Since my government is a bunch of thieves who take ungodly amount of taxes for nicotine containing protucts that used to be essentially free I decided to grow my own tobacco which I plan to further process into my own vapeable liquid. To do this I need to extract the nicotine from the leaves somehow and I need to find a way to do this at home with household items, plus some easily available chemicals. Apparently doing this is not trivial.
So far I'm thinking about doing this in two steps: First, blast a bunch of butane through the dried tobacco leaves like when making BHO from cannabis, which would already remove a lot of the goo (fats, waxes, smelly stuff, etc.) I don't want but not the nicotine since it's insolube in butane. This is just to make isolating the nicotine easier, divide and conquer. Then I put the preprocessed leaves in isopropanol, mix with something alkaline like soda to convert the nic salts (as naturally occuring) in the leaves into soluble freebase nic. After some stirring the leaves go into the trash, the solution is cooled in the freezer so that more garbage like fats and such soldifies and then everything gets filtered through a coffee filter (while in the freezer). Lasty, the isopropanol is evaporated. If I'm right this should leave me with a relatively pure extract that is useable for mixing into vape liquid. Maybe not 99% pure but I don't mind if I get some MAOIs or other goodies in the end product as long as vapes clean and tastes neutral.
Note: extraction using water is impossible as the leaves are like sponges and soak it up. You just get a mess that doesn't separate.
Any comments?