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(Theoretical) Drug extraction from urine?

J

JasNod

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Mar 19, 2012
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Is it possible to extract a drug from your urine since some of it is excreted unchanged? I'm aware if it is it is most likely dangerous and not worth the effort, but I'm curious =).
 
Dangerous? No. Gross? Yeah.

Ideally one would do this with some sort of amphetamine, since >75% of amphetamines generally are excreted in the urine. I once heard an account of a person going on a speed binge, and remarking to his friend that if that friend were to drink his urine, he would probably get tweaked out, himself. Well, the challenge was accepted and apparently the friend did actually receive strong amphetamine effects from drinking the urine.

But let's presume you don't want to drink urine, and look at an extraction.
1. There's a lot of product in there, so if one were to get it it certainly wouldn't be a waste of time.
2. That product is also in a lot of water, so you might want to do an acid-base extraction unless you have lots of patience and knowledge of urine.
3. There might be metabolites in there which would be difficult to separate from the original compound, so the end product might yield different effects. With amphetamine, probably increased sympathetic activity owing to norpholedrine.

But that's where my (shaky) knowledge ends, someone else would have to describe the details :P
 
As atrollappears has already outlined, it's definitely possble, but generally not considered to be worth the trouble.

Regarding #3, norpholedrine (or p-hydroxyamphetamine as it's more frequently called) is poorly extracted from aqueous solutions at pH >10, owing to deprotonation of its phenolic hydroxyl. Amphetamine, on the other hand, extracts nicely at pH 13-14. However, phenylpropanolamine is another minor metabolite of amphetamine, and can't be avoided simply by pH adjustment. But when extracting drugs from urine, you'd probably want to do a pretty extensive clean-up in any case.
 
A lot of drugs are excreted in urine conjugated somehow with e.g. glucuronide or sulfate, so you'd have to do some fairly signficant processing.

I think it's totally feasible to take 3 weeks worth of meth users pee and then shake it with heptane and lye to see what coems out. Sure you'd pull a lot of random amines and probably make a real stink of things but you could easily get 50% of the original weight in some form of amphetamines I would wager! (If you had a fume hood.)

Certain other drugs like ketamine/pcp are also excreted almost entirely unchanged in urine so it may be practical for those.

I remember there was a Dutch study where they showed that there's a good concentration of drugs in the sewage that can be detected by GC/MS. I think there was also an Italian one showing cocaine in their waste supply. Wonder why.

There's also e.g. amanita mushrooms and the Siberian shamans who recycle the muscimol through piss. One lucky person eats shrooms, trips fuck, then he pees it out and someone else gets a free ride! and so on. Silly siberian tribesmen!
 
Well he actually tried to extract it = manufacture it, not just drink it. It shouldn't matter whether base material is urine or ephedrine..

which is another good reason not to do it since manufacturing is another story regarding law than just possession.
 
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