AlphaTester
Greenlighter
- Joined
- May 8, 2014
- Messages
- 2
Hello, a newbie to the forum here, so I hope I'm in the right place for this post...
I recently managed to obtain a kilo of finely ground coca leaf from Peru. It came vacuum packed and by all accounts appears to be the "real thing" - i.e. the tea it makes produces a pleasant buzz and when a touch of baking powder is added to it, you can faintly feel the numbing of the mouth. The taste is also the same as I remember it from having sampled coca tea in Bolivia a couple of years ago.
Because I'm a natural tester (ha!), I could not resist trying to have a go at the extraction process. Now I'm certainly no chemist; apart from doing some basic organic chemistry at high school many years ago, I have no experience whatsoever with lab work etc. However the few recipes revealed by Google, in particular the "classic" one at Shroomery, seemed to indicate it should not be too hard to get a fine product at the end; if perhaps my losses would have been higher than a competent chemist would achieve.
So I obtained a separation funnel, filters, kerosene, some sulfuric acid and soda ash (Na2CO3), and got to work. I was unable to buy decent ammonia without soap mixed in, so decided to do the final cocaine base extraction using soda ash instead.
Everything seemed to go well; after 3 days soaking in kerosene, the base was extracted into H2SO4, filtered and the resulting beer-colored liquid oxidized in an ice bath, using 6% solution KMnO4. At this stage, I ended up with a liquid resembling drinking chocolate in its color and consistency.
After filtering, a clear liquid, with just a very slight, almost invisible, yellow tint, was obtained. I do not believe that I added too much (or too little); the quantities were not significantly different to what other people had described on the Net, and the final color was not pink (which I understand would have had the potential to kill the alkaloid).
Slowly & carefully adding a 10% solution of sodium carbonate up to ph 10 produced, as expected, a white precipitate, which settled at the bottom & sides of the glass beaker.
Once dried, the precipitate resembled chalk more than anything. I was happy to stop here; no need to proceed to the next step of converting the base to cocaine hydrochloride. Smoking some good base seemed like it would do the trick nicely. I was something I had not done before, as my previous experiences with cocaine have mainly involved the IV route, so I was keen to see how it compared.
However to get it out of the beaker, I dissolved it in acetone - and perhaps this is where I screwed up?
Instead of letting it evaporate, I heated the liquid up to boiling, and ended up with pinky-colored substance, which when smoked, was very little like what I'd expected. The smoke is quite acrid and irritating to the lungs. There is an acidic aftertaste which does not go away for a day or so.
More importantly, the high is not a cocaine high. There is a bit of that, for sure, but overall it just makes you feel very wired and wanting more almost straight away. It also kept me awake for most of the night (after stopping the smoking at around 10pm).
I am not a smoker (the one bad habit I managed to not pick up, haha!), so perhaps it is to be expected that my lungs would not like this, but even now, 3 days later, I feel short of breath and inclined to cough from time to time.
I am truly curious what could it be that I ended up with, and where did I screw up the process?
As I said, this was really just a project to see if I could do it; importing the leaves is not cheap or risk-free, and overall, given the time and cost involved, one would have been better off just picking up the phone and ringing the local coke-head... Wink
So what do the local chemistry gurus think?
I recently managed to obtain a kilo of finely ground coca leaf from Peru. It came vacuum packed and by all accounts appears to be the "real thing" - i.e. the tea it makes produces a pleasant buzz and when a touch of baking powder is added to it, you can faintly feel the numbing of the mouth. The taste is also the same as I remember it from having sampled coca tea in Bolivia a couple of years ago.
Because I'm a natural tester (ha!), I could not resist trying to have a go at the extraction process. Now I'm certainly no chemist; apart from doing some basic organic chemistry at high school many years ago, I have no experience whatsoever with lab work etc. However the few recipes revealed by Google, in particular the "classic" one at Shroomery, seemed to indicate it should not be too hard to get a fine product at the end; if perhaps my losses would have been higher than a competent chemist would achieve.
So I obtained a separation funnel, filters, kerosene, some sulfuric acid and soda ash (Na2CO3), and got to work. I was unable to buy decent ammonia without soap mixed in, so decided to do the final cocaine base extraction using soda ash instead.
Everything seemed to go well; after 3 days soaking in kerosene, the base was extracted into H2SO4, filtered and the resulting beer-colored liquid oxidized in an ice bath, using 6% solution KMnO4. At this stage, I ended up with a liquid resembling drinking chocolate in its color and consistency.
After filtering, a clear liquid, with just a very slight, almost invisible, yellow tint, was obtained. I do not believe that I added too much (or too little); the quantities were not significantly different to what other people had described on the Net, and the final color was not pink (which I understand would have had the potential to kill the alkaloid).
Slowly & carefully adding a 10% solution of sodium carbonate up to ph 10 produced, as expected, a white precipitate, which settled at the bottom & sides of the glass beaker.
Once dried, the precipitate resembled chalk more than anything. I was happy to stop here; no need to proceed to the next step of converting the base to cocaine hydrochloride. Smoking some good base seemed like it would do the trick nicely. I was something I had not done before, as my previous experiences with cocaine have mainly involved the IV route, so I was keen to see how it compared.
However to get it out of the beaker, I dissolved it in acetone - and perhaps this is where I screwed up?
Instead of letting it evaporate, I heated the liquid up to boiling, and ended up with pinky-colored substance, which when smoked, was very little like what I'd expected. The smoke is quite acrid and irritating to the lungs. There is an acidic aftertaste which does not go away for a day or so.
More importantly, the high is not a cocaine high. There is a bit of that, for sure, but overall it just makes you feel very wired and wanting more almost straight away. It also kept me awake for most of the night (after stopping the smoking at around 10pm).
I am not a smoker (the one bad habit I managed to not pick up, haha!), so perhaps it is to be expected that my lungs would not like this, but even now, 3 days later, I feel short of breath and inclined to cough from time to time.
I am truly curious what could it be that I ended up with, and where did I screw up the process?
As I said, this was really just a project to see if I could do it; importing the leaves is not cheap or risk-free, and overall, given the time and cost involved, one would have been better off just picking up the phone and ringing the local coke-head... Wink
So what do the local chemistry gurus think?
