Extraction of active ingredients from various sources.

[Red Beret]

Hello everyone.

This topic is to discuss the extraction of useful active substances from sources such as OTC meds, and any other sources you may have used.

I'll start off with my OTC codeine extraction, from tablets. I have tried this many times, and it works well with no special equipment. I like this procedure as it could be used in a situation where minimal resources are available.

Codeine is a strong painkiller, and will find many uses in the survivalists medicine chest.

Materials required:
Tablets containing codeine and either paracetemol or ibuprofen (thats what I have been using).
Filter, such as an old t-shirt or paper towel.
Water
Two 500ml containers, or thereabouts.

Method:
For a fairly powerful dose, start with about 200mg of codeine. So, if your tablets contain 10mg of codeine obviously you will need twenty tablets.

Grind your tablets to a powder, or at least small chunks, then add about 250ml of cold water to them. Stir until there is very little (or no) powder and chunks remaining. This usualy takes me around 10-15 minutes.

When this is done, cool the mix in the fridge or freezer. Paracetemol drops out of solution at around 20c, and ibuprofen is around the same. I ususally leave the mixture in the freezer until it is just above freezing. Around 50 minutes is good.

Once this is done you will notice a thick slurry on the bottom of the container, this is the ibuprofen, or paracetemol. Filter the solution out, there is usually no need to pour the slurry into the filter. Just pour it slowly and leave the slurry in the bottom of the conatiner as very little will be gained by putting this through.

Discard the slurry and keep the codeine solution. You may wish to put this back in the fridge to make sure no more paracetemol or ibuprofen settles out, but I have found this to be unnecesary.

Thats all there is to it. Drink the solution down! It tastes like shit, but just wash it down with some coke or somehting. Onset of effects will vary, depending on the person, but generally it will take between 20 and 60 minutes. Works more quickly on an empty stomach.

I always use nurofen plus, as it has the highest OTC codeine content in Australia, 12.8mg. Also the liver is more tolerant of an accidental overdose of ibuprofen than paracetmol, and you can take more ibuprofen before entering the danger zone.

Around 450mg of codeine is starting to get very high, and I think anything above 500mg is very dangerous. Codeine is an opiate, and can be very addictive. In my experience, tollerance can build quickly. I beleive codeine is converted to morphine once it reaches the brain, so I'm assuming a cross tollerance can be developed with codeine and morphine.

Please note this was not posted with the intention of teaching people how to get high, but to show people how to make a usefull painkiller when one is required. ;)

[nbk2000]

Next you need the process for turning codeine into morphine.

[Maldore]

Next you need the process for turning codeine into morphine.

Codeine is metabolized into morphine by the Cytochrome P450 2D6 (CYP2D6) enzym in the liver.

An idea to make the dose stronger by volume could be fractional distillation or freeze distillation (fractional freezing).

[nbk2000]

Codeine to Morphine:

http://designer-drugs.com/pte/12.162.180.114/dcd/chemistry/codeine2morphine.html

Codeine to Hydrocodone:
http://designer-drugs.com/pte/12.162.180.114/dcd/chemistry/hydrocodone.html

Codeine to Dihydrocodone (Patent):
US6887999 (http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6887999.html)

To copy/pasta that the drug is converted to morphine in situ by a liver enzyme is useless, unless you happen to have some spare CYP2D6 lying around to convert it to morphine outside of a body?

Didn't think so.

[Hirudinea]

Codeine is metabolized into morphine by the Cytochrome P450 2D6 (CYP2D6) enzyme in the liver.

To copy/pasta that the drug is converted to morphine in situ by a liver enzyme is useless, unless you happen to have some spare CYP2D6 lying around to convert it to morphine outside of a body?

Didn't think so.

Actually that brings up a question that I've been thinking of asking but didn't know how to ask.

I was looking up acetaminophen (paracetamol) on Wikipedia for fun and it mentioned that it was discovered when the urine of people who had taken phenacetin, a drug previously used as a pain killer, and that got me wondering, what other chemical processes occur in the body (human or animal) that could be useful in clandestine chemistry, is this a viable idea or just BS?

[nbk2000]

Recycling of pharmaceuticals from urine has occurred in the past.

When penicillin was first being used in WW2, it was so precious that the urine of soldiers given it was processed to recover the unmetabolized penicillin, to be used again.

Many street drugs, like meth, are passed out of the body in the urine in very high percentage, there for the recovery if so desired.

In a post-apocalypse scenario, the ability to recover antibiotics and pain-killers from urine could greatly extend the usability of ones stockpiles, if the process to do so was feasible and hygienic.

[Hirudinea]

When penicillin was first being used in WW2, it was so precious that the urine of soldiers given it was processed to recover the unmetabolized penicillin, to be used again.

Really I didn't know that.

In a post-apocalypse scenario, the ability to recover antibiotics and pain-killers from urine could greatly extend the usability of ones stockpiles, if the process to do so was feasible and hygienic.

Well in a post apocalypse scenario it would seem that recovering antibiotics would be easier than running down to the drug store, and if it was done in WWII it must be doable.

