"anyone care to shoot more?"

OK,

"First of all, put 2-3 kg of ion-exchange resin in a dish and pour a bottle of vinegar into it, then add 1kg of kitchen salt. Add some water so the resin is filled to the top, then stir.
You can soak the resin in HCl but vinegar is cheaper and easier to obtain. It must soak for some time, you can stir from time to time with something made out of wood. You can also gently heat, but avoid boiling."

I would scratch the above! (Did some wise ass write this after reading what we have already written?). Why would you do that? It just adds the risk of producing some salt of Morphine which is ridiculously soluble in water which will fuck up the next step! You will have to evaporate to dryness, and that will bring along any shit that was present! The exchange resin should be activated already when purchased!

"Now it's the "soup" part. To 20 litre saucepan put poppy straw, fill with water and boil. Press (knead? pinch?) it while boiling. Water will become brown. Strain (filter) it and leave only the liquid (remove all solid things)."


Now I can come up with 20 better ways to make a crude aqueous morphine extract from straw.

"Put the ion-exchange resin in a bowl/basin and pour the filtered "soup" on it. It must soak for a few hours, longer=better, approx. 3-5 hours. You have to stir, because the ion-exchange resin is heavy and will descend to the bottom. Don't heat. The resin is absorbing opiates."

Passing over a bed of exchange resin, does not constitute soaking for 5 hours. Exchange resin in these contexts are used frequently in columns, and if you have ever seen anyone run a column of exchange resin (I assure you it dont take 5 hours! lol). Thats why this particular procedure when ammonia was added would produce a very crude product. Whereas making a better quality extract of morphine from straw (maybe use some water with isopropanol and 0.23% Ammonia(couple of drops))? No boiling! The longer you leave it to extract the more shite you will bring along!), and passing the extract over the resin (not soaking for 5 hours!!, if you are paranoid about not getting it all do another run with different resin, as 90% of the best of the best will be in resin from the first quick pass!). After removing and washing the resin and adding to basic medium, are then meant to filter the resin and fix the pH at 7, morphine hydrate should precipitate from solution!! If acid is avoided at all costs! Then only one gram per every 5 liters of water used is be lost!! As 1 gram of morphine sulphate is soluble in 5 liters of water. That precipitate could be filtered and used to prepare the HCl salt if needed (no boiling, no evaporating!).

"When the most of acetone is vaporized, but not the whole acetone, you have to add 5-6 drops of acetic anhydride (using a dropper) to the dissolved plaster.
The plaster has to be vaporized until it is entirely dry, because acetic anhydride is a poison.

What is left dissolves in small amounts of water, approx. 20-30 cm(3). It is the "kompot".

This is about the only part I actually believe came from the original recipe, as I can imagine that! Still if I went through all the trouble of getting a nice Morph extract and acquiring a usable AA. I would not be producing home-bake black tar! I would be going for a white crystalline product!

Disclaimer; The following post contains a lot of pointless filler/rambles which, when writing I had not intended on including. However, as my joint burned lower and the warm fuzzy glow of my opiate dose kicked in, i started chatting more and more shit to the point where it became hard to tell between what was ineffably useless dribble and what questions i was actually trying to ask. I've tried to put all the main questions in bold text to save some time,  but its becoming increasingly difficult to concentrate on tidying up my post as the more time i spend on it the more incapable of general function i become. So i think I'll quit whilst I'm ahead .

Apologies for digging up an old thread, but I've been interested in extracting morphine from poppy pods straw for a good 18 months now(being an avid opiate user and chemistry hobbyist) but have had little headway in finding that elusive whiten crystal via simple chemical extraction(and I've tried many, at best I've got a ~50% pure extract which is useless for IV use due to the fats n' waxes. In fact the whole extraction is a motherfuck of a job, and very very pointless. Up until now I'd all but given up, having not been able to make anything even close to superior to simply grinding the pods to a powder and piling it into my mouth.

