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Give me tha ole' fashion morphine

Gary Gnu

Gary Gnu

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This is from a post in basic, but I would like your take on it..

I have looked around... forgive me if Iam missing somthing obvious... I have read through how folks make herion.

In terms of the raw material... goood ole' p. som.

I think you have to be a smarty pants, with a lot of lab equipment to isolate the morphine in seed or pod tea and separate it out. It isn't a home chemistry project or anything...

Interesting though... how do clandestine heroin producers deal with the thebaine content in raw opium? It seems as if it is removed somehow in the process. Does anyone know?
 
I had the understanding that brains was not really underpinning getting a decent sized stash of opium. It is more to do with the fact that you need if not an entire field, then at least several square meters of poppy plants to get anything. And then they must be P. Somniferums so forget about screwing about with the wild plants. The expert on this matter is a guy from Germany who gos by the name Bogumil. You should speak to him about it.
 
Oh, clearly you need quite a bit of raw opium to make herion (far more than you could derive from seed wash or pod tea), I just wondered what happens to the thebaine in the process.
 
^ AFAIK the thebaine is only present in amounts so minute that it really doesn't matter.
 
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I was just browsing some sites when I found this and thought of this thread:

"The fact that thebaine is rarely if ever observed in illicit heroin is attributed to its decomposition during acetylation since thebaine readily decomposes in the presence of anhydrides, acid chlorides or strong mineral acids." (1)

So it looks like the acetylation of morphine to heroin destroys the thebaine.
 
As far as I know morphine isn't found on the street because heroin is better. Morphine doesn't cross the blood brain barrier as well as heroin which makes it less popular.

Opium, which is morphine, codeine and thebaine (and a small amount of other opiates), is sold on street level, but pure morphine isn't available because if someone wanted to extract it from the thebaine and codeine they might as well turn it into heroin which people think is better.
 
Heroin is more addicitive than morphine, thats why you find it on the streets.
 
morphine is found on the streets. a lot of tar is monoacytlmorphine, and i know for a fact ive had it before (heroin doesn't give pins and needles). and b240c, i doubt that any professionaly manufactured morphine has any thebaine in it, or most columbian or pakistani/afgani heroin. im fairly sure some black tar probably contains thebaine due to the poor man process
 
also, wouldn't the addition of an acetyl group to morphine create more product. so, in theory, isn't there a gain in mass when converting morphine into heroin, making it more economical?
 
^ Two acetyl groups are actually added to morphine in order to create heroin. So 1 g anhydrous morphine converted to heroin hydrochloride weighs approximately 1.49 g.

Though, when doing the acetylation of morphine to heroin a yield of 100% can't be expected, so an increase in mass as high as ~50% isn't very likely.
 
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