i thought some of you opiophiles out there might find this interesting.
des chloro loperamide has an ED 50 of 3 mg/kg about 1/2 that of morphine; does'nt sound like much but esterify it and potency increases dramitically.
this paper gives examples of the ammonium formate palladium system for the hydrodechlorination of chloro arenes.
the preferrable way to hydrodechlorinate loperamide would be ammonium formate pd/c (as little as 3% loading is acceptable) and methanol.
stir 2 hours at room temp, filter, evaporate, basify,then extract.
the yeilds are 100% with no detectable starting material.
the process is highly chemoselective tolerating benzylic alcohols and esters so overreduction is not a concern (basically impossible to fuck up).
the paper below illustrates a hydrodechlorination using palladium on polystrene polyethylene glycol copolymer support.
and this link discusses the feasiblilty of des-chloroloperamide..

http://forum.opiophile.org/archive/index.php/t-34565.html?s=1170095548a680afaca8870c1283fddd

p.s. one thing i need clarification on is:
in one example they employ 3 equivalents of ammonium formate to reduce pentachloro arenes and in the table below they employ the same amount for mono chloro benzene what gives?

to isolate loperamide it is tricky until you figure it out.
see loperamide is complexed with hypomellose and you need to treat it with hot water first to break the complex then extract it with methanol.
do that until the pill mass is no longer bitter.
you'll get this greenish gunk which you can then recrystallize with methanol and isopropanol.
it's cheap if you buy it from costco or ebay (that's not a source loperamide is legal).
i know you need at least 1 mole ammonium formate 3 moles would'nt hurt i guess, and the ratio of catalyst is 1 mole %
or 1% by moles of palladium to the loperamide.
and enough methanol to dissolve it all.
you guys keep worrying about mptp+
here is news methyl phenyl tetrahydro pyridine
do you see a methyl group attached to the nitrogen?
nope...
as far as being a euphoric opiate indeed it is, at least the ester is i don't know about the des chloro compound.
i have'nt had an opportunity to stir some up although i have the means and the stuff.

that's weird the other paper says it leaves the benzylic esters untouched
looks like that example employs about 5 mol % palladium/substrate

OK
this paper is damn useful if you dig up references 4-12 you will find examples of catalytic transfer hydrogenation of mono chloro arenes
the work primarily done by anwer and spatola is most pertinent here.
also the reaction has psuedo first order kinetics dependant on the concentration of the formate ion.
also you will note it is good technique to first degas the methanol under sonication, flush it out with nitrogen for 15 minutes, then activate your catalyst by exposing it to ammonium formate.
this makes palladium hydride so that the catalyst does'nt get chemisorbed onto your substrate.
also, reduce the amine salt not the freebase because piperidines and other heterocyclic amines poison pd catalysts so leave it protonated make sure it is damn pure too.

also the pepap entry in wikipedia says this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEPAP

It is unlikely that the tetrahydropyridine byproducts that may be formed during the synthesis of PEPAP are neurotoxic in the same way as the MPPP byproduct MPTP. It appears that the N-methyl group of MPTP is required for neurotoxic activity. In animal experiments, only MPTP analogues that preserved the N-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine structure were active as dopaminergic neurotoxins. Most structural changes, including replacing the N-methyl group with other substituents, abolished neurotoxicity.[3]

water is used to break the hypomellose/ loperamide complex.
methanol extracts it.
if you just use methanol you won't extract all of the loperamide.

no loperamide is bound to hypomellose so it's soulubility in methanol is limited.
when you add hot water it breaks the complex liberating loperamide so it can be dissolved in methanol.
just add enough boiling water to slurry the pill mass then add methanol until it's filterable.
filter through cotton using a buchner funnel.
when you're done after 3 liquid/solid extractions evap the methanol and recrystallize the green gunk from methanol/isopropanol.

There will be no more source or price talk in this thread or it will be closed.

I have pruned it, my next step will be deletion if needed.

i wanted to chime in on an article i rented from deepdyve.com entitled
"further studies on the interaction of loperamide with capacitive entry in luekemic HL 60 cells"

in this article they mention the preparation of des-chloroloperamide
the process is outlined as follows:

analog 2
(des-chloroloperamide)
was synthesized by hydrogenation of 1 (loperamide) (514 mg) in ethanol 20 ml, containing triethylamine (.4ml) and 50 mg's of 10% pd/c for 24 hr. to yeild 44% (196 mg) after recrystalization (i think it's isopropanol/acetone)
and that's all it says.
now i said that to say this, comprehensive organic functional group transformations gives the ammonium formate/pd/c CTH procedure yeilds at 99% so this indeed is the preferrable way to go.

you have'nt tried the  propionyl ester that is 5 times stronger.
it does pack some euphoria, not as good as heroin, you can't have everything.
dechlorination would theoretically increase it's potency about 20 times, esterify that and you could have fentanyl strength opiods with some euphoria fentanyl is devoid of euphoria.

nope i wanted  to make some pepap but after i had that stroke everything got put on hold.

yeah modeling does'nt quite stack up to trial and error.
you could use potassium formate but ammonium formate is what is conventially used and it works fine.
modeling aside SAR for similar compounds say that the acetyl ester of prodine is 5 times less potent than the propionyl ester.
cinnamoyl esters would be worthless here anything more than 3 carbons on the ester and it falls of a cliff.