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Hungarian Poppy straw extraction

mitragyna

mitragyna

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Dec 7, 2006
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I was reading an article on Morphine and came across a Poppy straw extraction performed by a Hungarian chemist. Has anyone tried this?

A Hungarian chemist, Janos Kabay, found and internationally patented a method to extract morphine from "poppy straw": dried poppy pods and stem, and other parts of the dry plant, except for seeds and root. In natural form, in poppy plant, the alkaloids are bound to meconic acid. The method is to extract from the crushed plant with diluted sulfuric acid, which is a stronger acid than meconic acid, but not so strong to react with alkaloid molecules. The extraction is performed in many steps (one amount of crushed plant is at least six to ten times extracted, so practically every alkaloid goes into the solution). From the solution obtained at the last extraction step, the alkaloids are precipitated by either ammonium hydroxide or sodium carbonate. The last step is purifying and separating morphine from other opium alkaloids (opium poppy contains at least 15–20 different alkaloids, but most of them are of very low concentration).
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I think you would have to get the plant fats out , maybe use the stuff that is in wax candles forgot it's name.
 
^
Ya know I made a thread on a different forum asking the other day how to get fats and oil out from an extraction and people never heard of using Paraffin for that way. But I knew I've heard of people using it for that purpose before. Do you just melt the wax into the extraction and it's supposed to somehow "absorb" the fat or something?
 
^
Nice! That'll prove quite useful in future extractions. I think it will work well when I do Poppy seed extractions. I used to end up with a lot of nasty white oil from the seeds so hopefully the paraffin will absorb it.
 
Sorry, but the idea with paraffin is IMO completely stupid. You will be left behind with greased plant material, awful for any further manipulations. Paraffin's viscosity is far too high, i.e. a LOT will stick to your pods (or whatever you use).
But the idea of de-fatting first is, of course, well thought. You better try petrol ether, hexane or heptane. DCM could work, too. I do not recommend gasoline (which would do the job, too) due to probable aromatic impurities.

About the initial post: The idea is neither new nor innovative. Extraction of baseous alkaloids by means of acid-base-extraction is known for more than 100 years. The quotation is obviously from Wikipedia and the very next sentence starts with:
In the 1950s and 1960s, Hungary supplied nearly 60% of Europe's total legal, medication-purpose morphine production
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The method is totally "old-school"!

Peace! Murphy
 
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obviously you would filter out the pod material or seeds first

secondly while those substances you list all give better results they are all quite toxic , dangerous to handle , not always easily available and lastly not as cheap as parrafin.


my 2 cents
 
OF COURSE you'll do some filtering...Duuuh!
But there will be loads of paraffin left behind. The question is now: Are we talking about the same solvent?!

The term "paraffin" is historically used for all hydrocarbons. This includes doubtlessly hexane, heptane and petrol ether (the last one is NOT an ether, as the name would suggest, but a mixture of several isomer alkanes; in most cases different hexanes). If you meant those, then we were speaking about exactly THE SAME thing.

Nowadays, "paraffin" is used more commonly for the material candles are made of (also named "paraffin wax"). So maybe there was some confusion here. This wax is completely USELESS for the proposed de-fatting procedure.

Btw, the alkanes are not toxic per se. I admit that they are not healthy either, but acute toxicity is quite low (check for example Wiki about "hexane"). DCM is of course not very nice, no discussion at this point. The major (and IMO only) danger is high flammability. Then again, this implies somehow high volatility, too, which is helpful because you can air-dry your material afterwards easily.

About what solvents exactly were you talking?!

Peace! Murphy
 
Actually n-hexane is unusually toxic for an aliphatic alkane, acts as a neurotoxin, it metabolises to the 2,5-dione and goes on its merry way buggering proteins as it does.
 
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