But I was still wondering if their are chemicals you can give a subject and have their bodies turn them into other, more useful chemicals?

[nbk2000]

Results of military research in long-term drug storage:

http://www.mercola.com/2000/apr/2/drug_expiration.htm

[ciguy007]

Yeah - penicillin was recovered from urine (buffer to acidic, extract), except in self-inflicted wounds or VD in which case the victims were made to recycle it without the benefit of any sort of cleanup - yum, yum!

If you're gonna go to the trouble of converting codeine to morphine, why not get some acetic anhydride and go all the way to heroin? About twice as potent as morphine milligram per milligram.

[W4RGASM]

In siberia, shamans are very fond of the psilocybin-bearing mushroom for religious and spiritual purposes. About 40% is excreted unmetabolised in the urine, so they'd often drink it to get a second bite at the, uh, mushroom.

The reindeer know this too, and they love the shrooms nearly as much as those crazy shamans. In some parts of siberia, travellers are warned not to urinate in the open, or nearby reindeer, as they regularly try to drink it before it's hit the ground. Gets messy.

[ultma]

I don’t think it is Psilocybin, Psilocin and baeocystin from psilocybes, it is Muscimol or ibotenic acid or muscarine(yay for SLUDGE) any way the active substance from the Amanita genus is passed mostly un-metabolized in the urine.

The shamans would have it first then the lower class would recycle from the urine of the shaman, after all there shroom juice is one of their most prized possessions.

[russoc4]

Caffeine from Tea

Add 4 g of powdered calcium carbonate to 90 mL of water. Bring to a boil and pour about 60 mL over five tea bags. Allow tea to brew for five minutes, remove from water, and squeeze as much liquid out as possible. Return the tea bags to the remaining 30 mL of hot calcium carbonate solution and brew again for five more minutes. Remove from the water and squeeze out the liquid. Combine the two extracts. Hot filter the tea solution to remove any solids and add 2-3 g of sodium chloride to filtered liquid, stir, and cool to room temperature.

Extract the caffeine with 25 mL ethyl acetate (d = 0.9 g/mL) in a separatory funnel. Remove the lower aqueous layer, collect the upper organic layer. Extract the aqueous layer again with 25 mL fresh ethyl acetate. Discard the aqueous layer and combine the two organic layers (50 mL EtOAc total).

Add 2-3 g magnesium sulfate to the organic extracts and swirl for 10 minutes to dry. Filter the extracts and boil off (or distill) the ethyl acetate (bp 78 degrees celcius) to recover crude caffeine.

***********************

This procedure was adapted from Hill and Barbaro's Experiments in Organic Chemistry, Third Edition. 2005. Other carbonates can be used in place of calcium carbonate, such as the readily availible sodium bicarbonate. This is used to make the solution basic to make the caffeine more soluble. Also, chloroform (d = 1.5 g/mL, bp = 61 degrees celcius) may be used in place of ethyl acetate, though this is more toxic. Chloroform may be synthesized from household bleach and ethanol or acetone. Ethyl acetate may be synthesized by the Fisher Esterification of ethanol and acetic acid. Also note that chloroform is more dense than water when performing the separation.

[servidor]

It seems to me 200Mg of codeine is for amusement purpose or a really strong pain killer. On medical issue let some pain survive, the way you take care about the source of it.
For my experience 60 Mg is enough for migraine, some paracetamol left in the mix seems to make better for hangover. If you use it as pain killer don’t abuse or you’ll loose a wonderful medicine.

**********************

This is a junk post. Somehow however, it slipped through the cracks.

Consider yourself lucky, and don't slip again. I can imagine "servidor - Rape of the English language" fitting very well in the "Beast has Fed Upon" thread...

-Hinckleyforpresident

[c.Tech]

I have recently done some research into codeine based meds and the extraction of codeine.

During my testing I found that ibuprofen tablets (Nurofen plus) are probably the worst to use in Australia. When dissolved in water and filtered the resulting solution is always murky, no matter what I filtered it through it always ended up the same.

Many assume that because of the low solubility of ibuprofen and high solubility of codeine that Nurofen plus would be perfect to use, but due to these meds being highly abused the manufactures have found ways to counteract that by binding the codeine into the pills making it hard to separate useful amounts.

Some people reported they could get more of a high taking less whole tablets than what they used in the extraction.

Although in other countries where they may not have this problem ibuprofen tablets would be the best to use. Water from the extraction would be evaporated and the solid washed with alcohol to remove remaining ibuprofen that is very soluble in alcohol (1g/18ml)

The information I tried to find on solvent solubility of codeine phosphate, acetaminophen (paracetamol) and ibuprofen hasn’t been easy to find. I do have some information but I’m uncertain to how accurate it is. One source tells me that 1g codeine phosphate will dissolve in 325ml of ethanol and another source states 750g/L so I have great doubt trusting this information.

Another way codeine could be extracted would be to treat the solution of a cold water extraction with a strong base, changing the codeine phosphate into codeine freebase then dissolve it in a solvent.

Does anyone know how acetaminophen would react to a strong base?