The impatient newbie strikes again...

[Tona Aspsusa]

OK, so I shouldn't even be mixing my own liquids yet, and here I am asking for advice on dealing with extracting some nice flavours and alkaloids from tobacco...

Anyway, my main motives for wanting to play around with tobacco are (in order of importance):

1. Other alkaloids apart from nicotine. In just a few weeks of vaping it is very clear to me that I will never be able to give up smoking completely or even achieve 95% smokelessness (currently at about 45-50% compared to before I tried vaping, slight backslide from around 60% at the beginning). The nicotine is important sure, but there must be other things in smoked tobacco that my brain and nervous system really REALLY like.

2. Taste. Though I still have many, many, many flavours (both tobacco and non) to try mixing and vaping, I figure it doesn't hurt to have an even larger palette to paint from.

3. Concerns about possible bans on nic-liquids (already banned in my country (except theoretically with a medical prescription), thank Monnet for the EU!).

So I am looking for advice here, and especially pertaining to reason number 1. I know this is a very tricky area, and most of the knowledge will be anecdotal at best, and can hardly be anything else since the tools needed to test exactly what you can get out of tobacco are incompatible with the kitchen-methods I will be using.

(I am of course also verrry interested in any leads on buying extracted whole tobacco alkaloids, preferably concentrated, not ready made e-liquid).

As you can see I tend to be very wordy, so I'll leave this as an introduction, and put my questions and updates on my wacky experiments in separate posts in this thread.

 

[Tona Aspsusa]

So on to questions:

Reading various threads here I see wildly conflicting ideas about
A) What medium to use for extracting
B) What form of tobacco to extract from

A) When it comes to the medium it seems to me that alcohol + time would be the easiest. Or maybe alcohol mixed with distilled water. Or a mix of alcohol, distilled water and PG. Or alcohol, distilled water, PG and VG. Or...

I have no sensitivity to PG, so I am not limited here in any way. I do however have a slight aversion to boiling, steaming and generally "cooking" - mostly because my husband is very tobacco-averse and he sure wouldn't appreciate the kitchen smelling like a fresh cigar.
So I'd be very happy if someone could tell me if there is a reason for using heat, beyond just speeding up the process?


B) Regarding what to extract FROM there seems to be a certain fondness for Swedish snus, and secondarily for pipe tobacco. But in old threads I see people reporting promising results from cigars, even cigarettes.
(I have promised myself not to even THINK about growing anything myself. At least not until I've tried absolutely everything else I can think of. Which should take at least a few years.)

When it comes to getting most bang-for-the-buck wrt alkaloids, what forms of tobacco might be best? Nicotine isn't that interesting to me, at least not as long as it is available in a nice and clean form in a suitable strength (I use 36mg/ml to mix a 10-15mg/ml vape), but other potentially interesting substances are highly interesting, even my main motivation for doing this.

I do not have access to any growers of tobacco or tobacco markets or wholesalers or anything like that. I have access to a rather limited and very expensive array of cigarettes, RYO tobacco and pipe tobacco. With a bit of planning I can also get Swedish Snus (by going to Sweden).

 

[Tona Aspsusa]

While awaiting your wise answers I'll tell you a bit about my first "Impatient-Know-Nothing" experiment:

I took an old medicine bottle of dark brown glass (only thing I had handy, there's a shipment of an assortment of bottles etc sitting in the mail somewhere, but I am IMPATIENT!), washed it out with warm tapwater and then with 95% alcohol.
This bottle is a bit too large for this purpose, it holds around 115-120ml.

In this bottle I put an improvised mixture of
20ml 95% Ethanol
10ml Distilled water
2 ml Glycerine

(The very low amount of glycerine is mostly because I forgot to warm my bottle, and it is a pain to work with. The reason I bothered with adding any at all was that I wanted something in there that doesn't evaporate really really easily <= muddy non-chemist-thinking)

Into this mixture I put the innards of one(1) rather weird cigarillo The brand is "Partner", and these were bought by mistake in Latvia, on the package it says that they are manufactured by "PT Asia Tembakau, Jalan Kedung Baruk 25, Surabaya, Indonesia". No nicotine, carbon monoxide or tar content is given.
I say weird because these not only come with a filter, but the wrapping leaf is actually fake: it is extremely thin and glued (?) to an even thinner brown cigarette-paper. Obviously I didn't put this into my extraction mix, only the rather unevenly cut tobacco inside.
The smell of these cigarillos is rather pleasant, with no obvious non-tobacco scents added. The smell matches that rather dark fake wrapping leaf rather than the partly much lighter-coloured cut tobacco inside - if that description makes any sense.

