A purported two-step internet recipe for making the psychoactive compound DMT was tested and found to produce almost none. The second step, methylation of tryptamine, was analyzed with advanced mass spectrometry. Instead of DMT, the reaction yielded 47.4% 1-N-methyl-TMT, 21.0% TMT, 11.1% unreacted tryptamine, and a 0.5% trace of N-methyltryptamine. The work demonstrates that synthetic methods circulated online can be unreliable and produce largely unintended, non-psychoactive products.
DMT, a simple tryptamine with powerful psychoactive properties, reacts with dichloromethane during work-up or long-term storage, forming the quaternary ammonium salt N-chloromethyl-DMT chloride. Analysis of this side-product by gas chromatography ion trap mass spectrometry (GC-MS) yielded only degradation products, such as 3-(2-chloroethyl)indole and 2-methyltetrahydro-beta-carboline, while HPLC detected the original salt. Because GC-MS is standard for drug fingerprinting, the presence of these degradation products could lead to erroneous conclusions about the synthetic route of a DMT sample.