• BASIC DRUG
    DISCUSSION
    Welcome to Bluelight!
    Posting Rules Bluelight Rules
    Benzo Chart Opioids Chart
    Drug Terms Need Help??
    Drugs 101 Brain & Addiction
    Tired of your habit? Struggling to cope?
    Want to regain control or get sober?
    Visit our Recovery Support Forums
  • BDD Moderators: Keif’ Richards | negrogesic

Stop taking cartel meth

I have never messed with Cartel meth or the homemade stuff, what is the difference?
 
AlsoTapered said:
It's amazing how many people on BL just cannot get to grips with the concept of optical isomerism. I mean, it's not of interest to most people.

I discovered some people really struggle with the whole idea of mirror images being different. I have tried and failed to teach this concept. But that may say more about my ability to teach than anyone else's ability to learn.
Click to expand...
Explain it by telling somebody to shake somebody's right hand with their left hand.

They're left hand is a mirror image of their right hand so (intuitively or counterintuitively depending on your viewpoint) it should fit right in to somebody's right hand just like their right hand does, but it doesn't because it's a mirror image just like optical isomers.

I find that object lesson and demonstration works very well.
 
Jnowhere said:
I have never messed with Cartel meth or the homemade stuff, what is the difference?
Click to expand...
Well that depends.

Unless you're a really good chemist, homemade is almost certainly a (poor yielding dirty) reductive amination of Sudafed pseudoephedrine using either hydroiodic acid, or lithium hydride. Most likely lithium hydride because lithium batteries are prevalent.

If your reasonably good at cleaning up, it probably has a good amount of unreacted pseudoephedrine, and not a lot else because lithium catches on fire and the free base is very easily separated. But you have dextro and some pseudoephedrine.

Now if the home chemist is using P2P, methylamine, and a metal catalyst most commonly aluminum and mercury, you're going to end up with 50/50 levo dextro. You don't want levo, and a home chemist does not going to be able to separate it out. To give you high blood pressure, tachycardia sweats and generally feeling shitty.

The cartel on the other hand uses a process called resolution, re-raceimization, recycling where a chiral acid is used to resolve the dextroisomer and then a radical initiator is used to convert the levo back to a 50-50 mix of levo and dextro which is recycled and resolved with a chiral acid and so forth and so forth until you only get dextro or at least 97+ % dextro.

It's also very very pure 97+ percent pure.
 
Good Morning!

I really wouldn´t call this an impressive answer. At least not the chemistry part.

@snmfmy
Unless you're a really good chemist, homemade is almost certainly a (poor yielding dirty) reductive amination of Sudafed pseudoephedrine using either hydroiodic acid, or lithium hydride. Most likely lithium hydride because lithium batteries are prevalent.
Click to expand...

If pseudoephedrine is used as starting material in a methamphetamine synthesis the reaction is NOT a reductive amination. Instead a benzylic hydroxy is swapped for a hydrogen so it is a reduction. Have a look at the pseudoephedrine molecule. The nitrogen (with a methyl attached to it) is already in place. One just needs to remove that OH group.

Reductive amination (aka reductive alkylation) is the exchange of a carbonyl oxygen for a nitrogen (eg. ammonia or methylamine). This is what happens with P2P as a precursor.

Also using elemental lithium from batteries doesn´t involve lithium hydride. It is a kind of birch reduction utilising in situ generated ammonia.

And when aluminium metal is used to reduce an intermediate imine (formed from P2P and methylamine) the metal is NOT a catalyst. It´s a source of electrons for the reduction of the imine.
This is called a dissolving metal reduction (mercury is needed to break passivation of the aluminium metal so it can react).

Cheers
 
charlz said:
Good Morning!

I really wouldn´t call this an impressive answer. At least not the chemistry part.

@snmfmy


If pseudoephedrine is used as starting material in a methamphetamine synthesis the reaction is NOT a reductive amination. Instead a benzylic hydroxy is swapped for a hydrogen so it is a reduction. Have a look at the pseudoephedrine molecule. The nitrogen (with a methyl attached to it) is already in place. One just needs to remove that OH group.

Reductive amination (aka reductive alkylation) is the exchange of a carbonyl oxygen for a nitrogen (eg. ammonia or methylamine). This is what happens with P2P as a precursor.

Also using elemental lithium from batteries doesn´t involve lithium hydride. It is a kind of birch reduction utilising in situ generated ammonia.

And when aluminium metal is used to reduce an intermediate imine (formed from P2P and methylamine) the metal is NOT a catalyst. It´s a source of electrons for the reduction of the imine.
This is called a dissolving metal reduction (mercury is needed to break passivation of the aluminium metal so it can react).

Cheers
Click to expand...
Pseudoephedrine Is a secondary alcohol and it's reduced by removal of the hydroxyl group. So I shouldn't have said amination by reduction because it was already an amine

Removal of that oxygen atom that hydroxyl group is considered a reduction.

Using lithium and ammonia is called the birch reduction

LAH lithium ammonia hydride is formed in situ. Aside from sodium hydroborate, lithium hydrides are the only thing that can reasonably reduce the hydroxyl except for hydroiodic acid.

And yes, technically it's already an amine

-----------
As far as P2P, aluminum, methylamine, and mercuric chloride Yes yes yes.

Condensation to form the imine then hydrogenation to form the amine

The Al+HgCl amalgam and recycling process does not result in anything except aluminum and mercuric chloride and an aluminum mercury amalgam.

"a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change"

Specifically, they act as the catalyst to provide hydrogen for the hydrogenation of the imine.

Condensation to the alkene and catalytic hydrogenation to the amine.

