Purifiacation of Street H

[chemboy7]

One of the many problems with this unjust "war on drugs" is that the only people controlling the quality of these medications is criminals that care about making money and could give a rat's ass about the potential health implications of the cut drugs they are selling so long as their cut dope brings in the most money as possible. By the time the drugs get to the low level street buyer the majority of the suppliers that it has made it's way down the line to you have re-cut the dope so that by the time it's in your hands you have no idea how much unwanted shit has made it into your product. With the health problems that could arise from injecting these fillers it has long been needed a realitively simple way of purifying the product that most users can easily understand and imploy. I came acrossed this at the Lycaeum and being the fact that the proceedure is rather simple I thought I would share with my freinds here Opiophile. Here is the process copied/pasted:

This is as complete and as accurate as I can remember, it has been something like 9 years since I have used heroin. The process I used for purification was straight forward. Diacetylmorphine can exist in two forms, an insoluble base, or a soluble salt. Often it contained a plethora of other agents like pieces of broken glass, pieces of foil, dirt, wood, metal, mannitol, lactose, maltose, sand, you get the idea. The first stage of the process I used was to make sure the diacetylmorphine I received was totally converted to a soluble hydrochloride salt. The heroin I usually received was a brown powdered heroin, sometimes off white, very little vinegar smell. Today all you can find is a black crud that reeks with a vinegar (acetic) odor. The way I made sure it was a soluble salt was to drop enough 28% hydrochloric acid to make it wet. This insured that I would not waste any of the available drug, but would remove most if not all of the cut. I think that it would be better for me to detail it in a procedural manner. FYI, hydrochloric acid can be purchased in gallon jugs at hardware stores under the name Muriatic acid, 28%.

First weigh out one gram of heroin from the stock you received from your supplier. Place this gram into a 13 x 100mm test tube.
Add a few drops of 28% hydrochloric acid until it is evenly damp. Allow to react for a minute or two. Next add 5 ml distilled water, place your thumb over the end and carefully shake to dissolve all that will dissolve into the water.
Allow the insolubles to settle. Using a pipette, remove and transfer as much of the liquid to a fresh test tube leaving the solids behind. Dispose of the undissolved remains in the first test tube.
Slowly add via pipette, one drop at time, ammonium hydroxide (water clear household ammonia) until the white precipitate ceases production. Add several more drops at this point just to be sure. Shake gently to be sure that all the solution is evenly ammoniated. The solution should look milky.
Now add 100 ml ethyl ether (some kinds of diesel starting fluids, read the label) to a 150 ml beaker. Dump the milky liquid into the ether and stir briskly and allow the water to settle and collect on the bottom. The water will turn clear.
Using a glass pipette, remove this water from the bottom of the beaker and dispose of.
Now mix up a solution of 5ml 28% hydrochloric acid and 5ml distilled water and add this to the ether in the beaker. Stir briskly keeping as much acid/water suspended as possible for several minutes. Allow the water/acid to collect on the bottom of the beaker.
Using a glass pipette, remove this water layer from the bottom of the ether and transfer to a glass petri dish. Transfer the ether back to its storage bottle for reuse. It will still contain small amounts of heroin base, so don't throw it out. Recycle!
Slowly add small portions of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) to the water/acid solution in the petri until you don't notice any more bubbles being formed.
Place the glass on a warm surface, and allow to evaporate. The residue will be diacetylmorphine hydrochloride and salt. Table salt is a by-product of the reaction and will not hurt you at all when injected.
Scrape up the residue and weigh it. Yield from one gram of smack (yea, we called it that) would be anything from 100 to 300 mg, rarely more.
Place 100 mg of this powder in a test tube, add 10 cc sterile isotonic water for injection (available OTC at drug stores) and heat to boiling. Transfer this liquid while still hot using a syringe (available OTC at some drug stores) to a 10 ml rubber stoppered empty sterile ampoule (available OTC at drug stores).
To use this drug which is 10mg/ml, extract with a sterile syringe as much drug as you wish to use.10 mg would send me flying believe it or not. 2.5mg (1/4 cc) was usually enough to keep me "happy" and was my normal dose. 20mg was the most I could take safely in my opinion, and was a waste of drug and money. Normally, for most 150-170 lb males, 2.5 mg is more than enough in my opinion. Using heroin in this manner avoids the problems associated with "street use" and will keep your body healthy and safe, reducing the risk of disease and overdosage.
My memory is pretty good, and I think I covered all the bases here, but I may have made a mistake somewhere. Overall I think this is an accurate method, to the best of my ability to remember.