However, I've recently gained access to a lot of very hard to get or watched chemicals and equipment and so a lot of experiments that were for so long out of my reach are now possible, finally. Though that said, now that i can do these things, very few of them are appealing to me any more unless they are opiate-related. However, with the total amount of money and effort i put into extracting morphine from pod's over the years being far greater than all my other experiments put together, and considering i can now finally get ion exchange resin(for hella cheap!) there is little more that i want to do but complete a SUCCESSFUL extraction of high purity crystalline morphine and stop spending all my money on expensive pharms and H when its around.


Only problem is, there is very little information on the specifics of this anywhere i've searched(many hours of googling and patent-sifting) and a whole lot of conflicting misinformation. In the end i'll come up with my own finely tuned method as i do with all my experiments, but i better check i get the right equipment and the basic method down first(i just can't afford multiple failures any more, all i can do is small 10g or so pod batches until i find something that works i guess).  First off, the resiin itself. Am i right in thinking i just need Cation Exchange Resin? I asked my guy for Cation exchange resin and all i got in reply was "500g Cation Exchange Resin £x.xx" nothing about whether it's acidic or what. Should this not work? From the patent summaries i've read, it should, but if theres something specific i need to ask for i'm sure he'll be able to get it.

I also read that using water saturated isobutanol gives the best yields, but that adding any alcohol will help extraction, anyone know of just how much it would affect yield or purity of yield? Im thinking of leaving this out initially, as i just cant afford loads of chemicals at the moment(its a stretch just going for the resin as its money not spent on opiates/weed, and thats only a few quid!).

Basically, in my head i have the procedure as 1. Water/IBA extraction of poppy pods/straw 2. Add resin to aqueous ammonia and gently warm/leave to sit before filtering off 3. Wash the resin beads with the water/IBA extract(i was thinking of putting gauze in the bottom of a 40cm straight glass air condenser, filling it with resin and putting it on top of a fitting RBF so i can just drip it through and not risk loosing any, good?) 4.  Wash the resin out with some kind of basic solution(would Ammonia work for this? I read some place that only Bicarbonates can be used, some other place said NaOH is the best, some just say basic solution, any clarification?) and work up the extracted morphine.

Finally, i have been thinking on the ratio's of resin:extract. What kind of ratio's of resin:extract would i be looking at here? One would assume an excess of the resin to make sure you catch as much of the M as possible, but i dont know how to work out an excess when i dont know what a reasonable ratio would be in the first place. Would i work it on grams of resin/grams of pod used, grams of resin/ml of solution, grams of resin/mg of morphine content or what? I mean, if i dont find out i'll just experiment, but grindin them pods by hand is a helluva job which i dont wanna be doing more of than i have to!

I have to say...using carbonate, or possibly bicarbonate, a much milder base than NaOH to form the phenate salt of the poppy alkaloids might be a better idea. I am not familar very much with exchange resin use, never used any practically, so as far as the strength of the base and interactions with the ion exchange resin, not sure....but to prevent destroying one's precious papaveretum product for the kompot, why not use a weaker base? as long as the PH is high enough to form the phenate, all is good, no? too high, shit hits fan, clandestine chemist gets sprayed liberally with said fecal matter and loses the goods.

As far as pods themselves go....if going from pod to product...how about instead of processing the dried pods by grinding, leaching the goods out etc in basified isobutanol, acidic water, acidic alcohol etc, take FRESH pods, green, stinking, revolting tasting as tea fresh green pods, still with their natural water within the cells, and repeatedly freeze-thaw, freeze-thaw, to rupture the bejesus out of the cellulosic plant cells, THEN leach out the goods?

Just an idea.

Freezing will cause minute ice crystals to form within the cells, of their own water.

These, when looked at in miniature, are like a thousand knives, slicing the fucking shite out of of every single cell...repeat and the result will likely bee slime...but I believe this will have an affinity for the polar phase, at any rate it will be heavy and sink to the bottom. To bee born in mind if halocarbon solvents like chloroform or dichlor are used.