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Crush-Proof Oxycontin Matrix: The Physics of it?

seep

Bluelighter
Joined
Nov 28, 2008
Messages
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I want to understand how the new Oxycontins resist crushing, but first I want to make sure I have the correct matrix in mind. Namely,

  • ~19.8% Oxycodone granules
  • ~39.7% microcrystalline cellulose (Avicel® PH102, FMC)
  • ~39.7% polyvinylacetate/povidone (80:20) (Kollidon® SR, BASF)
  • 0.2% precipitated silica (Syloid® 244, Keyser & McKay)
  • 0.5% magnesium stearate
The preparation of this matrix gives the 40 mg oxys a diametral tablet breaking load of 8.8 six megapascals (which I'm guessing is a shit-ton).

I wanna load this up with formulas and diagrams and shit but I'm pressed for time. I'm getting the info from this patent application.
 
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Well 6MPa = 6 million Newtons per sq. metre / (10,000 sq cm per sq m)
= 600 N per square cm or about 60 kg

So assuming a tablet is about 1 cm^2 it would take 60 kg to break it, or a lot less if it was hit end on. Sounds crush resistant, like you said, not crush proof!

How it works I've no idea, it sounds pretty hard!

Oh, and I like this bit:

"Matrix tablets according to claim 1, wherein said compression matrix also comprises at least one or more of the following substances (a) to (f) or a mixture thereof:

a) a substance which irritates the nasal and/or pharyngeal tracts,

b) a viscosity-increasing agent, leading to formation of a gel when the tablet is dissolved in a minimum amount of water,

c) an emetic substance,

d) an aversive colouring agent"

An aversive colouring agent!? "Well it burns like fuck, turns to slime in my nose and makes me puke, I wouldn't give a shit if it wasn't for that horrible green colour."
 
"Well it burns like fuck, turns to slime in my nose and makes me puke, I wouldn't give a shit if it wasn't for that horrible green colour."

Lmao.
 
@aversive color: wtf? Are we birds? Patents have the craziest shit sometimes.

So why wouldn't they make the pill a sphere? Look at the formula:

jtbhuh.gif


A sphere would give the highest value of R_d.

(edit: actually I'm not sure about that: a sphere may give the lowest value: the expression in the denominator is for a cylinder)
 
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I wonder if the "aversive colouring agent" thing means it's like a mini dye bomb and that the inside of your nostrils will be stained some bright colour if you snort it.
 
I would have thought including noxious compounds such as capsaicin and emetics would be illegal.

I have a friend with Rett syndrome, absolutely drop dead gorgeous, lovely intelligent woman, and not really the type to go snorting pain pills, but might experiment one day, who knows.

If she did, and it caused vomiting, due to her epilepsy and adrenal problems, it could very well kill her, and the world would be short-changed one valuable and dedicated activist in the autistic community, and one seriously FINE chick.

I am sure she is not the only person with a condition that could kill if she had severe vomiting, my stalker has some unknown type of idiopathic ACTH deficiency, her adrenals work fine, if exogenous ACTH is administered, but she doesn't get any, and vomiting could do her some serious harm, and again, the world would be shorted another brilliant, sexy autie lady.

Yet another friend of mine, my housemate, although granted she could not take oxycontin, as she is fatally allergic to any of the phenanthrene opioids, but lets for the sake of argument, posit for a moment, that it is another painkiller, lets say its a time release formulation of meptazinol, which she takes (IR) as it is the only one we know of so far that she can take and still live.

This girl, due to some wierd arse autism-related pharmacological quirks, reacts very strangely to drugs, and is extremely sensitive to most drugs, both quantitatively and qualitatively, for instance, 10mg of temazepam will get her so uncoordinated that I have to physically support her (as long as she isn't having a sensory overload, and as long as she isn't having a catatonic episode due to sensory issues or acute stress in which case 100mg may not even faze her)

A tenbag of good strong skunk (UK £10 bag-average about 1.6-1.9g depending on supplier and luck and the current black market economy ) eaten over a few hours in the form of brownies has pasted her for an entire week before, the lucky bugger, whilst 50-60mg of rectal DMT base, no MAOI, I trip-sat her for her first time, and from that single dose, she was peaking for several hours, took it at about midnight and was still tripping hard at 5am, again, lucky bloody bugger.

