Silk Road forums
Discussion => Drug safety => Topic started by: wowzers on August 25, 2011, 02:18 pm
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The euro MDMA which is all over the place at the moment is almost completely pure.
It does however seem to have a small cut in it and some left over shit from the synthesis.
It also seems to come in 2 tasty flavours. The first is a sassafrassy, aldehyde smell (mostly MDMA from the UK). The second (most of the Dutch stuff), smells sweeter and more vanillin. As the synthesis won't make give the product this smell, I assume that a small cut is added to the crude product. Most people know the classic MDMA synthesis from safrole, I guess that by putting a small amount of whatever fragrant chemical in it convinces people they're consuming a quality product. MDMA however has no smell and is suprisingly mild in taste. MDMA is also blindingly white and sparkly in its microcrystalline form, the tan/ brown stuff is where the chemist hasn't cleaned up his product properly.
Here's a quick method of ensuring your MD is lovely and clean.
You'll need:
Diethyl ether (it's easy to get, you won't attract suspicion if you're sensible, buy it in small <500ml amounts)
Acetone (As above, hundreds of legit uses)
Isopropyl alcohol (buy it from a pharmacy or ebay)
some pasteur pipettes
a few 50ml beakers.
a heat gun or other heat source (no naked flames).
Put 2g of MDMA in the beaker.
Chill 20 ml ether and 20 ml acetone.
Heat up 10mL isopropyl alcohol.
Add the hot alcohol dropwise to the MDMA, heating as you do so.
If solids remain when all the MDMA has dissolved, carefully pipette the still hot solution into a second beaker. The solids are usually a bit of sugar added as a cut and are largely insoluble in IPA.
Allow the solution to cool for 1 h, then slowly add the chilled ether with swirling.
A fine powder will precipitate. When precipitation ceases, carefully pipette off any remaining liquid.
Add 10 ml chilled acetone, swirl and remove this liquid.
Add 10 ml chilled ether, swirl and remove.
Dry the precipitate under a lamp overnight.
You will have crunchy, sparkly crystals. I've tested this on several batches of euro MDMA and the resulting product is 100% pure, with a melting point of 153 °C (!!). Using this quick and dirty method you will get >80% product recovery by mass.
The product is much nicer to insufflate and is completely odorless and colorless.
Enjoy.
As a side note, does anyone in the business know what the cut is? I'm unfortunately not in a position where I can safely analyze the washings from the purification.
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Thank you for this!
if you're going to keep contributing such valuable content, you should have a bitcoin address in your sig for donations ;)
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haha, never considered that. I guess if you find it useful then chuck me a few pennies :D
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you've certainly got it coming to you. I feel like every post I've read by you brings me one step closer to a career in chemistry/safe alternative lifestyle.
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Thanx for the process description.
:D
nomad bloodbath
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glad to be able to contribute something to this community. many thanks to the people who donated btc, i seriously wasn't expecting them!
Any suggestions for further tutorials are welcome, I have a lot of experience in the field so I'll try my best to answer any pertinent questions about extraction/ purification techniques using OTC equipment.
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Put 2g of MDMA in the beaker.
Chill 20 ml ether and 20 ml acetone.
Heat up 10mL isopropyl alcohol.
Add the hot alcohol dropwise to the MDMA, heating as you do so.
If solids remain when all the MDMA has dissolved, carefully pipette the still hot solution into a second beaker. The solids are usually a bit of sugar added as a cut and are largely insoluble in IPA.
Allow the solution to cool for 1 h, then slowly add the chilled ether with swirling.
A fine powder will precipitate. When precipitation ceases, carefully pipette off any remaining liquid.
Add 10 ml chilled acetone, swirl and remove this liquid.
Add 10 ml chilled ether, swirl and remove.
Dry the precipitate under a lamp overnight.
You will have crunchy, sparkly crystals. I've tested this on several batches of euro MDMA and the resulting product is 100% pure, with a melting point of 153 °C (!!). Using this quick and dirty method you will get >80% product recovery by mass.