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There are a few additions that I would like to make also:

1. Hydrochloric Acid (HCL) can be easily attained from any scientific supply house (online or otherwise) without any suspicions at all, although this method imploys a diluted form so it would be necessary to dilute it to the 28% used above.

2. I thought I would mention what a "pipette" is for those who don't know; a pipette is basically a suction device like a syringe or eyedropper... in fact you could probably get away with using a glass syring without the needle on the drum instead, although these are easy enough to get through the scientific supply houses... seriously, just google "scientific supply house" or "scientific supply" and you will be able to find all the chemicals needed for this. To avoid suspicion though it would be best not to order all the supplies together.

3. Ammonium Hydroxide can also be obtained from scientific supply houses (and would need to be dulited) but of all the chemicals he mentioned this would be the one that I would advise you use this method of purchase above all because I am unsure that house hold ammonia would be in a high enough concentration to get stellar results. I do believe that it is a watched chemical in large orders, but I am unsure... if it is it would only raise red flags if ordered in manufacturing type quanities and with other suspicous chemicals.

4. Ethyl Ether is also very easily obtained through scientific supply houses but it is equally easy to go and pick up a few cans of starting fluid, Prestone containing the highest quantity of Ethyl Ether by weight, and spray them into a mason jar, add an equal amount of distilled water, cap and vigorously shake for about 5 - 10 minutes. It will separate into 2 protion being that Ethyl Ether is not water soluble and the water will contain all the rest of your unwanted materials. Next simply sypon off the top layer, it will be very obvious which of your portions is your Diethyl Ether and I would advise you to do a couple extra water extractions to make damn sure you got out all the toxins.

5. If you do not wish to purchase petri dishes (which like the other chemicals can be purchases at scientific supply houses and various mycological vendors for growing fungus in) a simply, but rather small, pyrex bowl would work equally well.

6. In the second to last step were it requires you to boil the solution it is recommened that you use a hotplate, although on top of a radiator or toaster over may also work after a while... I'm unsure. Either way, whatever you do do not use a stove with an open flame, this proceedure involves the use of Ethyl Ether which will hang in the air... that could be a problem.

All that being said this method of purification will not remove Fentanyl from a batch so if it is tainted with that your finished product may be active in miniscule doses. This proceedure will greatly increase the potency of your batch regardless (5 mg of Heroin is roughly equivelent to about 3 mg of Hydromorphone via IV) so start with outrageously small doses and work your way up... better safe than sorry.

This was posted for information purposes only. I do not condone the purchase/sale/ingestion or purification of illegal substances.

[devilsdrug]

excellent chemboy

[Coddfish]

excellent chemboyYes. Excellent.

[ZodiacKiller]

Definitely a good guide, there, C-7. I'd use it, but the 'raw' that SWIM gets is so good that I wouldn't think of messing with it, to be honest with ya. No vinegar smell, either, but a different smell that's kinda hard to describe, but whenever SWIM gets a bag, just a whiff of that smell triggers cravings like mad. I've yet to smell it anywhere else, so I don't assiciate it with anything but smack (and yeah, I still call it that), but if I did I'm certain that it would be trigger-city...

BTW, dig your new avatar, most appropriate, given the advanced knowledge that you seem to possess. ;)


ZK

[shaunclo]

Definitely a good guide, there, C-7. I'd use it, but the 'raw' that SWIM gets is so good that I wouldn't think of messing with it, to be honest with ya. No vinegar smell, either, but a different smell that's kinda hard to describe, but whenever SWIM gets a bag, just a whiff of that smell triggers cravings like mad. I've yet to smell it anywhere else, so I don't assiciate it with anything but smack (and yeah, I still call it that), but if I did I'm certain that it would be trigger-city...

BTW, dig your new avatar, most appropriate, given the advanced knowledge that you seem to possess. ;)


ZK

Im pretty sure the vinegar smell only applies to black-tar, the powdered H I have tried smelled nothing like the traditional black-tar. I may be wrong though because I have only had 1 source for the powder.

