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Methylphenidate extraction, multi-brand & generic

Alephnul said:
Just the kind of thread I've been looking for. Phreex's info on purifying Ritalin tablets, into pure MPH is great, but It's good to hear people's experience of actually doing it. It seems that whatever method one uses, the resultant concentrate is often 'sticky' (I think this may be to do with the gelatinous contents of some brands and generics), One way to avoid the problems inherent in this (eg - how do you insufflate a sticky powder?) can be overcome if, after having filtered and dried your solution (whichever method) you then take the resulting concentrate and make a nasal spray out of it. There is a general thread about nasal spray preparation here http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showthread.php?t=325155&page=4
Ignore what I say about the purification method (I naively thought that a simple CWE would do the trick for Ritalin tabs), use one os the ones mentioned either in Phreex's thread, or above, then follow the thread to create either a bespoke spray, or use an existing pharmacy spray that can be opened and resealed. A slightly saline MPH solution at approx 10mg/0.1ml is not easy, I'm working on it, and this thread is very useful. I won't post the results until I'm certain I've perfected the best method, both for extraction, and nasal spray administration. Watch this space.
If there is anyone else out there working on an MPH nasal spray please PM me.
thanks
AN

My extract is not sticky, it only sticks to the plate when evaporated but thats probably due to my impatient ass using a hair drier. When I scrape it off (which is a real pain in the ass) it turns into a fine powder. Making a nasal spray is a great idea though, too bad I don't have any MPH HCl now.
 
unicornnn said:
Methylphenidate is very soluble in water.
Thats why people can snort it.

I don't even know if its any soluble in any type of alcohol.


Just crush the pills up.
Put the powder in some water.
Then filter it threw a coffee filter, and keep the liquid.
Ditch the filter, or whatever, there would probably be a few mg's on the filter.
Anyway, you could then just heat up the liquid in a microwave or something.
And let it dry out into powder, then scrape out the powder and enjoy!

Unicorn makes a good point here, the MPH in Ritalin tablets must be highly water soluble, otherwise insufflating them would not have such a high BA (can anyone onfirm this, BL is full of shooting down newbies who plan to snort water-insoluble meds, so conversey Ritalin should be bery water soluble, r am I missing something here?). So…if one is after a purification process, rather than a method to extract pure MPH, this straightforward extraction should work.

What most people are looking for is a method that gives a powder that doesn’t clog up the nose (the stuff that clogs must by its nature be insoluble in water, therefore would be filtered out?).

As for the gelatine I would have thought that provided the method is CWE the gelatine will be too cold to be dissolved, and therefore remain in the filter (I’m guessing here so don’t shoot me down!!) – what remains after this method, would be a powder, substance (etc) that is 100% water soluble, would remove quite a lot of the crap that clogs the nose, and could be either insufflated, or {I keep banging this drum!}, turned into a nasal spray, do your maths right, and the end product could be an inoccuous looking nasal spray which could deliver a high concentrate of MPH per spray, get it right and you could have a 10mg doser that you can carry in your pocket – you could even take it in public!!!

Any thought appreciated
AN
 
You arn't flushing your filters?

Use a buchner funnel to filter the tabs and after they are filtered (only takes ~ 4 minutes due to vacuum pressure) add more IPA to the filter and they that filter though. Hell, do that twice or three times. IPA doesn't take long to evap.
 
i used to do this by crushing the tablets in boiling water then filtering through mutliple folded kitchen roll in a seive into a glass then pour the liquid into a frying pan and simmer off the water

not fancy pants more kitchen job done in under an hour to go out for the night, no equipment necessary

removing soluble cuts is not necessary as they cant be that harmfull (within relative reason) given the fact they will get ingested and absorbed into the blood daily by adhd kids

and this filtered caramel ritalin will hit you really quick and give you a rush due to faster onset and wont block your nose. it seriously improves the pleasure of the onset due to very increased speed and is way more addictive and feels like coke in large doses regularly (every hour)
 
Wizzle said:
So, this friend of mine has a script for 10 mg methylphenidate. The brand name is Sandoz. I was wondering if you can extract these the same way as the brand name Ritalin? The ingriedients in the tablets are:
-Methylphenidate HCl
-Calciumphosphate
-Lactose
-Wheatstarch
-Gelatin
-Magnesium stearate
-Dutch:Talk (chalk???)

I've read in another thread that the goodies in Novartis Ritalin can easily be extracted by mixing the thouroughly crushed pills in some kind of cooled alcohol (IPA 70% or higher for example at refigerator temperature [5 degrees celcius]) and filtering it through a coffee filter. Then let the solution evaporate and tadaaa! Pure methylphenidate. I have read that this method also works on Concerta.

