determining purity of morphine from an extraction, or heroin from the street?

[qwe]

WITHOUT access to GC/MS, is there a relatively easy way to determine in a solution the molar concentration of heroin or morphine? this would allow safer dosing, it would be a good harm reduction technique for many bluelighters if we could figure out a procedure to do this

 

[butane]

Not that I can come up with off the top of my head, no. The problem is, we have no idea what the impurities could be and how to remove them. Just be careful every time you get some different junk, it's about all you can do.

 

[Dtrotsky60]

I wish there was a way to make your gear stronger by using a special gadget.

 

[sekio]

Nope, not really. You can do things like titrate acidity, check the dry weight of it, do solubility tests, but unless you have a good 4-place balance and a bunch of calibrated lab equipment & reagents you are still not going to be able to do it with any sort of accuracy. And it's possible to fool the tests if you know what you're doing.

Most people don't have access to a UV-VIS detector or polarimeter, and you also have no idea what it's cut with, so most spectroscopic methods alone won't do anything. You really need either a NMR or a chromatography-MS setup.

A better option is to do an acid-base purification, yielding presumably pure heroin or morphine of a reproducible quality. A/B extractions can be adapted to purify just about every alkaloid there is out there.

For heroin there is actually an erowid page on it.
http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/heroin/heroin_info5.shtml

Le Junk's guide for cocaine has another A/B guide. And an A/B for amphetamines wouldn't be hard to think up.