It has now been about 36 hours, and the liquid seems very amber-brown. It has also taken on some tobacco smell, but the overwhelming smell is still the alcohol. Because the glass is so dark I can't really see whether the colour is evenly distributed or not, I have just used a throw-away plastic pipette to take some liquid out of the bottle to look at it.

I am a bit undecided on whether I will try to evaporate a bit of the alcohol/water first, or strain out the tobacco bits first.
Evaporating away some liquid first might be a good idea, or it might not (does tobacco work like some black teas and become bitter if steeped for too long? I'm guessing no one knows...).

Since I don't like cooking or heating things up I am thinking of simply removing the cap from the bottle and placing it between the windows. Partly to contain any strong smells, but mostly because I figure that the extremely low relative humidity there would perhaps speed up the evaporation, even thought it is much colder there than inside (Hmm, that should be true for water, but what about the alcohol?). And of course having it between the windows would greatly reduce the likelyhood of anyone knocking it over and spilling it.

If I go the route of filtering it first, what would be a good way to reduce the liquid? A good way that doesn't involve cooking, that is. Mainly I want to get as much of the alcohol out of it as possible.

 

[heavymetalhero]

As long as the cap is off, the alcohol will all eventually evaporate on its own. Shouldn't take too long... a day maybe? The water will evaporate on its own as well, but MUCH more slowly. I could be wrong though... since it is all mixed together, I don't know if the alcohol will still evaporate quickly like it normally would.

 

[Tona Aspsusa]

So, I got impatient again, and decided I had to DO something.

Two days of having the bottle open between the windows didn't reduce the level of liquid too much unfortunately (we got a cold spell, so that might have had something to do with it - plus, why would low relative humidity help when it is mainly the alcohol I wanted to evaporate? Sometimes I think my brain has left for vacation).
So I just decided to filter what I had.

After accomplishing that (with some paper coffee filter and a small funnel), and spilling a little bit - I now remember the reason chemistry wasn't that appealing in school - I had about 22ml of a very amber-brown liquid. Problem was that it still mainly smelled of alcohol.

So I decided to try to get some/most of the alcohol out by boiling it a bit in the micro wave oven. Found a suitable shotglass for this purpose. After a few turns of a few seconds each (and some more spillage, including some boiling over), it no longer smelled of spirit.
I now had 13,5 ml, which I left for ~20h in that open shot glass. At this point it was very uniform and clear.

Next day when I looked at it it had developed some uneven cloudyness. But, being impatient, and not wanting to filter (and spill) again, I poured it into a small glass bottle. The smell at this point was very weak, but that might partly have been due to my mixing and taste-vaping some other things nearby. The consistency was just a tad thicker than water.

Again being impatient, a few hours laters I decided "Heck, this is just a first experiment, I'll play with it a bit", and added 2 ml of my extract to 10ml of 50/50 PG/VG (no nic).

Then I tried dripping that. My atomizer wasn't totally clean, even though I had vaped quite a lot of no-flavour 13mg/ml nic liquid in between the last flavour (plain orange).

This diluted liquid made out of this rather weak extract had almost no taste. But it was clearly different from a plain PG or VG mix. More like a background smoothness, through which I could still taste remnants of the orange (very good combo actually) and even at one point the typical nic-taste of my flavourless liquid (also weirdly smooth and nice).

But there was something oddly relaxing about it - though it could of course be just a placebo effect.

So I decided I would put some in my regular vaping gear. Since it was almost tasteless, I decided to NOT clean anything or use new tanks or cartos.
So some I put into a clearomizer (not my favourite thing, fiddly, leaky, gurgly) that was already half full of a diluted commercial tobacco juice which upon dilution had turned nastily perfumy, together with a few drops of my new orange liquid.
Some I put into a cartomizer almost ripe for a wash, which had held a favourite of mine (Hangsen's Stuyvesant). And later I decided to try some in an Ego-tank which had the remains of some Hangsen D'Doff in it. (All remnants had a nic strength of 10-14mg/ml)

As with my testing atomizer, it is weird how this almost flavourless, very dilute, liquid seems to impart something extra to the traces of taste left from the previous flavour.

