The fire went out for a second when I rolled over it, but then it was right back there again. I should add that I wasn’t wearing any clothes. Fortunately I did not catch fire down there. I managed to use my bed sheets to put out the fire on my body and put out most of the fires in the rest of my room, and then I went downstairs to look at myself in the mirror. It was at that moment I realized I had been inhaling a very large amount of DMT—probably equivalent to a quarter ounce of shrooms, and you know how that feels.

Yes… well, maybe not quite like that.

So everything around me was glittering and shimmering and blinking and moving and colorful. I was looking in the mirror and I realized all of my hair was burned away, as was my entire face. There wasn’t an untouched spot on my face. I looked at my hands and forearms, and straps of skin were hanging off one foot in length.

Ahhh!

Yeah, it looked horrifying. The first thing I thought was, “From now on I will always look like shit.” This was at my parents’ house, and I also felt really bad for setting their house on fire, you know? They put me through school and I repay them by building a drug laboratory under their roof. I ran into the shower because the pain started kicking in. The water must have been really cold because when the ambulance came I had hypothermia. They injected me with ketamine and on the way to the hospital I stopped breathing several times. I came very close to death. The doctors told me the burns on my arms would not heal, and I would need skin transplants, but it turned out that I was fully recovered after three weeks. I attribute that to these protein shakes I was drinking, but also… you might think it sounds, kind of weird maybe, but...

Yes?

You know the elves right? The machine elves or whatever you call them?

I know of them.

It might sound ridiculous to most people, but I associate my healing and the fact that I didn’t go to jail to the DMT elf magic. This was just the beginning of the large-scale distribution and if all had gone according to plan I would have been extracting kilos of pure DMT every year for money. I think that’s why the accident happened. I still don’t even know what sparked the fire—it’s totally mysterious. I believe there is something in the substance, some self-regulating mechanism that prevents it from becoming too popular. There is no reason why DMT should not be a household drug. It’s a smooth, wonderful experience. But there are lots of reports of other people who do large extractions and have terrible accidents or get caught, like these elves punish anyone who becomes greedy. And yet they are not evil or anything because they aided me in healing. They are just trying to maintain a balance.
Click to expand...

Sam_Stoned · Oct 22, 2010

Interesting.

Spicey Cat · Oct 22, 2010

There are SOOOOO many things wrong with these descriptions it is horrifying. i'm not even going to start. The tek described is unnecessarily complex and uses weird ingredients.

Just use my tek people, and don't get so fucking greedy. Pull single grams at a time, NOT ounces. Use it for yourself, to trade and to gift and the spice elves (read: your subconscious you fucking fools, WHO THE FUCK DOES KITCHEN CHEMISTRY IN THE NUDE!!!!!!) will ensure you do not blow yourself up. Also, anyone who boils pots of gasoline over an open flame deserves to be blown up or set afire.

http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/showthread.php?t=398828&f=457

Read very carefully, follow directions to the letter and again, don't get greedy.

c-doc · Oct 23, 2010

I might've been stupid and reckless, but I had everything down when it came to the extraction techniques. 10kg input -> 120g 99.9% DMT. I have an nmr and gc/ms analysis, if you don't believe me (though chances are you still won't believe it's my material that was being analysed once you see it). All that within 7-10days with a total cost of ~1100€. So fuck your tek. ;P

The whole process was done within 1.5l plastic bottles, the plant matter staying within those bottles (suspended in alkaline H2O) throughout the whole process, ready to be disposed post-extraction. No mess, no separation funnel, no smell (well no smell until the solvents had to be evapped, IPA cleaning, alkaline wash and recryst would follow).

The whole vaccuum cleaner, gas canister thing was back when I had less experience and was trying to make the process more efficient, less time consuming, more low profile after I had first been following one of those lame internet teks which can usually not be scaled up for my needs.

I was quite creative during those days. As with all things, I just became really reckless (/idiotic) with time, ultimately leading to the accident. In retrospect, it was a welcome incident and I wouldn't be where I am today without it. In fact, I might have subconsciously called for something like that to happen. That's the only way to explain my behaviour really.

Oh and about the use of "weird" ingredients... I used NaOH and Coleman Fuel. Not very exotic. For the cleaning processes I used: IPA, activated charcoal granula, heavily diluted Ammonia (1mol/l) and Heptan for recrystallization. None of those are exotic at all, eventhough Heptan can be hard to acquire in some places. This was just for the added benefit of even higher purity though, which I doubt I could've found a more suitable, less "weird" solvent for.

Edit: Your spiritual talk about the dmt elves' gift in combination with the following claim that certain people deserve to blow themselves up really seem quite hypocritical to me.

CannbisSouL · Oct 23, 2010

Just out of curiosity.. why were you doing chemistry nude?
Seems like you would want something in between your skin and chemicals if you happened to spill some..

Spicey Cat · Oct 23, 2010

Fuck your tek.

You are an unsafe amateur and possibly a troll.

My record and teks on this forum speak for themselves.

Coleman is the ONE naptha that has a nasty ass additive (used to as a rust preventative). Prove it by putting a bit on some glass and evaporating. You see that nasty, oily, green residue. Additive.

Ammonia? Only if you like a radically reduced yield.

My tek stresses safety all around. Seriously, did you even read what you originally posted?

My hypocrasy will take care of itself, thank you. i call it like i see it. Stupid is as stupid does.

i have never had an accident, spill or chemical burn. Hundreds of trips and about a hundred full blown breakthroughs. Never sold a microgram.

Mr.Writer · Oct 23, 2010

it sounded like bullshit to me

Xora · Oct 24, 2010

And on another note, that not a very good yield. Given time and patience using Spicey method you can yield almost 30 G per KG. Which should means something to trade weed for, and to be given away.. I can't understand thinking "Damn Im going to take something deepens the world around us and make fuckin moneysss". Thats a small minded attitude. Grow up, learn from what you experienced. Oh and your tech is dangerous and full of nastsy. Use Spiceys.

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Kaboom - DMT lab goes up in flames

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Kaboom - DMT lab goes up in flames

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Spicey Cat DMT Witch (says husband)

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