From: OI812 Newsgroups: alt.drugs.hard Subject: Harry's Extraction Webpage Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1999 03:34:20 -0600 I posted this as a reply to a message way back in the message rotation. I wasn't sure it would get read there, so I am reposting it up here. Yeah, I know, another long ass post. I thought that I'd de-lurk long enough to offer another piece of advice regarding APAP extraction. I hope that you found my turkey baster / filter aid method to be an improvement over the coffee filter method. Now, I'm going to tell you how to completely eliminate any fillers or binders from your tablets before you proceed with extraction. You might want to go get a soda and a sandwich or something, I feel another long post coming on. First, a little background on how the pharmaceutical companies selectively use various nasty substances to try to prevent people from doing exactly the sort of thing that we're trying to do here. Some of the more insidious classes of compounds used for this are the cellulose ethers. Compounds such as methylcellolose, hydroxypropyl methylcellulose, hydroxypropyl cellulose etc. are added to the tablet mix prior to tableting. These compounds behave very strangely in water. They are non-ionic so they aren't really crazy about dissolving in water in the first place. They would (and do) prefer to be dissolved in a non-polar solvent like ether or benzene. The trouble with using non-polar solvents in extraction is the fact that the polar stuff like hydrocodone bitartrate won't dissolve in them. Even though this stuff isn't crazy about dissolving in water, it will under the right conditions. The solubility tends to be very temperature-specific. That's why some tablets dissolve just fine in cold water but turn to goo in hot. This is the exact opposite behavior that most every other known compound exhibits. It's normal for a slightly water soluble substance to increase its solubility as the temperature is raised. When cellulose ethers start to precipitate from water, they don't do it neatly, as anybody who has seen an Oxycontin 80 turn to jizz in the spoon can attest. The trick to successfuly removing this crap is to use a solvent in which the APAP and the good stuff will readily dissolve, but which will not bring water into contact with the gelling agents. That solvent must be very polar so as to dissolve the polar goodies in the pill. Water is polar and because APAP has an extreme differential solubility curve between hot and cold water, it is the ideal solvent for recrystallizing the APAP out of the mix. Trouble is, that water at this stage of the process will trigger the booby trap that the manufacturer put in the mix. The answer to the dilemma can be found in Merck and in my 2nd year pharmaceutics textbook. Methanol. Good old wood alcohol. APAP is freely soluble in methanol as are the salt forms (sulfate, phosphate, hydrochloride etc) of all of the narcotic alkaloids. Methanol is highly polar so it will dissolve most anything that water will EXCEPT those shitty binders. After grinding your tablets into a fine powder, shake them with a liberal amount of methanol and you will notice that unlike shaking them with water, the solution is clear with the binders laying neatly at the bottom of the container. Let the binders settle out after shaking and either gravity or vacuum filter the solution. Hint: Let the binding agents settle out for a minute or two before filtering. Then slowly decant the clear fluid into the filter before pouring out the settled solids. This prevents the fine solids from clogging the filter paper from the git-go. Those of you who have completed entire crossword puzzles while waiting for cold water / pill mixtures to run through the filter will be truly amazed at the speed at which the methanol / pill solution filters. After the solution has filtered and the binders are laying atop the paper, run a little fresh methanol through the filter setup to extract the last little bit of your desired compound from the paper and the binders. You now can proceed by either evaporating the methanol solution to dryness, or you can distill off the methanol for re-use. Don't try to boil the solution dry on the stove, you can burn your goodies (or your house). Be patient, methanol is very volatile and your mix will be dry in short order. If you have a vacuum dessicator, you can be bone dry in only a few minutes. What you will be left with is a mass of pretty white crystals. These crystals are basically the tablet mixture before the binders and fillers were added, just APAP and treasure. The stuff in the filter paper will be mostly starch (filler) and whatever the factory added to screw up the solubility. If you want to reassure yourself that this is true, try adding hot water to the dry powder in the filter paper. Bammo!, instant cumshot. You can also eat it (after it is completely dry, blindness is a total bitch.) You won't feel anything because the compound you're after is in the crystals in the other dish. NOW, you can do your cold water extraction and marvel at how easily the cold water solution and APAP crystals run through the filter. No turkey baster needed here. You can also separate the APAP from the goodies with a standard acid/base extraction without worrying about angering the methylcellulose gods. (Sounds like a good topic for a later post.) Methanol can be bought at most hardware stores, but to be sure that it is completely anhydrous, try a business which specializes in paints and varnshes. Anhydrous methanol is the preferred thinner for shellac. You can tell if it's pure methanol by the smell. Pure metnanol has a very mild, pleasant aroma and burns with an almost invisible flame. Unfortunately, the smell / burn test won't detect water. If the manufacturer has combined it with other solvents, the smell will be much more noticable and the stuff will burn with a brighter yellow or blue flame. Your best guarantee of having absolutely dry methanol is to buy it from a lab supply. It isn't a watched chemical and if the clerk asks what you want it for, just say that you need it to fuel your model airplane or refuel your wife's chafing dish. Well I did it again, I wrote another novel. Sorry about that, but I believe that by putting good, solid information out there somebody who might have done himself serious harm won't. I am a third-year pharmaceutical biochemistry student, so I'm not pulling this stuff out of my ass. I guess I need to cover my butt by saying that this is for informational purposes only and that