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Extraction of Opium from Poppies

Kul69

Kul69

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Joined
Nov 11, 2003
Messages
2,675
I recently tried to extract opium from live pods and ended up with 102mg of opium from about 20 pods. Hardly even worth it. Everyone told me I should just make a tea with it so I made tea with the pods and had a very mild experience.

My issue is that I'd perfer to smoke opium rather than eat it. Does anyone know of an extraction of smokable opium from dried seed pods? The only extractions I find are for more concentrated oral forms.

I'm thinking if I just powderize some dried pods and mix with water then simmer for 10 minutes and filter this I should have all the plant alkaloids in the water without much plant matter. I'm talking about vacuum filtration through several coffee filters. Would it be worth it to save the plant matter and do another extraction or possibly two with less water?

Could I then just evaporate this water for a crude smokable opium? Will it contain a high amount of unwanted alkaloids and plant fats or maybe evaporate off into something that isn't quite smokable in terms of harsh smoke or whatever?

Anyway, why the hell is it so hard to find an extraction of codeine, morphine, thebaine, and others to a lesser extent from an aqueous solution containing all of these alkaloids?
 
Well, after searching more and more it seems like no one has been able to obtain nice smokable opium from poppy seeds or pods. Scattered reports of very harsh smoke that produces very mild highs.

So, the following is what I think might work if someone were to try it:

500 grams of dried poppy pods should be blended into a fine powder. Two parts water to one part vineger is mixed and enough added to the poppy powder to cover it. This solution is brought close to a boil and then allowed to cool back to room temperature while stirring. The solution is then filtered through cloth into another container. The remaining plant marc (solids) is placed back into the original container and 1/2 as much water/vineger is added as the first time and the process repeated. This is then strained through a cloth filter again and added to the previous filtered solution. The combined solution is then filtered through coffee filters (or vacuum filtered through a Buchner funnel if it won't flow easily).

This is the point at which I know there is an acidic aqueous solution containing the desired alkaloids. However, it most likely contains other unwanted plant oils and fats and such. This is why I believe people trying to evaporate the water at this point end up with a harsh smoke that barely gets them high. They're smoking a lot of unwanted oils and plant matter with a small amount of alkaloids.

The desired alkaloids should be in their salt form now and suspended in this aqueous solution. The first thing I'd like to try is performing some defatting steps at this point.

Add Naptha at 25-50% of the solution's volume and gently agitate. Let sit until the two layers separate clearly. I'm not sure what kind of emulsions you could see at this point but remove the naptha layer and discard. Repeat this process two more times with 25% Naptha to volume discarding the Naptha each time using a seperatory funnel.

Now, at this point I feel like just neutralizing the solution with a small amount of sodium hydroxide to pH 7 and then evaporating would produce a smoother or more pure product. However, if possible I'd really like to migrate all the alkaloids from the aqueous solution into a non-polar solvent. The idea of evaporating vineger is also annoying to me. Vineger doesn't evaporate cleanly and although I'm sure whatever is left is safe to eat I'm sure it doesn't make smoking it any smoother.

This is where I'm unsure what the next step is because I've heard that morphine isn't soluble in non-polar solvents. Regularly I'd just basify the aqueous solution to around 10 (I believe Morphine does well at pH 9 and Codeine at pH 11 so I feel this would be a good target) and then add Naptha/Xylene/whatever looks best and mix it all up. Let seperate and remove the non-polar solvent layer (Naptha) and let it evaporate. This should contain all the plant alkaloids, right? It's just the whole morphine solubility thing that's confusing me.

There has to be an addition two or three steps after the alkaloids are contained in water that will provide you with a much purer product. When I consider that an average sized pod weighing about 3 grams can contain 10-80mg of opium I look at previous extraction attempts.

Someone will take 5 pods or so, enough to drink and become intoxicated, and try to perform an extract on it. That is only 400mg if you had pods that contained 50mg of Opium each. That should be enough to smoke and get very high but when people talk about getting this large marble sized balls of material from a few pods, there is no way it's mostly opium. 400mg of opium doesn't equal a large ball of material. This is also kind of a generous estimate as I doubt most pods contain 50mg of Opium each or that these homebrew extractions are getting much of the alkaloids from the pods. Especially when people are only doing one wash and then evaporating. I bet there is still quite a bit of alkaloids left in the original marc. However, most people seem to be trying to extract opium from seeds which seems even stranger to me.

