As some of ya'll know cannabis acetates pass the blood brain barrier more readily than standard cannabis oil. The effects come on so rapidly, that in his book, Marijuana Chemistry, Michael Starks proffers 3X potency.
We've been making it for awhile trying to sort out the process. We looked at Starks procedure, which seems to be based on making heroin out of opium, but decided to start with the general procedure for making aspirin out of salicylic acid.
Sooo, let's talk about the progress that we've made here in those experiments, now that we have had an opportunity to make this enough times to get the same thing each time.
Here is the process, probably not refined as far as it can be, but works and produces reliable results.
We started by dissolving an unknown weight (10.4 grams) of BHO into 16.5 grams of hexane, to remove it from the storage container with an unknown tare, so as to not waste any left behind in films and to get an accurate weight. We warmed the mixture in a hot water bath to increase dissolution rate.
When dissolved, we decanted into a beaker with a known tare and weighed the total amount, from which we subtracted the beaker tare and the weight of the hexane to get the BHO weight of 10.4 grams.
We then poured that into a one liter boiling flask. To that we added 25 ml of acetic anhydride and 1.25 ml of 98% sulfuric acid.
We placed the boiling flask on a combination hot plate stirrer, and added a stirring bar to the mixture.
We added an Alhin condenser to the flask, through which we pumped ice water, and reflux boiled the mixture for one hour while stirring.
After refluxing for one hour, we added 40 ml of water to react the remaining acetic anhydride, and another 40 ml of hexane. We poured that into a separatory funnel, which we finished filling with saturated salt water.
After shaking well, we allowed the layers to separate and bled off the lower water emulsion layer, only to refill with salt water again and repeat the procedure until we had run about 4 liters of salt water through the mixture.
After bleeding off the salt water one last time, we bled the hexane mixture into a beaker and after filtering through a 0.2 micron syringe filter, we boiled off the hexane using the hot plate stirrer, with the beaker sitting in a larger beaker half full of water.
Just before the hexane was gone, I refilled the beaker to the half way mark with 190 proof ethanol and boiled that off. I repeated the alcohol wash three times to insure the removal of the rest of the hexane.
The resulting acetate is of a lighter color than the original oil and of lower viscosity.
So what is cannabis acetate good for and why should we be interested?
I think for the same reason that we now use aspirin, instead of the salicylic acid it was made from. They both work, but the acetate works faster and better.
Our experiments in E-Cigs are a perfect example. We came up with some potent glycerin extractions that work as well as anything else that we could find available and the test panel all reported that they worked, but the cannabis acetate in an E-Cig was a resounding success.
While the most common comment from patients testing the glycerin, was "It's working." The most common with cannabis acetate was, "Oh Wow!"
Some of our test members have extreme tolerances, are typically unfazed by any vaporized oils. Because I use oil orally, I am one of them and do get more stupid as my short memory leaves me, but no longer experience a high and have never been put horizontal from vaporizing any oil.
Two of us were put horizontal vaporizing cannabis acetate in an oil well with wand, not asleep or in cannabis overdose fetal position, but on our backs counting the pretty clouds for about 30 minutes, because it seemed like such a good idea at the time.
It also noticeably improves the uptake speed when used in topical and oral meds, and actually has a very smooth, cough free, pleasant taste when vaporized, that is slightly reminiscent of smoking a blend of fine vintage photograph records.