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preparing your own timed release pill?

B

bingalpaws

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Dec 5, 2005
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I was gonna put this in other drugs, but advanced feels more appropriate.


< this is not a synth question, actually as far as I'm aware there's zero illegal about this as I'm only concerned with caffeine >



I'm soooo sick of taking my daily caffeine powder. I used to buy diet pills, some even timed release from the factory, but even the 'timed release' ones would have the crappiest time release mechanisms (for instance, one claimed it was an 8hr time release with 300mg... you'd take one, and 15 minutes later you'd feel like you just took at least 200-250mg.)


Anyways, I have bulk caffeine annhydrous powder (bulk nutrition), and it's a complete pain - nothing major, but one of the tedious parts of my day, taking out the 1/4 tsp measuring spoon, trying to eye an appropriate dose (1/4tsp of caffeine = 790mg caffeine! Some may remember my 'how to stop a caffeine overdose' thread recently lol!!).

So, instead of doing that 2 or 3 times a day, and tasting the disgusting powder mixed with some gatorade, I got to thinking about just making capsules.


But then that part of me started thinking, 'why not just make timed release pills?'


So, any suggestions on this? Is it a pointless thing to attempt or are there any 'ghetto' methods of making a timed release? My best 'timed release' approach to date has just been taking the caffeine with a lot of food - fatty stuff especially, but I'd love to be able to just make capsules that are timed release.
 
For caffeine, get something like candle wax and mix the caffeine powder with it while molten. Then pour into a mould and let cool. Once cool, eat it and await the slow release a la MST continus (morphine slow release tablets)

For more basic drugs that easily form salts, you can use an ion-exchange resin such as Amberlite IRC-50(H) - done it with 2C-D in the past with excellent results
 
That's *generally* what i was thinking, I guess I haven't acted because I haven't the sleightest idea how much wax will slow digestion, and since it won't be IR it'll be much harder for me to gauge if I really digested the whole (250mg likely) worth of caffeine I put in there. If it was IR i'd be able to tell right away if I made it right, but if I just mixed 250mg with wax I'd never be able to tell (did that make sense?).
 
complex coacervates consisting of a negatively charged and positively charged (usually gum arabic and some other compound i cant remember right now) moities (esp cheap proteins) is usually how pharma does it. Mix em at a certain pH, then adjust the pH to influence the charge of one of the species to make it fully charged at which point they coagulate and crash out, usually in spheres holding your drug of interest.
 
So THAT'S how they make those little balls huh?! Very interesting :) .

bingalpaws: What he's saying is that when you have a mixture of these things at a certain pH, they are all in solution together. When you then adjust the pH, they crash out of solution because they are no longer soluble - and naturally form little balls of the mixture. The little balls are a mixture of stuff that will dissolve slowly in the digestive environment. You could put them in a gel-cap.

I think?
 
I think I'll stick to the wax idea, although unless I can find some more info I don't think I'm just gonna start guessing at sizes for wax (hmmm, I guess I could try to approximate a tiny pill size, that could always work... I'm just thinking it'll take a lot of tweaking to get it so it's a solid time release *and* I'm getting everything in a reasonable period. A major problem is that I have sleep issues so I don't want to guinea pig a 250mg caffeine pill, only to have it start digesting at like 11pm when I'm trying to fall asleep.
 
yea, thats the idea matt

laymans version-you take one negatively charged, water soluble compound, and one soluble, neutral ompound, and your drug, mix them all up. The you add some acid to it, which causes your well-chosen neutral compound to turn positively charged. The negative and postive things interact and become insoluble, taking your compound with it in little balls.

the complex coacervate wiki is ok, the links should be able to take interested parties on a nice journey.

some trivia- the "second" check in your checkbook (the one behind every real check that makes an instant record of what you write), or any other instant-copy type of paper that makes an instant record like that, actually has millions of little balls in it like the time release drug formulations, all of them filled with ink. when you press on it, they explode and their dye makes your copy.


The_More_You_Know.jpg
 
The pressure (force / area) is likely much greater when using a pen. For example, if the contact surface of your hand is 25 cm^2 = 2500 mm^2, and the tip of a pen is 1 mm^2, you would have to hit the paper with a force equivalent to 2500 times the force on the tip of the pen.
 
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