Also, has multiple severe allergies, morphinans (fatal pulmonary oedema), latex-possibly fatal but much more likely to be very severe skin reaction and trouble breathing on a large exposure, responsive to antihistamines and asthma inhaler, iodine tincture, even povidone iodine, tomatoes, chocolate-feel a bit ill if eat too much, lactose intolerant, etc.

So unexpected variables could be highly dangerous if she was unlucky.

So, they bring out time released meptid, only they put a dye in it, capsaicin to deter IV or snorting, and an emetic.

If she was allergic to those, snorted or IVed or not, that could fucking kill her, and she would almost certainly be so hypersensitive to the emetic that she could tear her esophagus or perforate her stomach if she was unlucky, and the capsaicin would really make her miserable if taken orally, she can't even eat the mildest of hot spicy food, herbs and aromatic spices are fine, but hot? she just cannot eat them or she will have awful GI pain and irritation.

Then my housemate takes said new formulation, and it lands her in hospital, or kills her.

It could quite conceivably happen, and it isn't even unlikely for her in a bad case scenario, not even the worst case scenario, which is anaphylactic shock and death before the ambulance gets here.

Of course it is easy for those fuckers to say 'well don't snort pills, or you deserve to die'

But in my opinion, it is tantamount to assault, not only on personal freedom, but on one's body also. Besides, if somebody has a valid legal prescription, are they not completely entitled to administer the drug they have in their possession legally into their own body, in any way they so choose?

There can be no *'law', surely that dictates to somebody what they may do, and the way they must put it into their own body?

Can somebody in the US of Anus clarify? that shit just wouldn't fly in the UK, god doesn't exist, but thank god anyway. At least the fascist filth here are incompetent at it.

In a country the size of north america, there must be at least 20 thousand people who could die from such a fuckabout, all in the name of stopping somebody getting high, if not fifty or one hundred thousand. Prescription fraud is one thing, I disagree with doing it, well, I disapprove of it, for the sole reason that it will raise costs for needed drugs for people who need them, drug dealing? go right ahead, I'm buying :P, but for a person with a legitimate prescription in their name, what the fuck gives some government bastard the right to essentially put a poison in my medication?
 
I wonder if the "aversive colouring agent" thing means it's like a mini dye bomb and that the inside of your nostrils will be stained some bright colour if you snort it.

Did you come up with this or does it remind you of something? I think it's a brilliant interpretation.

& there was a thread a while ago on ADD about the safety and significance of injectable dyes

On another matter, doesn't the UK have laws regulating the method of consumption of nitrous oxide, laudanum and some other ancient stuff?
 
Did you come up with this or does it remind you of something? I think it's a brilliant interpretation.

& there was a thread a while ago on ADD about the safety and significance of injectable dyes

On another matter, doesn't the UK have laws regulating the method of consumption of nitrous oxide, laudanum and some other ancient stuff?

I thought about it because the way the patent is written seems to suggest that they'll start off with "minor" aversive stuff like the gelling but add other stuff later if the market starts to demand increasing anti-abuse measures.

It doesn't say that all those measures will be included in the formulation, just that at least one or more of them will be. Your doc could look for stained nasal passages if he thought you were abusing your meds.

It depends on digestion to be active, so I'm not sure how they'd be able to make the emetic effect occur only if you administered it in some way other than swallowing it.

Disulfirum was used as a stand alone drug to make consuming alcohol have nasty physical effects up to and including death, so it's an established anti-abuse measure.

When I was a kid, they used to add something to methylated spirits (denatured alcohol) which was supposed to deter alcoholics from drinking it.

These patents are quite clever as they don't become useless if people manage to overcome one of their features - they have some backups in reserve which they can add.
 
I'm pretty sure I have the wrong matrix, as this is from one of Purdue's competitors. But whatever: I'm not interested in defeating it (see behemoth thread in OD); I just think the technology is cool and I want to understand how it works.

I think the patent app I referenced actually makes a pill that's even stronger than the OP 80s that people are trying to pulverize with diamond-tipped drill presses and large hadron colliders and the like. As a point of reference: a nutcracker generates less than 10% the amount of crushing force needed to break one of these things (I think).

The "aversive colouring agent" thing probably refers to colors that drug-naive toddlers find icky. Still, I think the mini dye bomb thing is a brilliant deduction.
 
Still, I think the mini dye bomb thing is a brilliant deduction.

Let's patent it and get rich! We could make the tracer dye different for different drugs - you could tell what drug someone's been abusing by the colour of their nostrils/ass.
 