 

[Tona Aspsusa]

As long as the cap is off, the alcohol will all eventually evaporate on its own. Shouldn't take too long... a day maybe? The water will evaporate on its own as well, but MUCH more slowly. I could be wrong though... since it is all mixed together, I don't know if the alcohol will still evaporate quickly like it normally would.

Thanks! I got too impatient, see my next update.

I wonder what would be the best conditions to evaporate a) alcohol and b) water.

And how having VG or PG in the mix affects this - I'm thinking at least VG probably "holds on to" both water and alcohol quite a bit if its properly mixed to begin with.

 

[heavymetalhero]

I would think you might need to concentrate the extract even further, get rid of some of the water somehow. Then you might get a stronger effect/flavor.

 

[Tona Aspsusa]

So, getting these somewhat encouraging results even though being un-systematic, clumsy and impatient, I just had to start the next experiment ASAP.

This time I have the following in my brown glass bottle:
- The contents of 5 of these weird cigarillos
- 10 ml of PGA
- 20 ml distilled water
- 20 ml PG

So when my first try was 1 cigarillo to 32 ml liquid, this is 5 cigarillos to 50 ml liquid. I hope it's not too much tobacco to be practical to get it strained/filtered.

Why such a different solution from my first experiment?
I had way too much alcohol - it reeked, and boiling it off is not something I enjoyed.
I was very fed up with working with VG, it is a pain to measure, blend and do anything with.

So with this 10-20-20 (or 20-40-40, if one prefers percentages), I am hoping for a) similar results wrt extraction but without so much alcohol that I must then get rid of, and b) that the PG will mostly just not interfere, but make for a strained/filter liquid with a nicer viscosity right off.

 

[Tona Aspsusa]

I would think you might need to concentrate the extract even further, get rid of some of the water somehow. Then you might get a stronger effect/flavor.

Indeed - see my next experiment. Five times the tobacco to less than two times the liquid.

But I actually rather liked the result *because* it was so comparatively flavourless, it seems to work like a flavour-enhancer more than anything else. But I would like it stronger, only to be able to dilute it more.

Totally weird thing, which might well be a placebo effect: After vaping a bit of this last night, I slept better than I have since I stopped wearing a nicotine patch (while still smoking 15-25 day, the patch was because I was smoking upwards 40/day, and it just tasted crap all the time - a weird bonus effect of those 24h patches was that my sleep quality improved drastically).
This somehow does not compute for me at all. Unless it's something to do with one of those other alkaloids prolonging the effects of nicotine, combined with the fact that I seem to be very inefficient when it comes absorbing nice substances from smoking and comparatively efficient at absorbing them from vaping (I do NOT like high-nic liquids).

BTW, I can't really say anything about throat hit - the more I vape, the less I understand what is actually meant by it.

 

[Tona Aspsusa]

Just a really quick note, I'll post in more details about this later:

This time I have the following in my brown glass bottle:
- The contents of 5 of these weird cigarillos
- 10 ml of PGA
- 20 ml distilled water
- 20 ml PG

I filtered this yesterday, twice through paper coffee filters (yielded something like 30ml I think, can't find my notes). It smelled nice, a bit like prune-marmelade. Put it in a clear glass bottle (it is rather dark, and I wanted to be able to see if it separates or grows cloudy), with a cork stopper (just an old spice-bottle that I happened to have, got all smell of paprika(??) out of it with some PGA).

I *just*, two minutes ago, opened it up just to take a sniff (I had planned on diluting and tasting today and mix some other stuff too, but was too optimistic wrt time, but I just had to take a look/sniff at this):

OMG! It smells absolutely fantastic. Like a very very fine cognac, minus the alcohol and with a little more sweetness.
Or maybe like something distilled from a perfectly blended drink with Arrak, (as in Swedish "Punsch") Rum, Brandy (I'm thinking Moldavian minus the floral/perfumy overtones) and a darkish syrup... If I only went by the smell, this is something I would dilute with a thin simple sirup and use for a baba-cake!
There's actually nothing in the smell that it I would characterize as "tobacco", but I could well imagine a really sweetish aromatic cigar having a dash of this smell (which is really weird, because these cigarillos when smoked have not a hint of brandy, plum, sweet coffee or *anything* non-tobacco in their taste).

