This was started in the General Discourse forum, but I thought it could use some dicussion on the actual synthesis.
Now, the first step is to clean ordinary street coke. Rhodium said he had some solubility data stashed away, I bet that could be useful. But most helpful of all would be first hand A/B procedures that go farther than turning it into crack. I would think that a NP wash, then dumping it in ammonia water until the freebase had precipitated, then extracting with Et2O, then acidifying with concentrated HCl, and diluting with Et2O until it all precipitates would give almost pure cocaine.
But then, what if it's cut with something like powdered novacaine or lidacaine? Would those make it through the A/B? I guess this is where the solubility data would come in handy.
Now, once the coke has been cleaned, the next step is to reflux in HCl
(MeOH), according to
Post 329415 (missing)
(Rhodium: "I feel there are TOO many coincidences now...", General Discourse). I guess this is just an acid hydrolisis of the ether bond between the tropane ring and the benzoate moiety thing.(Is this the weak point that reqires a weak base be used to turn cocaine into freebase?) So that leaves you with Anhydroecgonine Methyl ester, which can be distilled at 67-74°C (0.1mm), according to
https://www.thevespiary.org/rhodium/Rhodium/djvu/clarke.djvu
. Peachy.
Now, the final step would be to run a grignard on the Anhydroecgonine Methyl ester with (p)flouro-bromomagnesiumbenzene, which leaves you with the desired analog as the major constituent.
The final step is the only one that I have questions about, really.
1)Well, the grignard with the (p)flouro-bromobenzene is what I'm worried about. How do you keep the F from snagging a Mg atom? It's a halogen, too, so what keeps it from reacting?
2)So the products are distilled after the reaction, or do you just A/B? Reasons?
3)What would be a good recrystallization solvent for this end product?
Just as a side note, if this were to be cut back 50x to normal coke strength, would that prevent it being rock up into crack? Depending on what cut you used, right? This could be a very good thing for the coke market, from some points of view, anyway. Not only would it last longer, It might eliminate the manufacture of crack. But then the CIA might get pretty pissed that you were killing their principle product.
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, Rage, against the dying of the light. --Dylan Thomas
