Just for the ease of example, I will write this for a 100 gram quantity of whole (dry) leaf. This should be easy to use as a basis for figuring smaller amounts, such as 10 grams of whole leaf to make 1 gram of enhanced leaf. You will need: 1000 ml of Technical or Reagent Grade Acetone chilled to 35 degrees F. 1 large stainless-steel, glass, or ceramic bowl. 100 grams of whole Salvia Divinorum leaf. When using this method without crushing your leaf up, or flattening it down into the bowl, you will probably need about 10 ml of Acetone per gram of leaf. You may be able to use half has much solvent, or less, if it is crushed up enough to be in flattened layers, rather than in bunches of crinkled up leaf. Also, with this process you can use as much leaf as you want, unlike other quick extraction processes, it doesn't matter. 1. Take 90 grams of whole dry leaf and moderately crush it, but DO NOT POWDER IT or this process will not work. When I say moderately crush it, I just mean very moderately, no where near fine. For example, crush one leaf into ten or so pieces, or don't even break it up at all, just put it in a bowl and smash it down as flat as you can. You just don't want to have your leaf anywhere near powdered. I only crush it to reduce the amount of solvent needed to cover the leaf. 2. Now put the leaf and the bowl that you intend on using for the Acetone soak (Glass, ceramic or stainless steel, not plastic.) in the refrigerator for a day. The bowl and the leaf just need to cool down to at least fifty degrees F 3. Once the bowl of leaf is thoroughly cooled, pour in the whole 1000 ml of cold 35 degree F. Acetone into the bowl, stir all of the crushed leaf around for about five to six minutes. 4. Pour the Acetone out into another container. Now add 10 grams of finely crushed Salvia leaf to the Acetone extract and let it evaporate completely down, be sure to stir it up really well so that it evenly mixes as the volume of Acetone evaporates down to just wet leaf. There can be a large amount of Salvinorin as residue on the sides of the bowl, as it evaporates down and dries, leaving behind a green film. This green film can have a very high purity of Salvinorin, so treat it with much caution. Why 8X, and not 10X since we used 100g to make 10g ? Although this process is very efficient compared to other extraction methods, is it not 100% efficient. If you soak your leaf longer than six minutes, you will begin to get too much black wax making it difficult to smoke. You can increase the efficiency by increasing either the temperature of the solvent or the amount of time that the leaf is soaked but an increase of either temperature or time will also increase the amount of chlorophyll extracted. Due to this, you must limit the amount of time the leaf is being soaked to no more than six minutes in the 35 to 40 degree F. Acetone. Be sure to stir the leaf the whole time it is in the solvent! Lower extraction temperatures can be used but will begin to loose the normal 80%+ efficiency if you go very far below 20 degrees F. However, the lower the temperature of the Acetone, the less chlorophyll and waxes will be extracted. Be very careful not to touch your face if you have touched the wet leaf or extract with your bare fingers (Which I find impossible to avoid when working with it.) I have found that this stuff is very hard on your skin, the extract or wet leaf will cause sensitive areas of your skin, such as your face, to get really puffed up and then wrinkle and dry so bad as to cause pealing. This may last a week or more! Thoroughly wash your hands with Acetone when you are done and don't touch your face at any time during the handling of this wet leaf, or Acetone extract. REMEMBER to save your leaf! After having done a quick cold Acetone extraction there will still be a portion of the Salvinorin left in the leaf. To get the remaining Salvinorin out dry the leaf and then powder it using a Mr. Coffee grinder and then do another extraction using chilled 20 degree F. Acetone. (Room temperature will also work, but will have more waxes.) When drying leaf that has been previously soaked in Acetone it would be best to dry it in a dark place to keep the interaction of light at a minimum. When soaking your powdered leaf if Acetone, 30 minutes ought to be more than enough. You can use room temperature Acetone for this, but chilled Acetone ought to cut down on the waxes and give a better extract. From my experience, powdered leaf produces a waxy extract when using Acetone at 20 or more degrees F., perhaps a lower temperature might work out better. If you chill your Acetone down to about minus 20 degrees F. and then add powdered leaf and put it back in the freezer for a few hours, this might produce a superior extract from powdered leaf, as long as the Acetone stays very cold the whole time. When extracting powdered leaf with Acetone you will never have quite as clean an extraction as when using whole or crushed leaf, so only use this to get the remaining Salvinorin out of previously processed leaf. If you decide to soak your powdered leaf in Alcohol (or 99% Isopropyl) soak it for several days because it isn't nearly as effective as Acetone. To obtain almost pure Salvinorin all one needs to do is use a colder Acetone, 20 degrees F. or lower will do just fine without much loss of efficiency. It is very important to use only whole or lightly crushed leaf. If the leaf is powdered this process will not work very well. With very cold Acetone almost all of the waxes and chlorophyll’s are left behind and remain in the leaf. If you want almost pure Salvinorin, you must not let the whole or crushed leaf stay in the solvent for a long period of time. Limit the soaking to five minutes or less but not much less than three minutes or the efficiency will begin to drop off. Be sure to stir the leaf the whole time! There is one last step in the process that I have discovered and developed to produce a much purer extract. Once you are finished doing a five minute (or less) extraction of the whole leaf with 20 degree F. Acetone (after pouring the Acetone off the leaf) let the Acetone sit for an hour or more so that the brown sediment like material which is extracted along with the Salvinorin will fall to the bottom of the container. You must separate this material from the lightly colored Acetone through either a gravity separation by letting it sit until it all falls out, or through filtering of the Acetone (I recommended several hours for a gravity separation). Once the brown material is removed