Cebillana

For Snuffing

When preparing the seeds to snuff, there are two critical steps: Toasting the seeds, and making the snuff alkaline. Skip either step and your experience will be substantially less pleasant.  Not-surprisingly, virtually every South American tribe that snuffs the seeds prepares the seeds in this way.

Toasting the seeds is very straightforward. Simply heat a pan on medium-low, drop the seeds in the pan, and gently stir them around for a couple minutes (typically until you hear them crack).  Alternatively, some people simply microwave the seeds briefly to achieve the same effect.  This will vaporize any DMT in the seeds, but that's no worry; we're after bufotenine, not DMT. Bufotenine is pretty stable to heat. As was mentioned earlier, the purpose of toasting the seeds is to remove some of the physically unpleasant chemicals prior to consumption (particularly 5-HO-DMT-N-oxide).

Now you're ready to powder the seeds. First, remove the shell-like outer skin from the seeds.  Put the shelled beans in a mortar and pestle or a coffee grinder, and pulverize to a fine powder.

Finally, we need to make the snuff alkaline by adding an alkaline salt.  There are two common approaches to this step.

The best method is to mix the alkaline salt into the powdered seeds, make a paste, then dry the mixture and crumble it into a powder.  You'll only need a small pinch of your alkaline salt; it should compose no more than ~10% of your mixture. It can be added while you grind the seeds to a powder, or after the grinding. It doesn't matter with a coffee grinder, but if you're using a mortal and pestle, I recommend adding the alkaline salt while you grind; the grit of the salt will help the seeds achieve a finer and more consistent grind.  Add a little bit of water, enough so the resulting paste appears moist, but not so much that it gets runny. The paste tends to give off an ammoniac smell for reasons I'm not clear on, but most people use this as a guide to when the mixing process is done. Once the ammonia odor goes away (or just after a few hours) you can dry it in the oven at 400° F (210° C). This is hot enough to melt the bufotenine freebase, but nowhere near hot enough to vaporize it. Once dry, crumble the mixture to a fine powder, and you're ready to snuff!

This method mimics the commonly-observed traditional preparation, where a paste is made by adding water to the seeds along with burnt shells or ashes, letting it sit out for a while, then drying it over an open fire.

Another common method is simply mixing the alkaline salt with the seeds during the process of grinding them to a powder.  A snuff made in this way will be able to raise the pH of the nasal membrane, but it will not freebase the bufotenine.  The majority of the bufotenine will remain in the form of a salt until the snuff enters a moist environment (like your sinus).

The differences between the two methods aren't tremendous, but the alkaline seed paste method is preferred for a few reasons. Since the bufotenine is converted to the free-base, it allows us to safely use more heat to drive off more of the chemicals that cause physical side-effects (bufotenine salts typically have lower boiling points than the free-base). Additionally, if one is using calcium hydroxide as their alkaline salt, this method will convert some of the calcium hydroxide to the milder calcium carbonate, which is gentler on the sinuses.

There have been many reports of people using baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) to make the snuff alkaline. Reports are pretty clear that this is more effective than snuffing plain untreated seeds, presumably because it raises the pH of the sinuses; the closer the pH of a membrane is to the pKa of a molecule, the easier it is for that molecule to pass the membrane.  But it is equally clear that baking soda is much less effective as a base than the suggested salts (sodium carbonate, calcium carbonate, and calcium hydroxide).  Since baking soda cannot convert the bufotenine to its free-base form in any appreciable quantity, it should be used only as a last resort (and if you can't find any of the three suggested bases, you're not looking very hard).

I'd also like to present a small excerpt from the Effects section of Christian Raetsch's A. colubrina monograph:

Quote:

"Experience has shown that before smoking or sniffing cebil, it is useful to chew coca (or sniff some cocaine). This helps the visions become clearer and also obviates possible side effects."


The use of coca in conjunction with Anandenanthera snuff is in fact a practice employed in some indigenous traditions, but the casual way he recommends doing a little cocaine before ingesting the yopo amused me. Take his recommendation with as few or as many grains of salt as you wish.