Benzos clonazepam extraction question

[FFTBinScramblemaster512]

question for the chemistry pro’s or anybody who has experience in this. due to having a new psychiatrist who wouldn’t continue prescribing me clonazepam i’ve had to procure them from sources that are a bit more under the radar so-to-speak. so far my experience and research is pointing to these pills being under dosed but definitely having the correct active ingredient. i’d like to do an extraction to find out roughly how much active ingredient is in them. this isn’t to take in any way other than oral and this isn’t for recreation, i’ve been prescribed clonazepam for a decade and it’s strictly therapeutic for me.

i see that clonazepam is mostly insoluble in water and although it says “slightly soluble in acetone, chloroform, methanol” etc etc, those numbers are like 31mg/ml in acetone for example, which is quite soluble. solvents i have on hand for this are: dichloromethane, ethyl acetate, methanol, acetone, 99.5% ethanol, isopropanol, and a smidgen of heptane.

i just want to make sure i do this extremely accurately because an accidental megadose of benzo’s is not something i want and i’m trying to ultimately end up with pure clonazepam that i can properly dose in 2mg doses, knowing that they are indeed 2mg doses.

i have a lot of experience doing extractions on everything from adderall to modafinil (the latter of which was also a somewhat shady manufacturer and i found that they only contained 10% active ingredient per pill by doing a dichloromethane extraction, but at least now i have an extracted powder which is pure modafinil that i can dose properly.

any tips or recommendations? i haven’t looked up fillers yet, that will be my next step, and run those solubilities against the solubilities of clonazepam to find the best solvent. tentatively it’s looking like acetone or methanol as those are the solvents that clonazepam is most soluble in from my searching.

any input or experience would be greatly appreciated!

thanks.

 

[negrogesic]

This is pretty much impossible to do outside of a laboratory setting. Say the allowed variation in these generics is 20% (200 micrograms), how would one quantify such a thing at home without a very high end scale capable of measuring micrograms, and a perfect extraction technique that extracts only the clonazepam and nothing else, with no residual solvents or loss of material in extraction vessels?

 

[FFTBinScramblemaster512]

well if the solubilities of the excipients cross check with the solubilities of clonazepam in a way that an essentially perfect extraction is possible, i don’t see why not? and you’re correct about the allowed variation in generics *in america* but these are serbian and i suspect they’re something funneled out the back door that might not have passed inspection, they seem to have far less active ingredient in them. the plan was to extract 10 or 15 at a time, they’re 2mg tabs, that’s 20 - 30 mg (ideally), and assuming a perfect extraction is possible i feel like i should end up with a measurable amount of milligrams, as i do have a very accurate milligram scale (not microgram though). i have micro scale glassware, sep funnel, plenty of polars and non polars and at least 3 options for each acids and bases. thoughts?

 

[OntarioGuy]

best bet is to find out all the inactive ingredients and their solubilities in different solvents. maybe doing a "reverse" cold water extraction first (dissolve pills in cold water, pour through coffee filter, then collect and dry sediment collected on the filter, discard or drink liquid ) would clean it up a little bit, and you could possibly work from there? figure out which buffers are insoluble just like clonazepam is, weigh the dried powder and figure out roughly how much buff did not dissolve with the clonazepam. if its just say, one or 2 fillers, maybe you could then find a solvent that only dissolves the clonazepam or vice versa, and extract again? Obviously it wouldnt be perfect, without a lab it would never be, but you could possibly clean it up quite a bit and perhaps get a rough estimate of active material by weighing the yield.