This one takes me back to wher I started on this subject a year ago in the Pill Fuckers at it Again thread.
Gas station ephedrine pills were ground up in a blender with no solvent pre-soak. They were then extracted with portions of 91% isopropyl alcohol. This pill formulation turned out to be a filter clogging type, so after soaking and swirling, it was allowed to settle and the soak was decanted. Then several more alcohol soaks were done over a period of several hours. This resulted in a milky looking solution that was allowed to settle overnight.
The almost clear alcohol extract was poured off the settled debris, and put into a beaker. It was put on the stove at med heat and set to boiling. As it got warm, roughly 12 grams KOH per 100 of the 25 mg ephedrine plus 200 mg guifenesin pills was added.
As it got boiling, the initially kind of clear solution turned a pale yellow, then a yellow oil layer formed at the bottom of the beaker. There was a fairly large amount of the oil compared to a similar number of sudafed pills. Boiling was continued for 25 minutes.
When the beaker had cooled down, the liquid was poured into a sep funnel. The oil layer was drained off, and the alcohol put back into a beaker. It was slowly evaporated down. The alcohol was of a kind of cloudy appearance.
When the alcohol was almost all gone, roughly 70 ml of water was added to the beaker for each 100 pills used. It was swirled around to dissolve the stuff at the bottom of the beaker, and poured into a sep funnel. Then about 50 ml of naptha (actual solvent used:hexane)was put into the beaker to clean up some more. This wash was put into the sep funnel as well.
The sep funnel was shaken, and after a bit of time to let the layers settle, the water was drained off. This was followed by another water wash, which too was drained away.
Finally, the naptha(hexane) layer was poured into a beaker, allowed to sit for a couple hours to shed water, then poured into another beaker and gassed with dry HCl. Yield roughly 70% of what seems to be nice ephedrine HCl. Perhaps it is time to start with recrystallization experiments.