Anyway.. can anyone look over the above ideas and tell me what they think? I'm considering trying to do a defat step with Naptha on the aqueous solution and then evaporating it and trying that. However, I would REALLY like to figure out a way to move the alkaloids from the water to a non-polar solvent for evaporation. I think the ticket to getting a nicer end product is getting it out of the water before evaporating. How can that be done?
 
The problem with the above guide is that it's for obtaining morphine from poppy tea not opium. After the defatting step you just discard all the codeine and other alkaloids. Could you evaporate the chloroform and continue the process through getting morphine then recombine the two? I doubt it would be anything like opium.

I guess what I really want to try is just a defatting step on the water before evaporating. I have a strong suspicion it's why people report such a harsh unbearable smoke, that in combination with not filtering good enough.
 
102mg from 20 LIVE pods?


the problem is DEFINETLY your lancing technique, I assume thats what you were doing when you say LIVE pods?

Or where you trying to cut the pods up and just boil them???


Are you sure its the correct strain of poppy? The difference is in the appearance of the extract, wrong strains will be brown, proper strain (somniferum) will be damn near black.


If its lancing your doing, you can, if done properly and the plants are nice and healthy, get over 10g of opium per LIVE pod. Its all in the technique... but im kinda in the middle of composing a pictorial on this very technique and I dont wanna spill the beans prematurely....


and all your extraction technique jargon is excessive. Alls you need to do is get a 73 micron bubble bag, dissolve your latex in water, run it through the bag, double saucepan evap, scrape that, and voila youve got a superb smoke that should, if done properly, present itself as light brown glassy shards of bliss.
 
Yes, I lanced I guess. Scraped very shallow cuts and watched the sap come out. It came out a milky white and dried almost black.

10 grams of opium from one live pod? That is complete and utter bullshit from everything I've ever heard about harvesting opium. This includes reading online and other people I've spoken to in person. That must be some amazing new technique, I'd love to hear it.

The opium yield from a single pod varies greatly, ranging from 10 to 100 milligrams of opium per pod. The average yield per pod is about 80 milligrams.
Click to expand...

http://opioids.com/jh/index.html

Do you do 10+ harvests for each pod? Cause I got 102mg from 20 pods but they were all harvested once, they wern't as mature as they should have been, and I cut too deep on some of them by accident so I believe a lot of the latex dripped into the seed chamber. 102mg seems about right for 20 immature pods that were cut too deep by a first timer.

dissolve your latex in water, run it through the bag
Click to expand...

Hmmm.. what latex is this that I'm using? I said extraction of opium from dried seed pods, not purification of opium latex.
 
Last edited:
If its lancing your doing, you can, if done properly and the plants are nice and healthy, get over 10g of opium per LIVE pod.
Click to expand...

HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHHAHAH Funnyest thing i ever read
 
Kul69 said:
Yes, I lanced I guess. Scraped very shallow cuts and watched the sap come out. It came out a milky white and dried almost black.

10 grams of opium from one live pod? That is complete and utter bullshit from everything I've ever heard about harvesting opium. This includes reading online and other people I've spoken to in person. That must be some amazing new technique, I'd love to hear it.



http://opioids.com/jh/index.html

Do you do 10+ harvests for each pod? Cause I got 102mg from 20 pods but they were all harvested once, they wern't as mature as they should have been, and I cut too deep on some of them by accident so I believe a lot of the latex dripped into the seed chamber. 102mg seems about right for 20 immature pods that were cut too deep by a first timer.



Hmmm.. what latex is this that I'm using? I said extraction of opium from dried seed pods, not purification of opium latex.
Click to expand...


The quantity depends on alot of things, but the size of the pod mainly and dry conditions, a tennis ball sized pod you could get over 15g if your a clean cutter.