Since Sandoz is the generic chain of Novartis the ingredients are probably exactly the same. I couldn't find the info on the generics in English so I'm just checking with the experts here to make sure.

Please help me out here so my friend and me can use his script to party once in a while without sniffing chalk!

The purification is for sniffing, so minor amounts of inactive ingredients aren't a problem.

Sorry for the rant, i'm high as hell on this shit now 8) (actually like it better then cocaine). Goes well with a few mojito's too!

I gues Ya'll get the point. Will the alcohol extraction work on this generic? If not, What will? Also, if there is a better or more refined method I'd also like to know, as long as the solvents and such are easy to acquire.

Thanks!


UPDATE on the extraction, please read page 2!
According to my thirteenth edition of the Merck Index, which I have on my computer, the following solubilities are given:
- Methylphenidate freebase; soluble in alcohol, ethyl acetate, ether. Practically insoluble in water, petroleum ether.
- Methylphenidate HCl; soluble in water, alcohol, chloroform.
- Calciumphosphate; (the solubilities where given for calcium biphosphate instead, which is the same, but with an added hydrogen atom) practically insoluble in water, alcohol. Soluble in dilute HCl(hydrochloric acid) or HNO3(nitric acid). Slightly soluble in dilute acetic acid
- Lactose monohydrate; one gram dissolves in 5ml water, in 2.6ml boiling water. Very slightly soluble in alcohol. Insoluble in chloroform, ether.
- Wheat starch; not found
- Gelatin; swells up and absorbs 5-10 times its weight of water to foram a gel in solutions below 35-40C. Soluble in hot water, glycerol, acetic acid. Insoluble in organic solvents.
- Magnesium stearate; insoluble in water. Decomposed by dilute acids.
- Talc; insoluble in water, cold acids or in alkalies. Soluble in hot concentrate phosphoric acid.

The best way to extract the goodies would be to grind the pills up as fine as possible, dump the powdered pills in a clean, glass bottle, and let it soak in a layer of chloroform(aproximately 3ml per pill, so 60ml for 20 pills, or 90ml for the whole pack of 30 pills) overnight, and filter it the next day through a coffeefilter. Evaporate off the chloroform in a hot water bath, which goes fairly quick, as it has a boiling point of 61-62C. Open up all the windows when doing the evaporation, chloroform is a possible carcinogen in humans. And voila, once all the chloroform has evaporated off, your left with nearly to completely pure methylphenidate HCl. Isopropanol nearly always contains water when bought in a store or from an online chemist(de drogist), which will dissolve some crap as well. Also, the Merck Index isn't very clear about the solubility of different alcohols, it might be possible that the lower the number of carbon atoms in contains, the higher the solubility is, due to their higher polarity. That means that methylphenidate could be "soluble" in methanol, but only slightly soluble in isopropanol, and even barely soluble in, for example, n-pentanol(C5H11OH). That could be the reason why your yields where only 50%, because isopropanol isn't very polar in comparisson to lower order alcohols like methanol, and especially methanol.

Chloroform would clearly be the best solvent for your extraction, as it won't dissolve any of the binders and fillers, which a low order alcohol like methanol will possibly dissolve, due to it's pretty high polarity(which makes it act a lot like water) Chloroform appears to be a very selective solvent for methylphenidate, leaving the binders and fillers undissolved in it, and easilly removable by filtration. It also has the big advantage that it will evaporate pretty fast.
 
pofacedhoe said:
i used to do this by crushing the tablets in boiling water then filtering through mutliple folded kitchen roll in a seive into a glass then pour the liquid into a frying pan and simmer off the water

not fancy pants more kitchen job done in under an hour to go out for the night, no equipment necessary

removing soluble cuts is not necessary as they cant be that harmfull (within relative reason) given the fact they will get ingested and absorbed into the blood daily by adhd kids

and this filtered caramel ritalin will hit you really quick and give you a rush due to faster onset and wont block your nose. it seriously improves the pleasure of the onset due to very increased speed and is way more addictive and feels like coke in large doses regularly (every hour)

Wouldn't all that heat destroy a lot of the ritalin?

Also, how much would you estimate you took every hour, mg?
 
That's why you certainly should not do an extraction with water on methylphenidate tablets, because you have to either wait untill all the water has evaporated after the extraction, which takes ages, or you would have to boil the water off, risking that you destroy some of the methylphenidate. And on top of that, chloroform is an extremely selective solvent for extracting methylphenidate out of these tablets, it will only dissolve the methylphenidate HCl, but not any single binder or filler, while water would dissolve them.
 
@Psych0naut

The Chloroform thing sounds cool. it's not necessary because IPA works wel enough. I would however like to get some real christals, just for the fuck of it. Isn't chloroform a restricted chemical though?? (for NL, as you know)

Edit: Is there a possibility to separate the d and l isomers? Or is that pushing it?
 