[ZodiacKiller]

Im pretty sure the vinegar smell only applies to black-tar, the powdered H I have tried smelled nothing like the traditional black-tar. I may be wrong though because I have only had 1 source for the powder.

Ah, well, since SWIM has never had the tar variety, I guess that would explain his stupidity :rolleyes: .

It just does not seem to be anywhere in this area--SWIM has wanted to try it just for the sake of trying it, if that makes sense, but it ain't around here.


ZK

[TTD]

First of all, if you really want to purify heroin one of your first steps should be to put it in a solution of water with something like chloroform or ether (NOT naptha), this will remove a lot of the crap, you then remove the water layer, add active charcoal and stir the shit out of it, then filter the charcoal out and evaporate the water. This will get a lot of the crap out of heroin, especially things that arent organic or soluble materials like glass or other such things.

If the heroin smells like vinegar its because It still had acetic anhydride in it when distributed, and this acetic anhydride has contacted water in the air and formed acetic acid, which is vinegar, OR someone has disolved the stuff in water at some point, which will also form acetic acid as above. In this case its very likely that you do not have the HCl salt OR the freebase, If it has acetic acid in it, some part of it is probably the acetate salt if not all of it. Its possible that you have diacetylmorphine acetate without any other form, so take that into consideration before you do anything. Ive never played with heroin conversion but im not entirely sure that HCl will knock off the acetate and make a HCl, it may or may not in this case. I do know that acetic anhydride can knock off a HCl molecule though.

You can order hydrochloric acid solution, but this will in fact arouse suspicion, someone ordering fuming hcl solution (38-40%) to a home address would be putting themself at the mercy of the supplier who only has to pick up the phone and dial a three digit agency, its happened before believe me. Complex organic compounds or lab grade reagents sometimes get no attention, but HCl is in some cases more suspicious than chemicals that can be used in drug production.

Since the HCl solution will in fact be the last liquid solution that touches your heroin, it might as well be pure. You can make HCl acid solution yourself with impure materials to start from, its not the easiest thing in the world but the reaction is as follows: NaCl + H2SO4 → NaHSO4 + HCl , which is salt and sulphuric acid forming sodium bisulphate and hydrogen chloride gas, and if you are inventive you can make the gas bubble through water and it will form hydrochloric acid solution in fairly pure quality. There are plenty of directions for this other places, but since were already playing with chemicals i figured what the hell. You might as well have pure HCl if your trying to get pure diacetyl morphine hcl anyway. In any other case this would be excessive, but for harm reduction purposes, going out of your way is in order.

By the way, you will not find isotonic saline or water injection over the counter in a pharmacy, they just wont sell it to you without a good reason. They do sell saline but sometimes it has other things in it, sometimes its hypotonic as well. That wont hurt you too bad but i wouldnt inject hypotonic (.45%) very often it pushes water out of the veins into the surrounding cells.

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Starting fluid also contains one or both of these: hexane, heptane

Both of those are high boiling point, non-polar hydrocarbons, which will not separate from diethyl ether without a distillation. Evaporating wont work, since diethyl ether will evaporate far before hexane or heptane will, so that will not separate them unless you, as above, are distilling the ether and collecting it. Hexane and heptane both have boiling points above ambient temperature, hexane boils at 69 °C and heptane boils at 98.42 °C , both of them far above ethers boiling point.

It might not hurt what your doing to have hexane or heptane in the solution since nothing is going to be left in it to evaporate, but i would definitely NOT trust any other side products present in the starting fluid. In the worst case if you got hexane into the final product (somehow), hexane itself has metabolites in the body that cause lose of protein function, specifically related to lysine if i remember right. The effects of that take a while to go away.

[chemboy7]

You can order hydrochloric acid solution, but this will in fact arouse suspicion, someone ordering fuming hcl solution (38-40%) to a home address would be putting themself at the mercy of the supplier who only has to pick up the phone and dial a three digit agency, its happened before believe me. Complex organic compounds or lab grade reagents sometimes get no attention, but HCl is in some cases more suspicious than chemicals that can be used in drug production.

Hydrochloric Acid is not a watched chemical in any quantity and has so many legitimate uses that ordering it should put no one under any suspicion at all. The only time you would have to worry, as I said above, is if you were ordering all the chemicals together... as this could give them insight as to what you are ordering it for.