I am so unhappy I now have to dash to my sis' birthday dinner and won't be in any state after that to fool around with anything liquid-y this evening when I get home, and hence have to wait until tomorrow to further investigate this.

My previous version was *nothing* like this, nothing. It was mellowly pleasant, and the smell was hard to even catch after I had boiled off the alcohol.

It may turn out to be not so good in a vape, but right now I am all and and

But have to go and ...

 

[rolygate]

Many of us have used VG plus pipe tobacco or RYO, plus a little DW and alcohol. Use as much tobacco as you can get into the liquid.

Filter it twice, add some more alcohol and VG to dilute the result.

We don't know what is in the resulting goop, but when diluted and added to pre-made e-liquid it seems to work well enough for adding that extra 'je ne sais quoi'. It also fixes some kinds of bad flavours as well.

There is very little nicotine in this due to the fact you are starting with too small an amount of tobacco leaf. To get a reasonable amount of nicotine out, enough to make it worthwhile, you would need a couple of kilos of tobacco leaf and a Soxhlet extractor or something like that (or a way to replicate it with other lab glassware). The DIY with pipe tobacco/RYO method might produce 2mg/ml or 0.2% nic strength, probably not higher than that.

Since the WTAs are at something like one-tenth of the amount of nicotine, there will probably be very little of them indeed. Be that as it may, the tobacco essence resulting from DIY extraction seems to work well enough, in the same way Snus does.

VG is supposed to be a better solvent than PG, and works fine for this purpose. You refer to some sort of difficulty with working with VG, but I don't know what this refers to - I didn't have any problems. Remember to thin it a little with some DW and alcohol, no more than 20% is needed. A short boiling period (max 1 minute) seems to be required. Also, heat it slightly during any filtration stage otherwise it is too viscous. You can filter it through one ply of tissue, in a funnel. Two filtration stages are needed.

As it takes a while to filter, you will probably have to heat it halfway through the filtrations (certainly on the second one).

 

[Tona Aspsusa]

Thanks for commenting!

Many of us have used VG plus pipe tobacco or RYO, plus a little DW and alcohol. Use as much tobacco as you can get into the liquid.

Filter it twice, add some more alcohol and VG to dilute the result.

When you say "filter", do you mean like I have been doing through a common paper coffee filter, or do you have some other type of filter in mind?

The thing I discovered (or more probably "unvented", as knitters like to say) with using these common paper filters that it is very handy is that when you have patiently been waiting for it to drip through and nothing more can be observed to drip, you can take the now tobacco-gooey filled filter, wrap it in one or two more coffee filters and squeeze out quite a few more ml.

The bad things about paper coffee filters I've discovered so far are:
a) not that fine a filtering (though this is also a good thing, a very very fine filter would probably mean extremely long filtering times)
b) it acts as a wick, and if left standing longer (which is a necessity if you want to drip-filter as opposed to squeeze), this wastes liquid.

We don't know what is in the resulting goop, but when diluted and added to pre-made e-liquid it seems to work well enough for adding that extra 'je ne sais quoi'. It also fixes some kinds of bad flavours as well.

Indeed, the mellowness that my very very weak (and then even further diluted, to about 16-17%) first experiment imparts is really interesting - I haven't had the need for using it to fix something harsh or bad yet, but I can well see how it would work that way.

There is very little nicotine in this due to the fact you are starting with too small an amount of tobacco leaf. To get a reasonable amount of nicotine out, enough to make it worthwhile, you would need a couple of kilos of tobacco leaf and a Soxhlet extractor or something like that (or a way to replicate it with other lab glassware). The DIY with pipe tobacco/RYO method might produce 2mg/ml or 0.2% nic strength, probably not higher than that.

As I wrote in another thread here, IMO there are so many factors involved in even the nic-strength of the tobacco, that trying to calculate from that into what might be extracted seems a fool's work.
(If it is even stated, my Latvian-bought Indonesian cigarillos have no labeling, and neither do some cigarettes I got as a souvenir from Colombia, and I've never seen nic/tar/CO stated on cigars)

Still, I think it is a good idea to be careful when testing a newly extracted liquid, especially if you are a low-nic vape; ie not assume zero nic and happily blend it to your usual strength before evaluating it.

