Harm Reduction Extracting caffeine from caffeine pills. Detection of methanol in refined caffeine.

[piller97]

Hey everyone, just looking for some help ensuring that that I don't poison myself with methanol.

For a while i have been looking for somewhere I can buy pure caffeine powder(i know its available online, id prefer to buy local).
Either way, after trying many stores, I decided to extract it from caffeine pills that I already had.

I determined would extract it roughly following THIS GUIDE.

However, in my area it is quite difficult to obtain denatured alcohol, and almost impossible to obtain 99% Ethanol.
So i decided to go with 99.9% Methanol.

After collecting the recrystallized caffeine, I am now wondering what the likelihood of there being residual methanol in the crystallized caffeine, how likely is this?

Is there any way to determine methanol content in the crystallized caffeine?

I held a flame to a small amount of of powder(thinking that residual methanol would ignite) however Caffeines low melting point resulted in the power disappearing almost immediately following the flame approaching(i assume this is what took place).


Yes, I know i could get near pure stuff online.
Yes, I know my yield will be terrible.


Any ideas you have would be super appreciated!
-p

 

[sekio]

Use water, caffeine is very soluble in it when hot, and is easily recrystallised from it. Also it's nontoxic and easily availiable.

Unless you have a GC or HPLC there is not a lot you can do other than just make sure it's been warmed at, say, 60C for a while to dry it. The amount of methanol that would be in 200mg of "dry" caffeine is not worth worrying about in terms of toxicity.