[stvip]

Please everyone, remember that giving wrong information with regards to practical chemistry can be extremely dangerous.

Chemboy's comments:

1. Hydrochloric Acid (HCL) can be easily attained from any scientific supply house (online or otherwise) without any suspicions at all, although this method imploys a diluted form so it would be necessary to dilute it to the 28% used above.

Being exactly at 28% concentration isn't important, but dilution of the acid is convenient.
Please note that hardware-store muriatic acid (a common name for hydrochloric acid) is almost always heavily contaminated with nasty (toxic) compounds.

in fact you could probably get away with using a glass syring without the needle on the drum instead, although these are easy enough to get through the scientific supply houses

It should be noted - the entire syringe should be made of glass, including plunger and luer lock, since some NP solvent can dissolve rubber, and acids tent to react with metal.

Ammonium Hydroxide can also be obtained from scientific supply houses (and would need to be dulited) but of all the chemicals he mentioned this would be the one that I would advise you use this method of purchase above all because I am unsure that house hold ammonia would be in a high enough concentration to get stellar results

It's not a question of "stellar" results, it's a matter of ensuring you don't introduce toxic substances into your product (which is a way of getting to the stars, indeed). There's nothing special about ammonium hydroxide as a base. Pure sodium hydroxide, potassium hydroxide, calcium hydroxide and calcium carbonate are easy to find, and not suspicious in the least.

Ethyl Ether is also very easily obtained through scientific supply houses but it is equally easy to go and pick up a few cans of starting fluid,

This is bad advice, do not use starting fluid. Also, note that pure ethyl ether and chloroform are both dangerous chemicals to handle (see later note)

All that being said this method of purification will not remove Fentanyl from a batch

It also might not remove other alkaloids present.

TTD's comments:

First of all, if you really want to purify heroin one of your first steps should be to put it in a solution of water with something like chloroform or ether (NOT naptha)

This is plain wrong - chloroform dissolves both freebase diamorphine and diamorphine hcl. Also, I believe ethyl ether is probably not suitable as a defatting agent. Petroleum ether (naptha) could be useful. As always, if you're not using pure chemicals, you might be doing more harm than good.

This will get a lot of the crap out of heroin, especially things that arent organic or soluble materials like glass or other such things.

It's the filtering that removes the insoluble material. Activated charcoal will adsorb impurities. If on a tight budget, the best investment would probably be in good filtration equipment and 0.22 mu filters.

Its possible that you have diacetylmorphine acetate without any other form, so take that into consideration before you do anything

I don't see why it would matter.

You can order hydrochloric acid solution, but this will in fact arouse suspicion, someone ordering fuming hcl solution (38-40%) to a home address would be putting themself at the mercy of the supplier who only has to pick up the phone and dial a three digit agency

HCl is extremely common, and is as non-suspicious as a pure chemical being sent to a private address can be. At least in Israel, there should be absolutely no problem purchasing it.
Why even mention its synthesis? Far too dangerous, and there's no need.

In the worst case if you got hexane into the final product (somehow), hexane itself has metabolites in the body that cause lose of protein function

Hexane would evaporate along with the ethyl ether, so that's not an issue. It might, however, pull some impurities along which ethyl ether wouldn't. This would be irrelevant with a defatting step (reminder: hexane is an alkane, petroleum ether is usually a pentane-hexane-heptane mixture). Anyway, if ethyl ether is to be used, it should be used in its pure form, without any alkane, and without the nastier compounds which might be present.

See this thread, for comments about chloroform and ethyl ether, among other things (and a reminder: I am not a chemist, and have very little practical experience with chemistry):

http://forum.opiophile.org/showthread.php?t=1586

[chemboy7]

Well I will agree with you stvip, the posting of wrong information in regards to anything can be dangerous but, with the possible exception of the ether/starting fluid comment, I fail to see how anything you quoted me saying falls into that category... really your comments were just touching up what I had already said. I had mentioned that to replace the pipette with a syringe that it would have to be glass, you said it should be completely glass; I mention that this wouldn't remove Fentanyl from a batch, you say it may not remove other alkaloids either; I mention diluting the HCL, you say it's not necessary but "convenient", ect.

