If you just want my reply to the initial question, skip to the last paragraph.... Holy shit, the stupidity in this thread is making me so sad. People are supposed to be able to come here to share information with each other that can be applied to harm reduction. Carrot Man's original post was a simple question and completely on the right track, and almost everything that has been added since is leading him astray.
Why the fuck are people talking about mixing heroin base with citric acid DRY and snorting it? Of course that burns ~ the two haven't combined to form the salt yet! Did you guys know that water can not only be added to something, but also evaporated away too?
Deru, are you using the word "precipitate" to refer to what the texture of the resulting salt will be once the water has been evaporated? When you add a base to an acid in water and then evaporate water, it leaves behind salt residue, which is generally crushable and snortable. The gooeyness you are talking about is being caused by other factors. Here on the west coast, we get black tar, which undoubtably contains a water-soluble salt of heroin, but it's gooey as fuck because they use a lazy, sloppy protocol to produce it. I've done an experiment a couple times turning it to base, and it comes out way more crystally/powdery than how started, just because the process leaves behind a bunch of non-alkaloid gunk in the water. Oh, in that process I can give you an example of today's vocab word: First I dissolve the tar in water, filter out some of the gunk, and then add sodium hydroxide to the solution, at which point heroin base precipitates out of solution. Swirl it up with some xylene in a separatory funnel, ditch the water, evap the xylene in a pyrex dish, and the resulting base the I scrape up vapes really well and comes on fast and strong (still tastes shitty, minus the vinegar flavor).
NorCalGuy - lactose isn't going to do anything chemically useful!
YesMam89 - That is really dumb too. At least chemically speaking, if that is basic enough to convert it to freebase, you made it less absorbable through your mucosa, and you probably might as well just eat it then.
OpialiciouslyMe - What you are describing the result of adding way too much acid to your heroin, or maybe you started with a salt to begin with. There is no fucking way heroin citrate has a really low pH, and adding baking soda is just something you could do as a remedy after you already fucked up adding too much acid! Heroin itself is a stronger base than baking soda if I'm not mistaken, the common salt is formed with HCl (the strongest acid in the Universe), and the tar around here tests neutral with pH paper.
Carrot Man ~ If what you have is truly base, do exactly what you said in your first post. to give you a ballpark of how much you will be using, the weight of H to citric acid ratio should be about 2:1. Dissolve the citric acid in a little warm water, and then break the H into little pieces in a shot glass or something. Add The acid water to it (but not all at once) and stir it around. As the acid molecules in the water come in contact with the base, they will form a salt and you will see the base gradually dissolve. Gradually add more acid water til it all dissolves, but don't overshoot it or you'll wind up snorting acid, which will burn. Also, keep in mind the possibility that there could be impurities in there that will never dissolve? Weigh the substance first on a scale that at least goes to the hundredths of a gram, and know that the ballpark ratio should be around 2:1, based on their molar masses. : )