from the Acetone by carefully pouring the solvent out of the bowl that contains the sediment, leaving it behind the Acetone is then poured into a evaporation bowl. Once the solvent has been completely evaporated off, you will find a high purity extract in the bottom of your container. This extract may or may not consist of crystals. The extract may be in the form of a crusty green or somewhat tacky green material. This extract can be further cleaned to remove the green coloring and or tacky substance through multiple washings with minimal amounts of Naphtha, Isopropanol, Methanol or regular 95% drinking Alcohol. For example, if you have extracted from 100 grams of leaf and have dried your extract out leaving just a few hundred milligrams of greenish colored extract, you can further clean or wash out the green waxes and impurites to such an extent that you can obtain Salvinorin that is so pure that it will be white. The washing process is very simple and is accomplished by adding about 10 ml of any of the above mentioned solvents to the dried extract to wash out and remove the unwanted waxes. Each time the extract is washed the remaining extract will be cleaner and cleaner with each wash, leaving behind a relatively pure concentration of Salvinorin. Naphtha would be superior to the other solvents for this last washing and cleaning process because Salvinorin is less soluble to Naphtha than it is to Isopropanol, or Methanol. Methanol is not recommended, unless dissolving the high purity extract to add back to leaf to make enhanced leaf. Do not over wash your extract because you will loose some of the Salvinorin each time you do. When I say "washings" this is to mean adding small amounts of the above mentioned solvents to your extract so that they will absorb the green and waxes. Thoroughly stir the solvent into the dried extract using a very small glass container to hold it, such as a shot glass. The solvent will become green colored as it absorbs the unwanted components. Let the container sit for an hour or until all of the particles fall to the bottom of the container (this can take hours or longer for most of it to resolve back into a solid) then carefully pour off the green colored solvent leaving the purer, or cleaner extract in the bottom of the container. Each time you do this, some of the Salvinorin will be taken with the green solvent you pour off. This is why it is important to use a minimal amount of solvent for each washing so that it will not dissolve too much of the Salvinorin into it. If your working with less than 100 grams you might consider a proportional reduction of the cleaning solvent (because Salvinorin will be taken away with the unwanted green components each time it is washed to remove the Chlor. and waxes from the Salvinorin solids in the bottom of the glass container). It is not difficult to clean up an extract to white Salvinorin with just a wash or two using Naphtha, depending upon the leaf that your extracting from. It is a good idea to do two extractions of whole leaf one after the other and to keep the solvent from each batch separate. The first three to five minute soak using 20 degree F. Acetone will produdce the cleanest extract, but a second extraction should be done right away to get most of the remaining Salvinorin left behind from the first extraction which should be about about 80% efficient if you have stirred it up well enough but over stirring can cause too much chorophyll to be extracted too, it is difficult to over do it but it can be done. I use a potato masher myself and only cover the leaf with enough Acetone so that I can push it into the solvent as I am mashing it. The second extraction won't produce nearly as much Salvinorin in it, but I think that it is worth doing. The longer the Acetone is in contact with the leaf the more chlorophyll will be extracted. Be sure to let the Acetone sit for an hour minimum to let the sediments fall out of the Acetone, you can't see them in there, but they will show up later as they begin to fall out. I have left my Acetone sit all night long and this worked out great. Older leaf will extract cleaner because some of the Chlorophyll will decompose over time. There are some other tricks used to reduce the amount of Chlorophyll in leaf, but you must have fresh leaf to work with and apply the techniques prior to drying, but this information is not my own and I won't comment further on it. The almost pure Salvinorin (Above 90%) can be used to enhanced leaf (or other materials) by concentrating the Salvinorin to much higher levels, to make tinctures or to make enhanced leaf or chews. There is a danger in putting too much Salvinorin back into leaf because without the black wax it is too easy to smoke large amounts of the leaf. With normal 5X leaf, it is difficult to smoke too much of it because of all of the smoke it produces from the chlorophyll and waxes being burned along with the Salvinorin. This is why responsible individuals such as Daniel Siebert DO NOT CONCENTRATE the amount of Salvinorin in their enhanced leaf to beyond 6X to reduce the possibility that someone will cause problems for both themselves, and him. If your making your own enhanced leaf, then you only have yourself to blame if your not careful about what your doing. Common practice is to add no more than 12.5 mg of Salvinorin back to a gram of normal leaf to give a concentration of no more than 15 mg per gram. Tinctures should have no more than 1.3 to 1.4 mg of Salvinorin per ml of fluid or it will not stay dissolved in Alcohol. Caution: Do not soak leaf in Acetone when exposed to light for more than an hour. Light will begin to decompose Salvinorin in a few hours while in Acetone. Alcohol is far less a problem when exposed to light, but it has been proven to me that Acetone will begin to decompose Salvinorin quite quickly when at room temperature and exposed to light. If you dry the leaf and try another quick extraction with cold Acetone, it won't work out nearly as well. Something has changed in the leaf making it impossible to do another quick cold Acetone without getting loads of black wax in your extract making your enhanced leaf difficult to smoke (If you try to make it 8X). Please don't jump my case for posting this. Everyone who I have given this to has wanted the information, once they get it, many have refused to share it. I am so tired of this whole issue that I am publishing the information and starting here. AKA Sphere - Chris Hazlitt _____________________________________________________________