u/Shpongle123

Tuning Barrel + Powerkit

Melatonin ---> 5-MeO-T

60g of pTSA is dissolved in 300ml water, after full dissolution 15g of melatonin is added, now the reaction is refluxed for 8h, when it's done flask is put on a side to cool down a bit. Next 30% NaOH solution is added until pH12 is reached, after night in a fridge crytals are filtered and washed with solid amount of ice cold water, yielding decently pure mexamine (8,06g / 62%)

5-MeO-T ---> 5-MeO-DMT

5g of 5-MeO-T is dissolved in 100ml MeOH, beaker is put on an ice bath and temp brought to 0°C, with strong stirring 1,9ml of 37% formaldehyde is added followed after 10-15 sec by 0,5g of NaBH4. This is repeated 5 more times, at intervals of 15min allowing temp to go back to 0°C, so in total there was added 11,4ml formaldehyde and 3g NaBH4. Reaction temp was kept beetwen 0-10°C. When it's finished, r-r is transferred to a flask and MeOH stripped via distillation. Next 150ml of water is added to the flask, followed by 30% NaOH until pH12 is reached, solution is transferred into sep funnel, extracted with 2x25ml DCM, organic layer are combined and dried over Na₂SO₃, solution is filtered and evaporated on a hot plate leaving thick, golden honey goo.

Now I fucked up a bit and tried to crystallize the product using ethanol, xylene, even converting to hcl salt, non of these methods worked, I lost significant amount of the amine, giving an abysmal yield, but after all that hustle dissolving everything in boiling heptane and freeze precipitation came to be the winner, giving beautifully smelling 5-MeO-DMT.

In both cases reaction run very cleanly.