Opioids Evaporating water from CWE

[aced126]

In 100ml of water at 20 degrees celsius, ~1.3g of paracetamol dissolves.

If I were to evaporate the water off, would I get a powder which is a mix of the opiate + the apap which is dissolved in the water?

 

[aced126]

The reason I ask is that I have a completely clear solution, but with a volume of 500ml. My question is will there be 6.5g of apap in my clear solution?

 

[pbuilder]

No one could tell you for sure, as we don't know the exact details of your extraction. But I'll tell you that 500ml is an insane amount of water for a cwe and you only need 2-4ml per pill, 4ml max.

 

[aced126]

I know its a lot of water, its completely clear but since 6.5g of APAP is soluble in that much water, surely the solution is not safe to drink?

 

[mostly-human]

Yeah, don't drink that - at least, not if you've been using APAP recently or plan to use it again in the near-future. That is a huge dose to take, probably relatively harmless (for MOST people, on average) as a once-off, but I'm guessing if you're performing CWE, it's not a once-off, once in a blue moon thing.

I think evaporating the water, at a low temperature (think patience - take your time) evaporate it down to 100ml or less, then cool it dramatically - to near freezing, then re-filter. I would say it would then be quite safe. But do not drink this solution of 500ml of water, I have no idea why you've even put yourself in that situation, as someone who frequently takes heroin and often performs codeine CWE when I need to go to work and not feel dope sick, I'll generally extract 40 tablets (500mg APAP 15mg Codeine) for a total of ~600mg of codeine, I'll take this dose in the morning before work and then again in the evening. I generally use around 90ml of water each time, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less.

 

[mostly-human]

If you're pressed for time, then slowly evaporate and correct this solution (or even just bin it, really - it's not expensive / that much of a waste) and whilst you're correcting this solution, just perform a regular CWE extracting on some different tablets and this time just do it normally, don't do weird shit like adding half a fucking litre of water. I find an easy way of measuring the water (short of an actual measuring cup/beaker) is to use a shot-glass. In Australia a standard shot-glass (for spirits) is exact 30ml.


EDIT: Oh, and finally - you keep mentioning that your solution is clear - you would EXPECT a solution with 6gram+ of APAP in 500ml of water to be PERFECTLY clear, this is what happens when you dissolve into water!!! So don't be fooled, by point people make about not drinking a cloudy solution is this: Lets say you have dissolved the tablets into 100ml of water, by the final product is very cloudy - well, this means there may be a whole bunch of APAP in the water that is NOT dissolved; hence the water being cloudy. In your situation though - you may have a perfectly clear solution because all the APAP *HAS* dissolved perfectly, because there is such a huge volume of water.

I'm an IV drug user - so when I disolve 500mg of heroin for example, into LESS than 1ml of water, the water is PERFECTLY clear.

 

[aced126]

Yeah it is cheap so I don't mind binning it but I'd like to correct it for learning benefit. What would be the best way to evaporate it?

 

[adder]

I don't think it makes sense to evaporate it at this point. I bet you're going to lose much codeine if you heat it to evaporate, your solution should be slightly acidic now and codeine is not really stable for a very long time in acidic conditions when exposed to light, it's fairly easy oxidized at the benzylic carbon atom, higher temperature will only speed up this process, and evaporating water to dryness is going to take a hell of a lot of time. Not a good idea at all. You can raise pH of your solution to ~10 to precipitate freebase codeine which is much less soluble in water than codeine phosphate is, this would also make paracetamol more soluble at the same time (deprotonation of phenolic OH at basic pH). Then you collect the solid and dissolve it in a small amount of acidic water (citric acid will do). Alternatively, you could reduce solubility of codeine phosphate by adding a salt with common ion into the solution, e.g. sodium phosphate. After mixing thoroughly and refrigerating the solution, codeine phosphate should precipitate out of the solution.

 

[aced126]

I don't think it makes sense to evaporate it at this point. I bet you're going to lose much codeine if you heat it to evaporate, your solution should be slightly acidic now and codeine is not really stable for a very long time in acidic conditions when exposed to light, it's fairly easy oxidized at the benzylic carbon atom, higher temperature will only speed up this process, and evaporating water to dryness is going to take a hell of a lot of time. Not a good idea at all. You can raise pH of your solution to ~10 to precipitate freebase codeine which is much less soluble in water than codeine phosphate is, this would also make paracetamol more soluble at the same time (deprotonation of phenolic OH at basic pH). Then you collect the solid and dissolve it in a small amount of acidic water (citric acid will do). Alternatively, you could reduce solubility of codeine phosphate by adding a salt with common ion into the solution, e.g. sodium phosphate. After mixing thoroughly and refrigerating the solution, codeine phosphate should precipitate out of the solution.

Thanks, that was helpful. Out of adding the salt vs making the solution alkaline which one would recover the most codeine?

 

[adder]

With both methods you can recover almost everything if not everything. I guess salting out will be safer though. You can basically recover almost everything as you can repeat salting out a few times if necessary. Add some neutral phosphate salt in portions until no more precipitation occurs, filter, save the solid, then add some more and see if there is more precipitation. After collecting the solid, add a small amount of water to it (at this point you can use just enough to dissolve your codeine phosphate).

If you raise pH to ~10, then most codeine should precipitate as freebase and paracetamol should stay in the solution as it will be partially deprotonated (pKa = 9.5). I wouldn't use a very strong base though, sodium carbonate should be perfect in this case. Then you can dissolve codeine freebase in a slightly acidic solution.

 

[aced126]

Thanks, very helpful info. What's the chemistry behind adding the salt. Does it have to be phosphate ions? Why does the codeine precipitate out but not the APAP?