Since the WTAs are at something like one-tenth of the amount of nicotine, there will probably be very little of them indeed. Be that as it may, the tobacco essence resulting from DIY extraction seems to work well enough, in the same way Snus does.

Mmmm. It would still be very interesting if someone had some ideas about which solvent might extract which alkaloids best - even just purely theoretical ideas.
I read some ideas about alcohol or water actually being excellent (and quick) solvents for all the interesting stuff, but further thoughts on this is always interesting.

VG is supposed to be a better solvent than PG, and works fine for this purpose. You refer to some sort of difficulty with working with VG, but I don't know what this refers to - I didn't have any problems.

Mostly just that I am lazy, and VG is very thick at room temperature and hence difficult (or extremely slow) to measure exactly (well, as exactly as a rather clumsy person with some 1ml, 2ml, 5ml and 10ml syringes can get).

Do you have an opinion on in what respect VG is considered to be a better solvent than PG? Tastewise? Nic? Other alkaloids?

Remember to thin it a little with some DW and alcohol, no more than 20% is needed. A short boiling period (max 1 minute) seems to be required. Also, heat it slightly during any filtration stage otherwise it is too viscous. [...]
As it takes a while to filter, you will probably have to heat it halfway through the filtrations (certainly on the second one).

Ah, now THIS is why I consider VG a pain to work with! I don't much like messing around with heat if I can avoid it. (And I don't have any really good vessels or equipment for this either - if at some point I discover/learn that heat is essential for getting essential non-nic active substances or flavours out of tobacco I would probably be looking at investing in some home-lab stuff: borosilicate glass, thermometers and some kind of heatsource that is easier to control than my gas stove.)

From a convenience POV what I would love if it worked (might do an experiment on this) would be use only alcohol and water for the actual extraction, reduce the filtered extract by evaporation, mix with PG or PG/VG mix and then by some magic (here I would probably need heat) try to get most of the remaining alcohol/water out of the PG/VG while leaving the flavour and active substances... One can dream, can't one?

I need to read some chemistry so I can better understand the properties of PG and VG, especially when heated.

 

[Tona Aspsusa]

Time for an update I think.

I have now made some things with my second extract (5 cigarillos in 10ml PGA, 20ml DW, 20 ml PG) that smelled (and still smells) so wonderful.

I have made a juice out of 30% of this extract, 33% PG with 36mg/ml nic and 36% VG => 12mg/ml added nicotine.
This juice also smells absolutely wonderful, especially now after a few days.

As for taste I think anyone who has ever tried to smoke a pipe because the smell was so lovely will be able to predict this: if you are inhaling, many of the subtle tones are just overpowered and lost. And if you don't inhale, the nic (and possibly also something else, I think now) bites your tongue, and again you loose those most delicious parts of the aroma.

Now, this is much better than trying to smoke a pipe, I must say that, much more of the flavour is retained. But the surprising thing is really what is added, not what is diminished when you vape this vs just smell it:
- The sweetness all but disappears
- There's a very strong, thick tobacco-y sensation in the nostrils on the exhale (something I've only experienced with really strong "old geezer cigarettes" - not even the cigarillos used for this extraction packs quite that punch when smoked cigarette-style - or they do (just lit one so I could be certain), but it is different, higher sneeze-tickle to flavour ratio as compared to the vape)
- There's a very small hint of the smoothness and mellowness that was in my ~17% dilution of my first much weaker extract, but it is very very small, and not really "usable" at this concentration.
- At the sweet spot in a carto (just before you need to top it up), or when diluting with a bit unflavoured, I sometimes get a little, but very distinct, hint of vanilla.

Of course I couldn't be content with just this one blend, it's nice, but also a bit harsh and undimensional for protracted vaping.
So I whipped up this conction, named it "Impro" and gave it the honour of being the first real mix of mine to occupy one of my new (few, alas) elegant 10ml glassbottles with a glassdropper:

5 ml of my extract2-juice (the one above)
5 ml of my unflavoured 14mg/ml 84/16 PG/VG
3 drops of TFA M-type (tabanone) (Yes, drops is very inexakt, I know, sorry, but measuring that amount would have been a pain and I would never have been able to use the syringe for anything else - that M-type is strong stuff)
I steeped it in a hot water bath for maybe 30 minutes or so.

