since i have them handy, i often pretty casually use anhydrous ethanol, isopropyl alcohol and methanol, as well as acetone, to clean certain things, because while they dissolve most things, its a different matter when its cold, or saturated. for example, i found that iso was really bad at dissolving MSM when the iso already had dissolved a bit of meth, in the sense that it took a fair bit of time, meanwhile meth.hcl dissolves very quickly. iso also works similarly for removing plant resin/gums from DMT. in both cases, very little is used, so it quickly saturates with whatever is most soluble, inhibiting but not outright preventing anything less soluble from dissolving. eventually it will though given time.
in an ideal world you would heat a mixture to make it dissolve everything then cool it to crystalize out the less soluble substance, organics dont all work that way unfortunately, or at least, not at the gram scale.
its not a "good" method, since its not selective, and kind of does a 80:20% re-ratio of your product, but for the stuff it works on its handy for turning some nasty unusable crap into 1/rd oral dose, 2/3rds smokeable dose and if the solvent is pure, theres no real downside to doing it.
Unfortunately though you have to experiment to find out if it works, solubility data and chemistry is unhelpful here, this is just how organic compounds like to play. but in general theres usually circumstances you can fractionally dissolve but not fractionally crystalize, A away from B if you know A is more soluble than B, even if its not by a huge margin, because, again, if you add so little solvent that it its constantly saturated, different compounds, especially with lower affinity for the solvent, will be repelled, and VERY cold solvents are especially good at this, its like crystalization but in reverse.
Anyway another method if you know for sure you have MSM, is to bake in an oven at 115C for 10-20 minutes, according to Microgram journal (1999, vol32), MSM sublimates out while meth does not, this was i believe a solution utilized due to the fact MSM made analysis of meth samples difficult to impossible at the time with the technology available, and, frankly it seems like a terrible way to prepare a sample for analysis so i think thats the only real way, for MSM at least.
If using random alcohols (ethanol should be water free if the salt is water soluble) to try washing stuff, its not neccesarily a given that the main compound is also the most soluble. its easy though to see if it works, if you do a time based set of batches and then just smoke them, i did this for DMT, it had some crazy variance in the effects and out of 10 fractions, 3 were unusable, with 1 of the 3 being salvageable, but just barely. it even seperated and remixed the various triptamines from one another, even though total seperation wasnt acheived. this blind process is also probably the best for when you have no idea what it is thats in there and when your given drug is orally active or the contaminants arent toxic, just unsmokeable.
Keep in mind, its rare to get ethanol thats really just pure ethanol by any reasonable margin, and ethanol reacts with some drugs too directly. i dont know what reacts with isopropyl or acetone, or methanol, all i can tell you is i did it, and it worked for me.