I'm not trying to encourage anybody to break the law. (What I'm really trying to do is to keep somebody from killing his liver or clogging his capillaries and taking the express bus to stroke city.) If you intend to inject the product you extract, extracting that product from pills can be deadly if not done right. Unfortunately, we have a government that believes that the best way to keep people from using pharmaceutical drugs in excessive dosages or in a "non-approved" manner is to load those drugs with poisons. Now when somebody destroys his liver or kidneys because he or she has a prescription drug habit that they can't control, the government counts that as another "victory" in the war on drugs. I remember seeing a news story years ago describing how the soviets in Afghanistan were dropping mines disguised as toys so that village children would pick them up and lose a hand, eye or worse. I remember the moral outrage with which the U.S. government spokesman responded. It was enough to make any god-fearing American voter cry. It really made us feel morally superior to those barbaric communists. Now we have another dirty little war right here at home, and our government is mandating that drug manufacturers load their "toys" with the equivalent of an explosive charge to take out any evil drug user who might dare to take that drug in a manner not government approved. I hope my lengthy posts help defuse a few of those toy mines. ==================================================================== From: "John Smith" Newsgroups: alt.drugs.hard Subject: Re: Harry's Extraction Webpage Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 21:40:46 -0500 I don't think they denature methanol. They do, however denature ethanol with methanol (as well as other things to make you sick or blind if you try to get drunk off it). The whole idea of denaturing is so people cannot drink ethyl alcohol without paying their dues to the government (vodka is basically ethanol and water). If you want methyl alcohol, it is usually called methyl hydrate at the hardwood store - the guy working there probably doesn't know it is methanol. Try to evaporate a bunch on a clean piece of glass before using though to make sure it evaporates clean. Hardware store methanol is not made for this kind of thing. The method that you were trying to duplicate, while an excellent method, is overkill unless you are prepping something for IV. If you are prepping to drink the fluid, binders, and even a bit of undissolved ASA/APAP, are no big deal. You're going through a lot of trouble for nothing. The aquarium filter thing gets around the problem of the binders clogging the filter paper. A couple of suspended particles in the mix will not hurt your tummy. They will however, clog capillaries and cause other probs if injected. ==================================================================== From: OI812 Newsgroups: alt.drugs.hard Subject: Re: Harry's Extraction Webpage Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 22:54:38 -0600 John Smith wrote: > The method that you were trying to duplicate, while an excellent > method, is overkill unless you are prepping something for IV. If > you are prepping to drink the fluid, binders, and even a bit of > undissolved ASA/APAP, are no big deal. You're going through a > lot of trouble for nothing. > The purpose of doing a methanol is to do a preliminary extraction of the binders and fillers so that they don't clog your filter paper. Read my original post. I never claimed that the product would be purer. There are other ways to accomplish that, but at the expense of yield. You are still going to do a cold water extraction after you evaporate off the MEOH. The end product will be the same, but it will take you a fraction of the time to extract. Sorry about the false start, Harry. I probably should have warned you away from denatured ETOH. ==================================================================== From: Harry Newsgroups: alt.drugs.hard Subject: Re: Harry's Extraction Webpage OI812 wrote: > > I posted this as a reply to a message way back in the message rotation. > I wasn't sure it would get read there, so I am reposting it up here. > Yeah, I know, another long ass post. > Okay, I tried the methanol method. Here's what happened. I went down to a big box store and found something called S-L-R denatured alcohol. It was the only wood alcohol they had and said it was for thinning shellac and fueling marine stoves. I smashed up 14 vikes and put them in an old honey jar with about 6 oz (I figured that fit the "liberal" definition) of the alcohol. I shook it up a good bit and then left it to settle. 15 minutes later I came back and saw that a lot of it had settled, but the liquid was cloudy, not clear. I left it awhile longer, but it didn't clear up. I assumed this was because there was water in the alcohol. There was nothing on the can that said what percent pure it was. I poured the liquid out into a coffee filter out on the porch, because even though it didn't smell bad, it made me feel ill. There was little cloudiness in it, but it still took awhile to go through. The stuff that came through had no particles in it, but it was still cloudy. Weird. So I poured it in a glass pie dish and put it out on the porch with a fan blowing over it to evaporate it. It's pretty humid where I live, so I thought it might need some help. I didn't think it would take 10 hours to fully evaporate, which it did. Finally what was left in the pie dish was a lot of crystals. It looked and felt a lot like APAP. By that time I had gotten impatient and done the usual water extraction with some more pills, so I just put the pie dish in a cabinet. Today I sniffed and sniffed to make sure no alcohol smell came from the crystals anymore, but they felt slightly oily or damp. I scraped them off the pie dish and mixed them with water the way I usually do when doing a water extraction. Put it in the freezer. The water started to freeze up pretty quick, so I filtered it through a coffee filter. The stuff that came through was clear. However, I just stuck it in the fridge because I wanted to make sure that I had used the right solvent and because I can't take pills two days in a row. I did taste it, and it wasn't very bitter, which is not a good sign. Usually it tastes at least as bitter as good endive. I think I had problems with this because it *is* extremely humid here, about 80% or more, normally, I didn't have the best quality alcohol, and I don't have lab equipment. Did I use the right solvent?