Cocaine Cocaine purification, easy Levamisole reduction?

[EduardoSnowden]

Something interesting occurs when executing an acetone wash on product with levamisole, and being a bit lazy so simply baking the filtrate at ~150F to completely remove the acetone and get going.

Something that seems odd at first occurs. Checking on the progress, it will dry as expected. However when the filtrate reaches the full 150F temp, no longer will it be drying but it will rewet! Interesting, Pulling up the chemical properties of Levamisole, you see the melting point: 140F.

With this information, this could be deduced:
The acetone fully evaporated before 140F, leaving the filter paper dry.
The Levamisole began melting onto a completely dry filter paper.
Capillary action pulled the liquid levamisole into the filter paper.

Knowing this, the filtrate was placed into the fridge and exactly what was expected occured, the filter paper hardened with a glass sheen, with our intended product still idling on top of the filter paper. The product was scraped off thoroughly and the filter paper discarded.

As Levamisole is a common adulterant that is difficult to remove without A/B extractions, it would appear that this could be a potential way to proceduralize its reduction:

1. Finely grind your product down and spread onto a large medium flow filter paper.
2. Bake at 150-170F for 10 minutes.
3. Scrape off product, discard filter paper.

The big question here though is, what is the solubility of our product in liquid levamisole? I would consider any value greater than 1:5 w/w far too great to make purification vs. product loss worthwhile. Something that implies that liquid levamisole would not be a good solvent for my product is the fact that my product is extremely soluble in both ethanol and water whereas levamisole is not, indicating enough of a difference in polarity that I would expect liquid levamisole to be a poor solvent. IMO this would not be the ideal approach if you are not time constrained either, because a full acetone wash without heating and a careful ethanol recrystalization would set an lower bound for the ratio of product to levamisole at 6.5:1 and not require any questionable reagents or processes you couldn't execute in the kitchen.

Thoughts?

 

[G_Chem]

Much appreciated.

You could cut a determined quantity of filter paper (for numbers sake say .5x.5cm) then weigh that against the same size cut piece of a fresh piece of paper to determine quantity of levamisole laden leftovers are in said piece.

Next bioassay a very small quantity and compare effects in relation to the cocaine you saved on top. It’s risky business but assuming you only test a tiny quantity shouldn’t be terribly unsafe. Just enough to feel for local anesthetic effect and light stimulation, and only once.

Beyond that maybe reagent testing as well.

-GC