This is what I have been mostly vaping for the last few days.
In the beginning the M-type was very dominating in the smell of it, but that has receded a little bit - the two people I've asked to just smell it have been very confused by it: "Asian food!" said one, "sesame oil, but not quite" said another. (Personally I think M-type has a strong nutty/fatty smell, but also quite a lot of caramel toffee and prune marmelade.)

When vaped this mix is rather like the extract-only juice, but much stronger in feel, and at times even more "dry" in taste. Both rather perplexing, seeing that this is basically the extract-juice diluted to 50% and with M-type added.
After the first few hours the M-type seems to have receded from the taste completely, and serves more like solidifying the basic tobacco taste of the extract.

I was a bit afraid to vape this around other people, tried to blow the vape down and away from anyone - the taste/feel is that strong. I kept thinking of the unkind things my grandmother (who smoked from about 1925 to her death in 2000) used to say about the smell of "brown" tobacco cigarettes (gauloises, bulgarian etc)...
But the people I have asked, after blowing the vape right in their faces, say it isn't that strong at all, smells a tiny little bit like an old tobacco shop, perhaps with some wet wool socks in a corner (!), but not unpleasant and really hardly noticeable.
The only person who has so far tested it, my friend who is a sometime smoker, was quite overwhelmed by the tobacco-y -ness of it. (Interestingly enough, she rather liked the other flavour I had on me, a mint-menthol that I think is quite a bit too strong in flavour.)

There's still a long way to go, but I feel I now have a pretty good tobacco base to tweak this way and that. I've ordered some Hangsen flavour concentrates that I really liked as liquids (DDoff and Stuyvesant - incidentally analog brands I actually like, though I think the taste of these Hangsen flavours are nothing like the cigarettes they are named for), and I'm very optimistic about what I can whip up from combining my "heavy body" extract with these sweet-spicy and dry-spicy flavours.

Oh, and I have 136 of these weird cigarillos for when I want to make some more... When I do a bigger batch I think I'll have to plan it a bit more, and for a bigger batch it might also be a good idea to see if I could get rid of some more particulates in some way - my extract now *looks* clear, but if it is left undisturbed for a day it develops a small amount of sediment, suspended almost at the bottom in the middle of the bottle.

 

[comski]

lol WTF! dude your making poison, you have no idea wot strength the nic content is????
you have to be very careful dude (wear gloves) at least man.
the more you concentrate it the stronger it will get, afew drops if swallowed = DEATH!
im sure its easier and cheaper to buy e-juice than tobacco and alcohol ect??

 

[Tona Aspsusa]

lol WTF! dude your making poison,

Well thanks for putting the warnings on top of the page in the vernacular.
Maybe you should take a look at some of the other threads in this section; it seems to be rather well established that the amounts of nicotine and other alkaloids you can extract through methods like these are very small. I'm pretty sure everything I've done so far is far below the commercial 36mg/ml juice I have somewhere.

 

[comski]

Lol sorry buddy
I have read some other posts about it, and I still can't believe it's cheaper to make by buying tabacco and alcohol time effort ect??
the more you concentrate it the stronger it will get,
you just have NO idea how strong it is full stop!!!
I've dove this kind of thing but for other products, I've seen videos about Nic extraction DIY! the more you concentrate it the stronger it will get.....
If you concentrate it to much afew drops will kill you, so I guess it's alot higher than 36, 52 ect.
It's all down to how much you concentrate it to get your final product b4 you mix in vg pg ect, but it's all guess work!!!
Sorry if I sound negative but it's your health I'm more concerned about, is there any way off finding the strength without going to a lab for them to test it?
Any way if you want any advice about how to do it the best and easiest way just PM dude. D'oh!

 

[comski]

Just abit of info I found you can do more research ect.
Any1 wanna do the math?

