My old man (although this was yesterday) decided to start making up his own e-juice, and got a couple of bottles of flavourings that I'd appreciate, as well as the american red tobacco flavour he sticks with, which I don't like.
Basically he got a bottle each of pure nicotine (fucking dangerous to handle, IMO, since the stuff itself won't come out of the little dropper plug-cap (like you get on essential oil bottles) its too viscous to come out at any proper rate, and some each of propylene glycol and glycerine, that way the proportions can be varied and flavours customized so one hasn't to rely on off the shelf offerings, some of which are pleasant, others, such as one he keeps getting sent free, is unusable because it is absolutely vile. Stinks and tastes worse than it smells. The only way to use that stuff, is (and he just won't touch it) if I apply a few drops of the diluted, vile tasting stuff transdermally).
The nicotine bottle, you need to lever out the dropper and use a long pipette (got plenty of those) and then mix with appropriate flavour, glycerine and propylene glycol to end up with e-liquid of chosen strength and taste. Now it means I can both make my liquid stronger than the commercial ready made offerings, he only uses I think 16mg/ml, I like mine at about 36mg/ml. And it is REALLY difficult to find anything like that, typically strongest I can find off the shelf is 24mg/ml.
The really good part though, is being able to dispense altogether with the glycerine. Decided to do that and use only propylene glycol/flavour concentrate/nicotine freebase because as it happens, I did an experiment as a kid, which involved chemical dehydration of glycerine by means of destructive distillation from anhydrous sodium or potassium bisulfate. Which dehydrates it into prop-2-ene-al, or to give it its common name, acrolein. Which is most unpleasant stuff, highly toxic, and I figured, since when the e-liquids available off the shelf get used with a powerful battery or a variable voltage/wattage one and the coil inside overheads the e-liquid, you get some really awful, caustic, choking fumes instead of pleasant flavour, and doing it just once or twice by accident means dumping the contents of the tank, and I clean it out too using something like dry isopropanol or methanol (not of course undenatured EtOH, since it is too valuable to waste, and if I were to buy mine from this country rather than eastern europe, I'd get brutally taxed half to death, never mind I (for the most part) don't plan to drink it, at least not without turning it into diethyl ether by distillation from fuming sulfuric acid [yes, obviously one doesn't drink it mixed with 98-99% H2SO4. At least, thats something you'd only be capable of doing once before dying slowly and horribly:P])
So I figured the glycerine is probably undergoing thermal cracking and dehydration to the enal, in the heating element of the e-cig. I'd know that godawful teargas for its stench and choking, burning vicious nature anywhere, after encountering it once.
And I am pretty sure that having glycerine in those e-liquids is NOT a good thing, and since people turn to them often as an alternative to carcinogenic tobacco...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AcroleinRead THAT and tell me you want to breathe it in. I'd be shocked if over time, in fact, the acrolein produced by overheating of glycerine in e-liquids isn't carcinogenic as hell. And if you'd encountered even one milliliter of pure acrolein, you'd never, ever want to encounter it again. Not without either a GOOD quality gas mask on and full face protection. Wouldn't want the stuff coming anywhere near my skin either. I made the mistake, after the experiment that involved it as a nipper, of pouring a surplus 0.5-1ml or so down the sink and flushing it with water. Turned the tap the wrong way, and hot, not cold water came out. The result was....painful to say the least, from the virulent cloud of..well teargas is accurate enough a description, only unlike most teargases, riot control agents aren't intended to be so damn toxic. The likes of pepper spray are mostly harmless, and military grade riot agents/tear gases/choking type chemical warfare agents are somewhat nastier, but not THAT nasty.
So I made up some e-liquid with propylene glycol as the diluent for the nicotine only, flavour, and no glycerine at all, and the resulting product is worlds better. No horrid choking fumes, even when I use the e-cig at its highest output settings. Previously I had to quickly press the on switch, on-off, on-off lather, rinse repeat to avoid overheating the glycerine content and resulting in acrolein production. Especially nasty if you don't notice the tank needs a refill and there is only a tiny amount of liquid left, which burns and leaves you coughing and choking and tearing up.
Now all I need do, to produce a product which should be ideal for my liking, is to replicate the reinforcing effect present in tobacco smoke, due to traces of MAOI (monoamine oxidase inhibitor) beta-carboline alkaloids, such as traces of harmine and hamaline, which as it happens, are, along with tetrahydroharmine, present in yage vine, which is used for making the psychedelic drug n,n-DMT (dimethyltryptamine) active orally, where otherwise, like serotonin, due to its close similarity (serotonin lacks the methyl groups on the sidechain amino nitrogen and has a hydroxyl moiety present on the 5' carbon of the phenyl half of the indole ring) so MAO-a chews up DMT and spits it out.
Ayahuasca is a traditional brew from the amazon basin region used as a ritual hallucinogen, and whilst individual recipes are as varied as the curanderos who prepare it, every shaman having his own proprietary blend of plants and admixtures more or less, the core is a beta-carboline MAO(a)I to prevent the degradation of the DMT, again sourced from various other plants. All I need do, is obtain a little yage vine, not difficult, in fact I might even be able to obtain a living cutting from a yage plant from someone I talk to if I offer suitable inducements for a rooted, little live plant, and in the meantime, buy a section of the vine of souls, and do an extraction, then add a little of the resulting beta-carboline MAOI mixture, so that the e-liquid then becomes, pharmacologically speaking, much closer and more reinforcing, like tobacco is. And ergo much more enjoyable. Since e-liquids use synthetic nicotine, the MAOIs aren't present and compared to smoking tobacco it is..well...distinctly 'missing' something. So not quite a proper substitute for the real thing.
Just a bit of better living through chemistry, and a little botanical alchemy for a project the next time I'm thirsting for something to do in the lab and haven't the time for anything truly interesting, but which will have a most useful result
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