poppy seed extraction

[Abject]

I've been doing a little bit of reading on concentrating PST and I thought I'd come to you more knowledgeable folk for guidance.
The first method I'm interested in involves partially freezing normal PST (shaken up water with seeds, strain) the idea being the bigger molecules and plant fats will be trapped in the ice and the alkaloids will be pushed to the water.
The next method involves using calcium (oxide or hydroxide? would carbonate work?) to bring the pH to 9 or 11? which causes alkaloids to convert to salts. My question is, wouldn't the salts still dissolve in the water at cool temperatures? I have read about adding ammonium to a pH of 9.1 to convert morphine but not other alkaloids, but I'm not sure I can ask about that as it's getting freebase-y and borderline-y
The last method I've come across is simply using ISO alcohol in place of water in a normal PST wash and evaporating it (or makeshift laudanum) and they're not really on my mind.

I'm mainly interested in whether the chemistry of the freezing technique holds up to retain alkaloids and trap plant shit in the ice?
I've added a quote as I've tried to be brief.

The filter residue was extracted again with water, fractions were combined.
The closed bottle was kept still, in a freezer at -5 centigrade until 2/3 of the solution was frozen.
The freezing solution was filtrated, after which the ice was discarded.
The filtrate was put back in the bottle, and the freezing procedure was repeated.
The resulting brown solution was allowed to evaporate on a hot water bath,
yielding a brittle brown substance which was potent and tasteful enough to smoke pleasurably.

Hypothesis of the success of the procedure:

The active ingredient, morphine maleate, is highly soluble, even in cold water.
Acid or base addition is unnecessary and unwanted because of possible decomposition of the maleate salt,
into possibly less soluble constituents.

Heating is unnecessary and unwanted because of possible degradation of saccharides and peptides (inflicted effect explained below),
and additional dissolving other unwanted materials, like lipids.

The crystallization of water in the solution forces other molecules than water out of the matrix.
Small molecules, like morphine maleate move easily to stay in the liquid phase.
Large molecules, like (poly)saccharides and (poly)peptides can not move easily enough, and are included in the ice.
An additional effect may be that plant saccharides have a high affinity to water.
So, may be, small saccharides are included in the ice as well.

The freezing therefore accomplishes a separation between alkaloids and "nutritional" materials.
This statement is confirmed by direct evaporation of cold water extract.

It is important not to break the ice crystals during formation, because cavities will form, enclosing active ingredients.
This is experimentally confirmed.

 

[neurotic]

Only morphine and codeine will form salts when calcium hydroxide is added. The point of this parte of the process is to get rid of the inactive opium alkaloids.

 

[m1c4h]

I'm new as a poster but I've spent many hours reading and recently began researching poppys. Could butane be used with poppy seeds or pods for that matter to extract something in a smokable format?

 

[belligerent drunk]

Only morphine and codeine will form salts when calcium hydroxide is added. The point of this parte of the process is to get rid of the inactive opium alkaloids.

pH 9-11 would turn everything that has an aromatic hydroxyl into respective phenolates, codeine doesn't have one (there's a methoxy group). So in fact codeine would not form a salt at pH higher than 10, because the tert nitrogen would deprotonate. Same goes for thebaine, oripavine (which I reckon is in opium poppy) on the other hand can form a phenolate; so in total making the solution basic will make codeine and thebaine practically insoluble and leave morphine and oripavine in the solution. I'm not aware which other alkaloids are in opium poppy.

So bottom line is, if you want to extract every alkaloid (including codeine), you want to use an acidic solution: citric or acetic acid would work. If you want only morphine, then use a basic solution to extract.

The first method sounds sketchy and redundant. Things like oils and stuff don't really dissolve in water anyway. If you have access to lab solvents, then you can perform an extraction with a basic or acidic solution, then "wash" that extract with something like petroleum ether or diethyl ether - that will remove most of the nonpolar non-salt stuff.

I'm new as a poster but I've spent many hours reading and recently began researching poppys. Could butane be used with poppy seeds or pods for that matter to extract something in a smokable format?

The main active compound in opium poppy is morphine, with only some (insignificant) codeine. It is practically impossible to get morphine freebase with conventional methods, so extraction with butane/petroleum ether won't yield anything as morphine salts prefer to be in water.

 

[neurotic]

pH 9-11 would turn everything that has an aromatic hydroxyl into respective phenolates, codeine doesn't have one (there's a methoxy group). So in fact codeine would not form a salt at pH higher than 10, because the tert hydrogen would deprotonate. Same goes for thebaine, oripavine (which I reckon is in opium poppy) on the other hand can form a phenolate; so in total making the solution basic will make codeine and thebaine practically insoluble and leave morphine and oripavine in the solution. I'm not aware which other alkaloids are in opium poppy.

shit, i need to step my chemistry game up... i'm guilty of having simply repeated what i had read in poppy extraction teks without a deeper understanding in that post

 

[belligerent drunk]

Well it's not really crucial here, because the amounts of codeine are lower than those of morphine and additionally codeine itself is an order of magnitude weaker weight-by-weight, so that makes codeine an insignificant player in opium. I guess the main plus of using a basic extraction is that it rids the product of thebaine, although I'm not sure how bad consuming a bit of thebaine is.

 

[Bagseed]

so to extract fairly clean opium alkaloids, extracting with acidic water (which pH is good?) and then washing the acidic solution with something non polar, and then evaporating the water afterwards is good? or should one perform a full A/B a la DMT extraction?