I want to understand how the new Oxycontins resist crushing, but first I want to make sure I have the correct matrix in mind. Namely,

  • ~19.8% Oxycodone granules
  • ~39.7% microcrystalline cellulose (Avicel® PH102, FMC)
  • ~39.7% polyvinylacetate/povidone (80:20) (Kollidon® SR, BASF)
  • 0.2% precipitated silica (Syloid® 244, Keyser & McKay)
  • 0.5% magnesium stearate
The preparation of this matrix gives the 40 mg oxys a diametral tablet breaking load of 8.8 six megapascals (which I'm guessing is a shit-ton).

I wanna load this up with formulas and diagrams and shit but I'm pressed for time. I'm getting the info from this patent application.

It's an interesting one. I'm really not an advocate of opiates being an ex-J'y myself but the physics is worth a look.

The tablet works by making it tough. It is also hard which actually kinda opposes toughness as brittle things aren't great at absorbing energy, but hey.

That's the short silly answer.

The long answer, or at least a stab at it, is reduction of cracks and crack lengths within the finish product. Things break coz under stress cracks already present grow inside them. When the cracks grow too big they become critical and the crack propagates and the objects breaks, well brittle ones anyway. They press the shit out of them making them dense and with very little space/cracks for internal stresses to localise and grow to produce visible cracks, the kind we think of.

Crack stopping is the name of the game really. It can be achieved by reducing internal flaws and also with the right selection of other materials that may resist the travel of a crack within the material.

So the solution would be to make cracks. You can't really do this on the inside as easily as the out. Making the surface rough would indeed make it less resistant to crushing. I would say anvil double bag and mallet size hammer would do the trick thou for making internal ones!...

..or stick to non addictive's and don't find yourself smashing the hell out of the garage floor at 3 in the morning.
 
They released their secret formula (if that is indeed, it)? I think maybe you're right, that it is fake. I mean, AFAIK, the TimeRX is a heavily guarded secret. If not for competition, then to avoid abuse potential. Once you know what's in it, it is easy to find the right solvents/conditions to break it down.
 
Let's patent it and get rich! We could make the tracer dye different for different drugs - you could tell what drug someone's been abusing by the colour of their nostrils/ass.

Lol, colour of their ass!

And yeah, just hit it with a hammer, I can't imagine any pill withstanding that.
 
And yeah, just hit it with a hammer, I can't imagine any pill withstanding that.

Breaking it to pieces increases the surface area and facilitates the extraction of the oxycodone, but one still has to get it to go into solution before safely administering it by any other route than oral. And that takes time and effort.

Time release matrices are tailored to withstand gastrointestinal conditions, not tool-shed conditions. Tamper-resistant matrices, on the other hand, are meant to withstand both. They have significant cohesive integrity even after they are milled to a fine powder

(though proof of concept for Oxycontin's crush-resistant matrix entailed the difficulty of mechanical fracture. And if you notice, the formula I put up treats the pill as if all its mass was concentrated at its shell: i.e. as if it were a hollow cylinder)

Maybe a better way to think of it is in terms of Young's modulus: the ratio of tensile stress to tensile strain.
 
Lol, colour of their ass!

And yeah, just hit it with a hammer, I can't imagine any pill withstanding that.

The only ways I've read about people successfully overcoming it to some extent are ones which take too much time and effort to do on a pill at a time basis. And apparently a hammer doesn't produce the desired result.
 
@aversive color: wtf? Are we birds? Patents have the craziest shit sometimes.

So why wouldn't they make the pill a sphere? Look at the formula:

jtbhuh.gif


A sphere would give the highest value of R_d.

(edit: actually I'm not sure about that: a sphere may give the lowest value: the expression in the denominator is for a cylinder)

forum created just so people who are really high can come here and make themselves think they are somehow bettering their lives by this "street chemistry" 90% of people on here dont even have that straight.
 
Pralus you talk about crack a whole lot for an ex-J'y ;)

About the sphere thing: I had thought that would work considering you can't really break an egg by sqooshing it in your hand (try it). I'm interested to hear why that physical phenomenon works but a sphere wouldn't. And what about pearls?

My vision of a crush-resistant or -proof tablet would be that of a carbon lattice macrostructure something like a nanotube but larger. The oxycodone (or other compound) would dissolve out of the structure, only problem is you might not be able to digest it. Oops. Take a shitload of oxy's and become a human BB gun.

My vision might be silly anyway I don't know if that could work...^

Could the tablets mentioned in the OP be dissolved in (acidic?) water and reconstituted or even wash-purified?
 
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