Great tutorial, but I'm a little unclear about a couple of the steps. Any chemistry I learned was a very long time ago :). Do I understand correctly that the IPA is being used as a solvent for the MDMA (leaving solid cut compounds behind) & then the acetone & ether are both being used to precipitate out the MDMA while keeping cut material in solution, which is then disposed of? What is the reason for alternating between ether & acetone?
Again, great tutorial, sorry if my questions are a little bit basic.
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To wowzers: Thanks for this. There are rumours that some MDMA is cut with piperazines. I have no chemical knowledge at all, but what research I have been able to do indicates that pipes have similar solubility to MDMA, so will be difficult to clean out (am I correct?!). So 2 questions: will your method clean pipes out of MDMA, and if not, do you know of one?
To anyone else who's read this... have you tried wowzers method yet and can you confirm it is good?
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Zewt: Yes, the IPA dissolves MDMA.HCl. Sometimes there is a shit cut of something like sugar, salt or even those little glass etching balls that weed used to get sprayed with in the UK. These wont dissolve in IPA. MDMA.HCl is sometimes a little difficult to recrystallize out of IPA so dropwise addition of ether precipitates it back out, though as a microcrystalline solid rather than large crystals. A lot of additional impurities exist in MDMA from the synthesis, nothing too terrible but lots of polymeric tar (the brown stuff), substituted pyridines, dimers and the like. These generally aren't amine hydrochlorides, so a quick wash with ether and acetone gets rid of most of it. Obviously ether and acetone have different polarities. Ether has a super low b.p so dries nice and quickly. I tend to make gelcaps out of mine or insufflate it so a fine powder is great for me. An optional extra is to do an additional IPA recrystallisation- dissolve the clean product in a minimal amount of hot IPA in a very clean and scratch free beaker, cover with cling film and put in the refrigerator for 24 h, nice crystals will spring forth! Following my tutorial, the first time you dissolve your MDMA in IPA, the solution will be orange (!). After cleaning it, the second IPA solution will be clear.
Recrystallisation is a good method for purification of a compound as slow crystallisation necessarily excludes impurities as the crystal structure forms..
Myolddutch: It seems strange that anyone would cut MDMA with pips but yeah I have come across it but only with some batches. I won't name sellers as I don't think any seller intentionally offers MDMA with a 5% cut of pips and as sellers seem to change batches regularly it would be unfair to lose them trade over 1 lesser quality batch. As far as I can tell my method does get rid of pips. I first noticed it when I concentrated the filtered IPA and acetone/ ether washes of a 2g batch I was cleaning. A brown oil was left which smelt quite floral. Upon addition of a small amount of ether, this oil hardened. Gentle scraping with a spatula caused a fine brown granular material to precipitate, washing this with further ether caused no change in colour. This granular material weighed 60mg (3% by weight), gave no reaction to marquis and had a m.p of over 200, also had a slightly sweet but bitter taste. I think it is a piperazine of some variety but I unfortunately am not in a position to further test this...
hope this is useful to you.
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I just have an suggestion..
Do not place any drug under bright light.
Nice tek btw
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Thanks for the detailed answers, wowzers. One more question; Can this process be adequately scaled down for smaller amounts of impure MDMA without losing efficacy? Say using 200mg of initial product to be recrystallized, with correspondingly smaller volumes of IPA, acetone & ether, rather than a full 2g?
Also, I would guess that ether should be stored in a freezer when not in use, so as to avoid loses due to evaporation?
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Usualy, ether is stabilized with BHT. It does not need to be stored in freezer. Best place is dark and cold (max 20c) in bottle in which is supplied. Of course, when you open a bottle, some fumes goes out, but that amount is very small. I still hear it even if I put bottle in freezer..
Yes, you can scale MDMA down, but you can lose some amount of the product.
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MDMA is a rock solid molecule, but yeah it's prudent to keep any chemical out of direct sunlight. You can scale down, the volumes of solvent are only guidelines, it has minimal solubility in acetone and ether. Depending on how good your technique is, losses should be minimal but if you lose ~20mg from a gram, you'll probably lose ~20mg from 200mg through unavoidable mechanical loss (adhering to pipettes etc).