You shouldn't keep these results for yourself, seriously! It would indeed be helpful for lots of drugs users if they were able to identify correctly their drug of choice and to determine the purity.
Providing results of color reactions, thin-layer chromatography (Rf-values, suitable solvent systems, staining reagents), authentic melting points etc., which are all easily reproducible, can actively support harm reduction. It seems to occur occasionally that vendors sell the wrong products, products laced with cutting agents or simply grossly impure stuff.
Take care!
- Murphy
I posted some info in the wrong thread instead of in here, oops.
Simple and accessible qualtitative tests like melting points and so on is something that really interests me, for exactly the reasons you've just mentioned. I've been trying to keep quiet about it though, due to the high chances of unwittingly misleading people by being totally wrong.
TLC is something I plan to do to, but am sticking to whatman chr1 paper while learning. I have no idea how useful paper chromatograms are, or if they can be correlated atall with results on silica plates using the same solvent systems and visualisation reagents.
on topic:
The melting point of 1-Naphthalen-2-yl-2-pyrrolidin-1-yl-pentan-1-one hydrochloride is given as
221 - 223c (decomposition) in the paper linked to from the naphyrone wikipedia page (Meltzer PC, Butler D, Deschamps J, Madras BK. J. Med. Chem. 2006;49:1420-1432)
As far as purity goes, keeping things simple as possible, I would try to find a substance with the same melting point, grind it and the unknown "naphyrone" as finely as possible, then heat a tiny, thinly spread layer of each side by side on a surface that heats slowly and uniformly to a temperature of at least 230c.
Even without a thermometer, a sharp melting point should still be observerable in a high purity sample.
I did this in the past with MDPV (mp 229-231 according to the original patent) sandwiched between a coverslip and a glass slide, heated using a butchered pair of
ceramic hair straighteners. The PTC heating elements in these self-regulate at their rated temperature with a tolerance of ~5 degrees and heat up reasonably slowly, so were the most suitable heat source I could find for a fiver
Obviously if the stuff is brown it needs cleaned up first!