Heroin Can tar evaporate due to summer heat?

[FunctionalJnkieGrl]

Sorry if this is a dumb question. Just wondering. I once accused someone who visited me of pinching from my bag when I was in another room, but i later realized that heat does indeed seem to make it break down or evaporate some. Is this some sort of optical illusion or can the summer heat alone cause your stash to evaporate out a little? I know its easily dissolved in water and you can cook it (I smoke it), but i wasn't sure if warmer temperatures alone could make it disappear from a baggy. I can't put it in the fridge or freezer either. I gotta keep it hidden well out of sight and reach.

 

[FunctionalJnkieGrl]

Well nevermind on that. Just found out my 1 plug for tar just got busted the other night. Sucks.

 

[DeathIndustrial88]

Damn, you're still able to find actual heroin in the US? Or were, I should say now...

 

[tarman]

It's still around. I bought a test kit but easiest ways to put it on some foil. You'll know right away because fent smells like sickly sweet gross chemical weirdness. H smells like burnt coffee-ish.

Edit: fixed voice transcription error

 

[FunctionalJnkieGrl]

It's still around. I bought a test kit but easiest ways to put it on some foil. You'll know right away because fence smells like sickly sweet gross chemical weirdness. H smells like burnt coffee-ish.

Blues/fetty, back when it was still decent in my area, smelled like burnt popcorn. When the quality went piss-poor, it started to smell more like an electrical fire or something. Good tar always smells like vinegar to me. When I smoke it, it kinda reminds me of slightly sweet BBQ sauce.

 

[FunctionalJnkieGrl]

Damn, you're still able to find actual heroin in the US? Or were, I should say now...

In North Texas/Southwest Oklahoma, it made a comeback for about a year until just a week or 2 ago (assuming only 1 person was selling to myself and a handful of other junkies in the area). Now people gotta drive about 2hrs out of their way for it again if they want H--probably the Dallas/Ft.Worth area or OKC. H is next to unheard of in smaller towns in the south. Folks gotta drive to the nearest metroplex now. That's just my guess.

 

[4DQSAR]

I suspect that the 'burnt popcorn' smell can be attributed to propanamide being a pyrolysis product. But when propanoic anhydride became harder to obtain, fentanyl manufacturers swapped to propenoic anhydride and the propenamide which is highly reactive and produced what is described as an 'acrid odour'.

I don't claim to understand the thinking behind the choices made when it comes to Mexican cartels picking the next homologue, but it doesn't appear that it's particularly sophisticated because anyone who understands the chemisty would use a precursor that still produces fentanyl... but isn't legally controlled (anywhere, as far as I can tell). I suggest they sought an alternative that meant that the final step could just be to swap to an anhydride that is physically and chemically similar. In fact, apart from the odour, I don't think anything changes.

But on the topic of tar, I found the original 1840s experiment in which poppy extract (so not pure morphine) was reacted with GAA (glacial acetic acid) and it doesn't form diamorphine, it forms 6-monoacetyl morphine (6MAM), a compound MORE potent than diamorphine. In fact the body has to remove the ester at the 3 because it's actually 6MAM that is the active. Diamorphine is a prodrug.

 

[Alias451]

I suspect that the 'burnt popcorn' smell can be attributed to propanamide being a pyrolysis product. But when propanoic anhydride became harder to obtain, fentanyl manufacturers swapped to propenoic anhydride and the propenamide which is highly reactive and produced what is described as an 'acrid odour'.

I don't claim to understand the thinking behind the choices made when it comes to Mexican cartels picking the next homologue, but it doesn't appear that it's particularly sophisticated because anyone who understands the chemisty would use a precursor that still produces fentanyl... but isn't legally controlled (anywhere, as far as I can tell). I suggest they sought an alternative that meant that the final step could just be to swap to an anhydride that is physically and chemically similar. In fact, apart from the odour, I don't think anything changes.

But on the topic of tar, I found the original 1840s experiment in which poppy extract (so not pure morphine) was reacted with GAA (glacial acetic acid) and it doesn't form diamorphine, it forms 6-monoacetyl morphine (6MAM), a compound MORE potent than diamorphine. In fact the body has to remove the ester at the 3 because it's actually 6MAM that is the active. Diamorphine is a prodrug.

Do you happen to have a link to the experiment?

 

[4DQSAR]

Do you happen to have a link to the experiment?

Do you mean a link to that first acetylation of morphine?

 

[4DQSAR]

WRIGHT, C. R. A., "On the Action of Organic Acids and Their Anhydrides on the Natural Alkaloids ", Journal of the Chemical Society (London), 27, 1031-1043 (1874).

I chased down the original paper and what I got was simply a scanned image of a page from the above journal. Don't forget that back then, the structure of morphine had not been confirmed and due to the limited scope for qualitative analysis, it's not entirely clear what products were formed. The researchers had some way of working out that half a mole of water was produced for each mole of morphine and I assume that incorrect value is because they belived morphine to be a dimer.

I just checked and I think the most intriging Google result for 'acetylation of allylic alcohols' (which 6-monoacetylation of morphine is) makes use of both heat and 3Å molecular sieves. Now that makes some sort of sense since such acetylations are readily reversible and it's water that allows the reaction to be reversed. I'm pretty sure the original paper I found simply used boiling acetic acid (117.9°C) so the water would be driven off as steam - the water can only be vapourized at the surface of the mixture whereas molecular seives remove water wherever they are.

Likely you would need to mess around a little to find a reasonable route. I don't know where you reside but here in the UK, 6-monoacetyl morphine most certainly is covered by the Misuse of Drugs Act and if 6-MAM has never been encountered before, potentially covered by the Novel Psychoactice Substances act although if the compound has been known for over a century and is even written in an acadmic paper, can it possibly be considered novel?