A "thin" Golden Virginia cigarette (using 0.4g of tobacco) rolled to be 5.2mm wide will contain 8mg of tar and 0.7mg of nicotine

A "wide" Golden Virginia cigarette (using .75g of tobacco) rolled to be 7.2mm wide will contain 15mg tar and 1.3 mg nicotine

*Source - Writing on a 50g packet of Golden Virginia Hand Rolling Tobacco*

Most snus contains 8mg of nicotine per gram. A sachet of Scandinavian snus delivers the same amount of nicotine as one standard cigarette. American snus, on the other hand, has lower levels of nicotine.

According to UCSF...2.3 mg. of nicotine per cigarette.

http://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/fo...st-mg-ml-nicotine-follow-up-dvaps-method.html

 

[Tona Aspsusa]

If you look in a few other threads in this subforum, you will notice that I am well aware of the immense problems in trying to estimate nicotine content based on either typical values of delivered nicotine per cigarette/portion of snus or the values stated on the packaging.

I can't really estimate by feel exactly how much (if any) nicotine there is in either of my extractions; probably because while I am a high-nic smoker, I've turned out to be a low-middle nic vaper. My guess would be very little. It is quite vape-able on its own (diluted 1/6 to 1/3 in no nic base), but doesn't really become satisfying until 10-12mg/ml nic is added to the mix.
I am still uncertain whether I might have managed to get some minuscule amounts of other alkaloids or not - on one hand it is fairly unlikely, on the other hand there's this vague feeling...

 

[comski]

Ok buddy no worries?
Was only trying to help There will be alkaloids (crap) lol its down 2 the soak time.
Offers still open dude about advice.
Hope you get to wer your goin buddy

 

[rolygate]

The thing is, when a 'nicotine per cigarette' number is quoted, it is almost certainly the amount of nicotine in the smoke - not in the tobacco. These are two very different things. It seems there is up to 23x the amount of nicotine in the tobacco compared to the smoke.

The amount of nicotine in one cigarette (not the smoke) varies between 13mg and 23mg. (US gov docs [1])

There is about 1mg nicotine in the smoke from a cigarette. This is not relevant for our purposes.

There is about 1gm of tobacco in a cigarette. Therefore there will be a maximum of 23mg nicotine per gram of tobacco in a solvent used for extraction of the tobacco ingredients. I have no idea how much in mg there is per gram of raw tobacco, but apparently it's about 3% to 9% by weight. However most people seem to be using finished products in these processes, not tobacco leaf.

Note that extraction from a finished product will also get some/all of the 'casings': these are the additives, including things that smooth out the taste. These are not wanted but unavoidable unless you use raw leaf.


Practical example
So let's look at an example in practice.

I used 3gm of finished tobacco (RYO) for flavor extraction. The solvent used may then have contained a maximum of about 69mg of nicotine (3 x 23mg), and up to 6.9mg each of the other WTAs such as nornicotine.

If the solvent was diluted to a total volume of 50ml, it would then contain a maximum of 1.38mg/ml of nicotine or 0.14% (69/50). It is unlikely to be this strong (!) though.

If a sophisticated (recirculating) lab method was used for the extraction, using only 10ml of solvent - or if the solvent could be reduced to a volume of 10ml without losing any nicotine content - then the strength would be 6.9mg/ml or 0.7%. This is unlikely for our purposes unless you have a Soxhlet extractor or similar. The result would also be unusable as it would be semi-solid in any case.

These amounts of nicotine show that the personal extraction of nicotine as a substitute for commercial supplies is a waste of time unless large quantities of raw tobacco leaf can be acquired.


Filtering
Anything that works is good. Coffee filters, tissue, whatever. A filtered solvent with no observable particulates is a good result however obtained. For me it took 2 iterations.


VG as a solvent
When I looked at this originally I found several references that seemed to indicate VG is a better solvent than PG for this purpose, but cannot now recall what/where. In any case I don't use PG so this may have been an influence. PG though is an excellent solvent for immiscible medicines - those that do not mix with water - so is used for injectable medicines of this type, such as diazepam (i.e. when it's injected, the carrier liquid is PG, not water).


Cautions
There is a good argument for removing any cautions we have on these procedures because it looks impossible in practice to obtain any usable amount of nicotine from a finished tobacco product, never mind a dangerous amount. Many kilos of raw leaf would be needed for this, and a far better extraction process than described here. What we are getting is flavor plus a very small amount of WTAs including nicotine.


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[1] Harms of Smoking and Health Benefits of Quitting - National Cancer Institute