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Mitragynine/7-oh-mitragynine extraction?

ryand123

ryand123

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Joined
Jul 8, 2011
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206
Ive been searching for good heat on extraction method. I've read multiple methods such as alcohol/water extractions and acid base extractions. But I have yet to figure out what method is the best to get the most bang for my buck. I'm very interested in isolating as much mitragynine and 7-oh-mitragynine for research purposes. Anybody here on ADD have some advice? If this should be moved to OD then feel free to move it, thanks guys.
 
Extraction and isolation of mitragynine
Fresh Mitragyna speciosa Korth leaves (1.0 kg) were washed with water to remove dirt and adhering material, oven dried at 45-50 ?C for three days and milled into fine powder using a blender to get the dry powder (297.0 g). Soxhlet extraction was carried out using 297.0 g powdered leaves with 4 L petroleum ether (40-60 oC) for 8 hour, then petroleum ether solution was discarded and the defatted powdered leaves were dried and the extraction was repeated with 4 L chloroform for 8 hour. The chloroform solution obtained was filtered, concentrated, evaporated to dryness under the reduced pressure using rotary evaporator and was kept in a refrigerator (-20oC). The dried crude chloroform extract was subjected for flash chromatography according to the method of Still et al.[10]. Crude fraction containing mitragynine was obtained by eluting with hexane and ethyl acetate (80:20 v/v) and this fraction (100 mL) was subjected to liquid-liquid fractionation using petroleum ether (100 mL X 3 times) for further purification. The petroleum ether layer was discarded and the remaining solution was concentrated under the reduced pressure using a Buchi R215 Rotavapor (Flawil, Switzerland) to obtain crude mitragynine.
Click to expand...
http://www.ukm.my/mjas/v15_n1/Goh.pdf

You can probably get away with just extracting the dried leaves with dichloromethane at reflux for a while, that should pull all the alkaloids out as crude freebase.

Mitragynine is hydrolytically unstable so prolonged contact with water/acid/base is not advisable.
 
^Very intresting and doable, unfortunately I cannot afford a Soxhlet at the moment. All I can really find is into about water/alcohol extractions and those do not seem to be too effective. Your post has definitely been the best approach I have seen. But seeing as I do not have access to the equipment i need for this extraction, is the alcohol the best way to go? I can do the acid-base extraction but seems like it would be a lot of work for about the same payoff as an alcohol extract.
 
I know neither of these methods will isolate the compounds I want but at least they will be more concentrated.
 
The problem with using methanol is that you will also extract large amounts of e,g, chlorophylls, sugars, phytosterols etc.

You can't really cut corners and expect extracting kratom to work. See also: the suprising inactivity of most commercial "kratom extract". I think mitragynine and friends are not the most stable alkaloids in the world; doing acid-base extractions may work to isolate the mitragynine but you can expect significant losses to hydrolysis, and you'd probably want to isolate it as a freebase because trying to concentrate water solutions down by any means except maybe reverse osmosis/lyophilization.

Dichloromethane can obviously be substituted for chloroform as it has very similar properties as a solvent but is less toxic and cheaper.
If you cannot find a source of dichloromethane (check hardware stores for paint strippers containing DCM) you can manufacture your own chloroform from either ethanol or acetone plus a source of hypochlorite (chlorine bleach or calcium hypochlorite).

Probably the most corner cutting you can get away with is switching a soxhlet extraction to just boiling the leaf material in dichloromethane for a few hours and then filtering it, then evaporating (or pref. distilling) the solvent, to recover a resin enriched in alkaloids.

If you do attempt this you should keep the material cold (pref. freezer temperatures) and in a well sealed, dry vial or bottle.
 
I will be attempting this in a few weeks or so. I plan to use about 250-500g of dried leaf powder. With this method I can expect somewhere in between 300-600mg of mitragynine depending on which amount I use (if my mitragynine content is about 1.5% and I get a yield of about 80% from the extaction). May I PM you Sekio? I had a few questions that you may be able to answer before I start this experiment.
 
Go ahead, I guess. Although it's usually better to keep it as a public discussion thread in case your questions are helpful to others.
 
If one were to obtain isolated (commercial) purified mitragynine, what would its relative potency to morphine be, so I can calculate a rough dose relative to my tolerance? would of course run it up, talking IM or IV use, or either intranasally or plugged, rather than oral.
 
I think it's in the tens to hundreds of milligrams for an oral dose. I recall some paper somewhere that stated that 50mg was a fairly consistent euphoric dose.
 
For a non-tolerant individual? tens to hundreds is a fairly wide range. Don't suppose you know what the TI is? guess it might be quite high for mitragynine, considering the oxidation product mitragynine pseudindoxyl as a DOR agonist and your average commercial supplier being a lazy bastard and that individual batches are likely to have a considerable time exposed to air during and post extraction,
 
The TI of mitragynine must be pretty high, I don't think there are recorded overdoses from using it?

Obviously tolerance will vary pretty widely.
 
Hm, well there are some hepatotoxicity issues with raw kratom at least, are there not? although not sure as the reason why has been answered. Which, if its due to mitragynine itself, could well make it problematic for someone..resistant...to most opioids. I may not really give much of a shit if I'm still here or not, but if I'm going to go, I'd far sooner make it quick than something slow and nasty like shitting my liver out as a smoothie. I've been hunting wild mushrooms to eat for far too long not to know how nasty that is for a way to exit stage left :p you only need to read one single account of an Amanita or Galerina poisoning to know 'shoot yourself, it'll be prettier' if in that sort of a situation.
 
I think the hepatotoxicity of krtaom is overplayed, certainly it doesn't occur in a reproducible fashion, suggesting that it's either batch-specific contaminants or perhaps personal physiology that's responsible.

I used to mess around with daily use of kratom (~10g a day) and never had any issues. Then again i always got mine form a reputable vendor and checked it for nasties with GC.
 
Given the price of mitragynine picrate (an exciting addition salt!), I suggest that mechanical losses preclude all but large-scale extraction... presuming you buy from a source offering a CoA.
 
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