Do get some KOH. It works much better than KOH you make, or KOH you have after evaporating drain cleaner. Like the difference between lye and NaOH, only more so.
I had some success making a workable alcohol solution with lots of K and OH's in it. I dissolved KCl and NaOH in a minimum amount of water-- not enough for all of it to dissolve completely-- heated that up and added a larger volume of ISO alcohol to it, then left it on heat with stirring for about thirty minutes. I added the alcohol layer to the pseudo/ISO/H2O solution from extracting the pill mass, brought this to a boil and refluxed it for thirty minutes, then separated the water layer out. I evapped off the alcohol, added water, and extracted with xylene. I also extracted the trashy water layer with xylene and picked up a lot of pseudo from it as well.
The process worked; it was cumbersome, and most of it was guess work. Far better to just obtain and use KOH. The pseudo obtained was very clean of polymers, however, and reacted very well.