It should be noted that I agree with you also about it being a good idea to buy pure ether instead of using the washed starting fluid... I mentioned it only in passing as I know that alot of illict chemist, essecially meth chemist, imploy this method as a means of obtaining ethyl ether and from what I hear an aquaous wash removes 98% of the unwanted toxins.

[stvip]

Well yes, in your case, with the exception of the starting fluid idea, my comments were not contradictory to your statements. If it seems I had implied they were supposed to be, it is because my English composition skills are lacking today (am tired). However, it's poor judgement to even mention the use of chemical products contaminated with unknown impurities.
Not enough people are purifying their drugs prior to use, it is important to have an accurate, safe and practical procedure available.

[exitwound]

I would say that both chemboy7 and TTD were correct in essentially everything they said. You were not without points, stvip, but honestly I think you over-stepped and threw out a lot of debateable or questionable items yourself.

I don't want to get myself in the middle of a technical discussion when I have little practical knowledge on the topic and even less experience, but what little I do know suggests that everyone should be slowing down, trying to find positive and useful information to collaborate on & refine....not knock down and devolve into flames, kthx?! :)

-your friendly neighborhood mod-beast

[TTD]

I did take organic chemistry , and i almost majored in pharmacology. So while i am not a chemist by trade, im going on what i learned in org chem, namely that the lack of an OH group on diacetylmorphine does make it lipophilic (as do the acetyls), but the formation of a salt should in fact lower the polarity to the point that it no longer disolves in non polars, and while chloroform is not really like the other non polars it is used as one, usually for lipids and moderatly polar compounds since its polarity index is only 4, perhaps that fits in this case, but evidence elsewhere was enough to cause doubt.

Every piece of literature i have ever read regarding the manufacture of heroin has included the use of chloroform as a purification of the salt in water, removing unwanted compounds. The active charcoal is also mentioned in every paper i have ever read, including the thread you posted.


Reference here : http://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/heroinmfg.html

" To the heroin base mixture in the pot, water is added at three times the volume of acetic anhydride and mixed by stirring. A small amount of chloroform is added. The mixture is stirred and then allowed to stand for twenty minutes. Doing so precipitates highly-colored impurities and a red, greasy liquid. The water layer is carefully poured off and saved in a clean pot, leaving the red grease in the pot. In a clean pot, activated charcoal is stirred into the aqueous solution and is filtered to remove solid impurities. The decolorizing effects of the charcoal, combined with the chloroform treatment, will leave a light yellow solution. The use of charcoal is repeated one or more times, until the solution is colorless."


This case would be the acetate salt. Chloroform is BARELY miscible with water on the order of less than 1% by weight, so they arent combined in the solution, and they saved the water presumably because it contained the drug.

If it smells like vinegar it obviously has acetic acid in it still. Its not absolute, but likely that you have the acetate salt. This does in fact matter if your going to be adding anything with a hydronium anion or OH ion. Id like to know beforehand what im forming with a reaction before i end up ruining something, not as critical in this case though.

Anything that requires above tech grade HCl solution is not typically something a normal citizen will need it for, hence it will in fact cause suspicion. I tend to be more cautious, but HCl itself (the gas, hydrogen chloride) is in fact a watched chemical. The acid in solution is not going to be ignored simply because its common in chemistry.

Forming HCl from salt and sulphuric acid is not what i would call a synthesis, i would consider ether or chloroform etc to be far more dangerous than HCl gas if you direct it carefully and dont dump things together all at once, the heat generated is managable, and you dont draw attention to yourself.

Diethyl ether is a regulated chemical that cant be purchased in quantities above 2gallons in most cases, but even under that limit there not going to ignore it being shipped to a house. Either way your inviting attention for something that isnt even all that illicit as far as chemistry goes.

Hexane boils far above ether, at 69deg celsius, ether boils at 35deg celsius. That may not be as high as other sovents, but heptane boils at 98deg cel. Your not gonna get rid of either one before the ether in an evaporation. Unless your heating it, its not going anywhere, for quite a while.

[zig]

ok I'm confused. chemboy's original post was pretty straight forward, is it good to go or has the debate changed all that?

[devilsdrug]

ok fukk it all, purify it by skippin all the bs , cook it slam it home be happy