There's a few steps here folks. Somebody rigged up a erlenmeyer with a couple of hundred grams of off the shelf black pepper and threw in some EtOH and let sit. After filtering organic matter out and drying the EtOH off, one gets a mixture of different isomers of piperine (4 to be exact) but never the less they all react with caustic hydroxides to form piperonylic acid + piperidine byproduct(don't worry there's not enough of this to collect for other uses, so let it evaporate)which is then oxidised to piperonyl. Ethyl nitrate is as easy as making HCl from sulfuric acid, and somewhat the same setup but here you won't be collecting gas. The equation goes EtOH+H2SO4--> Ethyl Sulfate + (K or Na)NO3 --> Ethyl nitrate + (Sodium or Potassium) Bisulfate and sulfate. If you decant quickly after the reaction sequence you can save the trouble of separating those byproducts later (even though some purification is needed) The sulfates will crystallize at the bottom then slow dissolve back into the solution. Catch them as crystal and It will save a lot of trouble. Decant. Purify, etc. Now piperine yields I've read are anywhere from 2.5% to 7% of the weight of the pepper used. Mind you this will produce small amounts of MDA in the order of 4 to 5 grams per run per 100 g of pepper. By hey how hard is it to get 100-200 g of black pepper,EtOH,Na or KNO3,H2SO4,KOH? The nitrates used in the Ethyl nitrate run can also used to make nitric acid with can oxidise piperonylic acid to piperonal. I've also read that MnO2 can be used but who wants to purify that out of batteries? I've dreamed up MDA from alkaline batteries, black pepper, stump remover and alcohol. How much more over-the-counter could it be?
