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Turning Codeine into Morphine by boiling in water for long enough trough hydrolisis?

Gaffy

Bluelighter
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Oct 27, 2018
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In France codeine isn't available anymore but it is in Spain, Belgium and Luxemburg. Would this work, aljust be it a slight gain in potency?
 
I doubt. Ether hydrolysis usually takes some persuasion beyond t and an aqueous envinronment.

Also if it were that easy to do, clever junkies would have found out about it and be doing it. I mean look at krokodil syntheses. Although krokodil is apparently contaminated with morphine, it is produced in a strongly oxidative environment and people generally end up with quite a wide range of oxidized morphinan derivatives.

 
No way, you can't convert a methoxy into an hydroxy (phenol) group just by boiling it.
 
I doubt. Ether hydrolysis usually takes some persuasion beyond t and an aqueous envinronment.

Also if it were that easy to do, clever junkies would have found out about it and be doing it. I mean look at krokodil syntheses. Although krokodil is apparently contaminated with morphine, it is produced in a strongly oxidative environment and people generally end up with quite a wide range of oxidized morphinan derivatives.

I know for a fact that methylphenidate left in water for long enough turns into ritalinic acid.
 
And I know for a fact you can turn amino acids into esters by boiling them in alcohol for 24+hours, creating beautiful inactive crystals
 
Sadly Phenylalanine's ester isn't active like the undiplomated little drug addict I was thought it would be basing itself on ritalinic acid and methylphenidate hehe
 
You used to be able to easily buy codeine here in Australia. But then they banned that a few years back cause codeine causes liver failure...

Yes, that's right, codeine does that, and definitely not the paracetamol/acetaminophen, no sirrie. :p

Granted my tolerance is way too high for otc codeine to be worthwhile anyway.. But it's the principle of the thing.
 
US 4,667,037 deals with O-demethylation using strong acids. There are other routes
 
In NZ they do homebake from morphine scripts into the purest heroin since it comes from pharma grade morphine the opiate scene innovated clandestine chemistry after the busts in the 80 destroyed international supply . Since morphine is already hella expensive H is even more expensive. I knew of some opiate users with entire poppy farms doing crude chemistry and injecting the resultant mixture. Codeine to morphine requires chemicals which if are not lab grade purity will give you all sorts of side products and def aint going to be transformed by boiling water.

I swear some doctors here prescribe morphine directly more than codeine. But france is pretty close to holland so the supply of cheap pure afgani H should be plentiful so i don't see why europeans would go through the trouble of even trying to convert codeine to morphine.

 
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Ethers can be hydrolysed with supercritical water at high pressure, but if it's codeine you're going to destroy some other part of the molecule faster if you do that.

 
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