By definition that's what happens and the only thing I shouldn't have said was calling the birch reduction an amination by reduction cuz it was simply a reduction of the alcohol. Pseudoephedrine is already an amine.

And yes, the mercury aluminum amalgam is called the catalyst throughout the literature for the hydrogenation of the condensation product of the ketone (aldehyde) and the amine.

Just because there's not platinum, rhodium, or some other exotic metal And we're not doing a catalytic hydrogenation of pseudo ephedrine directly to methamphetamine which you can do, doesn't mean that the mercury aluminum amalgam is not a catalyst.
 
Last edited:
Hopefully, you will not use this knowledge for any illicit purpose, I understood about 10% of that.
 
charlz said:
Good Morning!

I really wouldn´t call this an impressive answer. At least not the chemistry part.

@snmfmy


If pseudoephedrine is used as starting material in a methamphetamine synthesis the reaction is NOT a reductive amination. Instead a benzylic hydroxy is swapped for a hydrogen so it is a reduction. Have a look at the pseudoephedrine molecule. The nitrogen (with a methyl attached to it) is already in place. One just needs to remove that OH group.

Reductive amination (aka reductive alkylation) is the exchange of a carbonyl oxygen for a nitrogen (eg. ammonia or methylamine). This is what happens with P2P as a precursor.

Also using elemental lithium from batteries doesn´t involve lithium hydride. It is a kind of birch reduction utilising in situ generated ammonia.

And when aluminium metal is used to reduce an intermediate imine (formed from P2P and methylamine) the metal is NOT a catalyst. It´s a source of electrons for the reduction of the imine.
This is called a dissolving metal reduction (mercury is needed to break passivation of the aluminium metal so it can react).

Cheers
Click to expand...
Wow, I am impressed
 
@snmfmy
snmfmy said:
LAH lithium ammonia hydride is formed in situ. Aside from sodium hydroborate, lithium hydrides are the only thing that can reasonably reduce the hydroxyl except for hydroiodic acid.
Click to expand...

1. LAH is common abbreviation for LithiumAluminiumHydride. No ammonia involved.
2. If by sodium hydroborate you mean sodium borohydride (NaBH4) then NO this reagent won´t be able to perform the reduction of pseudoephedrine to methamphetamine.

snmfmy said:
The Al+HgCl amalgam and recycling process does not result in anything except aluminum and mercuric chloride and an aluminum mercury amalgam.
Click to expand...

1. There is no HgCl. It´s either HgCl2 (Mercury(II)chloride) or Hg2Cl2 (Mercury(I)chloride).
2. Elemental aluminium is spent during the reaction. Whenever one substrate is reduced (here pseudoephedrine), some other material will be oxidised. In this case aluminium.
Also there will be elemental mercury (Hg) in the waste stream. Again a chemical change because initially you feed in a salt of mercury.

What do you mean by recycling process?

snmfmy said:
Condensation to the alkene and catalytic hydrogenation to the amine.
Click to expand...

Condensation product of ketone and amine is called an IMINE.
 
Last edited:
snmfmy said:
Just because there's not platinum, rhodium, or some other exotic metal And we're not doing a catalytic hydrogenation of pseudo ephedrine directly to methamphetamine which you can do, doesn't mean that the mercury aluminum amalgam is not a catalyst.
Click to expand...

There is a catalytic hydrogenation of pseudoephedrine directly to methamphetamine? You got reference for this? Because I think ephedrine needs to be
converted to chloroephedrine before being catalytically hydrogenated to methamphetamine. So NOT really direct.
 
charlz said:
There is a catalytic hydrogenation of pseudoephedrine directly to methamphetamine? You got reference for this? Because I think ephedrine needs to be
converted to chloroephedrine before being catalytically hydrogenated to methamphetamine. So NOT really direct.
Click to expand...
Were you a consultant on the television show, Breaking Bad? Lol. Ephedra grows in Afghanistan: The Taliban has claimed it will eradicate the opium fields. Can wild ephedra be used to make a new cash crop product; methamphetamine or some variation of it?
 
Stop taking cartel meth - start taking Taliban meth!

It´s semi-synthetic and enantiopure....

😂😂😂
 
Last edited:
charlz said:
? Because I think ephedrine needs to be converted to chloroephedrine before being catalytically hydrogenated to methamphetamine. So NOT really direct.
Click to expand...

No - you can directly reduce. I knew someone who did precisely that. It's a benzylic hydroxyl that's being reduced so it's worth searching for hydrogenation of benzylic alcohols rather than specifically routes that are specific to (pseudo)ephedrine.

To be clear - not the Emde reduction.
 
@AlsoTapered

Hi, I just did a search in reaxys for "hydrogenation of benzylic alcohols". Turned up one document:

https://sci-hub.wf/10.1055/s-0029-1216852

In this paper 1-phenylethanol (as the only substrate) has the OH replaced with hydrogen via Rh/graphite: 3% yield, main products got the phenyl reduced to cyclohexane.
Reaction conditions: 1–2 mmol scale of substrate in 1.4 M soln at r.t. and 1 atm H2 of pressure using Rh/Gr (C24K, 4% loading by weight)

Do you mean this?

Searching for "catalytic hydrogenation of benzylic alcohols" turns up nothing at all.
 
It was back in 2000 and as I think I've said, methamphetamine is not my world. But the person who told me had attained significant further education in chemistry and more importantly, had provided facile routes that were adapted from patents or papers - they had a 100% record. Doesn't mean I've not forgotten something. So maybe hydrogenolysis or deoxygenation is more accurate than hydrogenation? I didn't ask for details due to circumstances.

I do remember that a supported palladium catalyst was involved.

Sorry to be so vague but it was long ago.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top