Last edited:
For real crystals, chloroform will be probaply be selective enough as a solvent, IPA unfortunenately isn't, though it's cheaper, and indeed works well enough. Chloroform is not restricted in the Netherlands, so you won't have any problems ordering it, only some difficulties finding a supplier who sells it. But old-skool chemists(drogisterijen dus, en dan geen DA of Etos, maar echt de ouderwetse) sometimes still sell chemicals, among which chloroform. I'm shure there will be one in the Hague who sells it ;)

Seperating the two isomers is also possible, though you'll need d-tartaric acid to do this, which is probaply not worth buying as it's pretty expensive and hard to come by. The process you would have to go through to seperate the isomers would first be obtaining as pure methylphenidate as possible, dissolving it in distilled or demi water and turning it into the freebase, and extracting it with a non-polar solvent. After that, you'll have to evaporate off the non-polar solvent, dissolve the methylphenidate freebase in anhydrous IPA and add just a small excess of d-tartaric acid to the dissolved freebase methylphenidate. Let it stand for a short so all the freebase can react with the d-tartaric acid and turn into the salt, promptly crystals will fall out of solution. The crystals have to be obtained by filtering the solution, and evaporating off all the IPA to recover some of the dissolved methylphenidate tartrate. Now through fractional recrystalisation, the d-isomer can be obtained, leaving behind the l-isomer as freebase. Probaply way too much effort and costs, though it's certainly worth doing with amphetamines, especially racemic amphetamine and methamphetamine made from P2NP/P2P. Hope this is of any help :)
 
^No way, extracting is definitely the way to go, oral sucks, so does sniffing pills...

The chloroform thing is interesting, I'll try to find some.. Separating the isomers is too much hassle though :)
 
I did this with denaturated alcohol and it left me with about 50% of the starting material


I'd like to try iving these pills so im interested in the chloroform thing too if done correctly wouldnt the result be too hard to dose however?
 
If you've got plenty of tolerance to them, it won't be that much of a hassle, but if your tolerance is low, I would be careful or even just skip IV'ing it. An IV dose of pure methylphenidate is around 20-25mg. Thats like half a match head.
 
I used to do this with dexmethylphenidate.

If ones aim is to get the product pure enough to snort, IPA works fine, though as mentioned, this is not the most efficient method. If one wants to inject it, then they either have to purify further (you could probably do IPA followed by acetone I suppose, then wash it), or use a fine micron filter when preparing the IPA purified extract for injection.

I knew some kid who used to smoke the extracted powder from racemic methylphenidate. I suppose this could work, but I would imagine it to be quite shitty...
 
It only requires basic chemistry to do an acid/base extraction, and it can be done with household chemicals. By doing an acid/base extraction on the Methylphenidate you've yielded by doing the Chloroform extraction I posted earlier on, you would end up with completely pure Methylphenidate HCl, perfectly suited for injection
 
Wizzle said:
^No way, extracting is definitely the way to go, oral sucks, so does sniffing pills...

The chloroform thing is interesting, I'll try to find some.. Separating the isomers is too much hassle though :)
Plugging methylphenidate works really well, too. For me, it was stronger than nasal administration.
 
BingeBoy said:
I did this with denaturated alcohol and it left me with about 50% of the starting material


I'd like to try iving these pills so im interested in the chloroform thing too if done correctly wouldnt the result be too hard to dose however?

I wouldn't do it with alcohol denat if I where you, it's got nasty-tasting addatives that will end up in your product. (Look up linalylacetate).

To dose you'll safely dose you need a mg scale...
 
I've been looking forward to trying this. Makes me wish I'd been a chemistry major. After sniffing methylphenidate only a few times i'm already getting sick of all the filler and crap they put in it. Thanks for all the info.
 
I got pure methylphenidate crystals by crushing about 5 20mg pills, mixing with ~5ml dh2o then pushing through a 0.22 micron filter and evaporating the h2o. It was easier on my nose but ultimately I didn't think it was even worth that much trouble, I can't imagine going through an IPA extraction just to sniff ritalin.
 
The method you use will depend on which route of admin. you want to use.
I know from their chem. props as well as from personal experience that methylin, brand rits, and focalin are all very h20 sol.

Im not sure of the best method for purifying the pills for insulfation, but i would think that a CWE would work nicely.

IV PREP is easy. Crush and dissolve in water, stir let sit, put spoon on ice or in freezer briefly. Filter, filter, shoot. Depending on what brand you have, you may have to heat, THEN cool.

Personally, wouldnt bother insulfating....easier to IV, and hits you way BIGGER and BETTER.

Zig
 
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