RedHat
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2015
- Messages
- 91
Hello! I'm an on again/off again Heroin user, and I live in a part of the United States that doesn't get much heroin other than the black tar heroin. But that's not the type of heroin that most people think about or the type of heroin you see in movies or in articles. I started to get curious what that "china white" heroin was like, so I started doing some research online to see if there was a way to convert the black tar into the nice clean white powdered heroin (at this point, I was completely clueless when it comes to chemistry, but I've learned a lot over the years). What I found was pretty interesting, and I'm sure a lot of you are already aware of this, but I'll sum up what I learned in the quote section below (which you can skip to the question that's after that if you like).
My question: Does anyone have any experience with pure 6-monoacetylmorphine? Or know anything about its chemical characteristics? There doesn't seem to be too much out there about it. Neither the 6-MAM Wikipedia or Pubchem pages have much about it. I would think that since it's a more potent morphine analog than even heroin that there would be some data on it, but nope, at least not that I could find. Nothing about it's solubility in different solvents, melting point, anything like that.
Basically, there are four "types" of heroin (of which, only two are actually really even heroin), and the four types basically just represent different states of the product as it's taken from the poppy plant and processed into heroin.
- Heroin #1 I believe is just before the opium is extracted and turned into morphine base (though I could be wrong about this, different sources say different things).
- Heroin #2 is the morphine base.
- Heroin #3 is when the morphine base is acetylated into diacetylmorphine (real heroin) using acetic anhydride.
- Heroin #4 is the nice white heroin hydrochloride.
Acetic anhydride is used because it's a much stronger acetylating agent (capable of acetylating the morphine at both the 3 and 6 locations) than just acetic acid (capable of acetylating only 3 OR 6 - though it seems to preferentially acetylate the 6). But when acetic anhydride itself became a restricted precursor, the process was modified to use vinegar in place of acetic anhydride. Now if they were to use pure/glacial acetic acid instead of just vinegar, then apparently the product wouldn't get so gunked up, since (from what I understand) the black stuff is mainly from sugars or whatever else is found in the 5% vinegar that's used to acetylate it.
Now here's the interesting part - Both the diacetylmorphine and 6-monoacetylmorphine need to get turned into morphine to be bioactive. The acetyl groups make for a more potent drug because it helps the molecule pass through the blood brain barrier faster than without them, but having two acetyl groups doesn't make it cross any faster than having just one. However those acetyl groups need to be removed to expose the phenolic hydroxy groups (making the drug bioactive), and it takes twice as long to remove two than it does to remove one. This makes the 6-MAM found in black tar heroin a more potent opiate than the diacetylmorphine (this doesn't take into account the concentration within the black tar, but just the potency of the opiate itself).
My question: Does anyone have any experience with pure 6-monoacetylmorphine? Or know anything about its chemical characteristics? There doesn't seem to be too much out there about it. Neither the 6-MAM Wikipedia or Pubchem pages have much about it. I would think that since it's a more potent morphine analog than even heroin that there would be some data on it, but nope, at least not that I could find. Nothing about it's solubility in different solvents, melting point, anything like that.