The jist of it is at least 3-4 days of dripping, collection twice a day (or more if shes a big dripper), DRY CONDITIONS ESSENTIAL, but the bigger the pod is, the more room to lance, the more opium you'll get and the longer amount of days you can do it for (up to a week straight if your really good). Of course it gives a greater margin for error with the technique. One 'bad' cut on the pod, being too deep, will fuckup the whole pod so practice makes perfect.

just wait a few weeks and ill have the guide done... the 'true' part of the technique is in how you do the cuts, when, where, and why.


But ya, harvesting prematurely, cutting too deep, and only a single harvest is bound to get you dickall.


As well the information on the link you posted (http://opioids.com/jh/index.html) is highly flawed and inaccurate. I just skimmed through it for 30 seconds and found several things that ive in my own first hand experience seen to be otherwise.
 
100mg maybe. Besides a large pod is equivalent to a golf ball not a tennis ball.
 
Smyth said:
100mg maybe. Besides a large pod is equivalent to a golf ball not a tennis ball.
Click to expand...


ummmm sure son, sure

maybe u should lookup giganthemums


tb7se.jpg
 
Diacetylus said:
10 grams a pod, are you sure you don't mean 10 mg's Pharoah?
Click to expand...


lol definetly not, I wouldnt even get out of bed to take a piss id been holding in for 6 months just to receive 10mg of opium let alone grow it if alls I was expecting was 10mg per pod.

After refinement youd be left like a few specks unless you were growing an entire acre of poppies. Its not about quantity its about the quality of the plants and how well you harvest em, doesnt take a field. My biggest gigs are now at 18 buds per plant, with the potential to develop at least 8 more buds over the next week, if I can get 30 buds per plant ill bust a nut.
 
^Ok. Wow, they're certainly big, healthy looking pods.
The ones that I tried growing were "Indian/Persian white", they obviously had white flowers, but the Opium content was pretty small. Didn't really get a chance to yield anything though, because I had to rip them out due to people looking at buying our house.

They took about 5-6 months (maybe less) to grow here in Australia (winter time), but I was only experimenting... I just planted a crapload of seeds I bought over the internet and when they grew, they sorta grew in huge bunches together. but yea... the pods were probably about 1/8th the size of that Gigantheum you showed in your pic.
 
if you want a way to get smokable from dried pods, pm me.... its not as good as tea, but it is smokable, and it does work...

you can also eat the tar-extract w/the method.
 
funknsoul1 said:
if you want a way to get smokable from dried pods, pm me.... its not as good as tea, but it is smokable, and it does work...

you can also eat the tar-extract w/the method.
Click to expand...
How to get smokeable from dried pod? I hope you will answer since you stated this years ago.
 
mikemuck said:
How to get smokeable from dried pod? I hope you will answer since you stated this years ago.
Click to expand...

He didn’t it was Kul69. This was also 17yrs ago. All these people are long gone. It’s my opinion there is no easy method to smokeable product from dried pods.

-GC
 
As I recall, the way smoking opium is made is like so -
Poppy pods are scored in the early morning, just after the flowers lose their petals. The latex is initially milky and runny.. It can be collected in this raw form and dried/processed elsewhere, or left to dry in the sun, and later in the day the exuded and dried latex is scraped and collected.
Pods can be scored several days in a row with diminishing returns,

Then, the crude opium is dissolved in a minimum of hot water, filtered to remove debris, and then the water is boiled off over low heat to yield smokable refined opium.
 
For a long time I have firmly believed that smoking opium should be available to adults from licenced outlets. Good opium will prevent abstinence syndrome in opioid-dependent users and poses a much lower health risk that most illicit opioids.

Sure, if you drink a bottle of laudanum or eat a matchbox-sized lump of opium then it's likely fatal, but that could be said for tens of thousands of other compounds.

Elsewhere, Yabacity has gone into long trip reports (over years) CC opium usage. (S)he noted that it appears to produce a protracted withdrawal syndrome that was (to them) unique. I suggested that papaverine might be the cause - I mean, it is very water-soluble and has a MP 20°C lower than morphine freebase.

I've read that upto 50% of the morphine in opium is in the form of it's meconate salt whose MP I haven't been able to obtain.
 
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