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Extracting Alkaloids from Poppy Seed Tea

SpareRib

Bluelighter
Joined
Sep 9, 2018
Messages
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I've made quite a bit of poppy seed tea but haven't touched it in about a week. It's not been refrigerated (others in my family will throw it out unknowingly, as they have done before) and is now a bit gross. The liquid has bits that are separated and sticking to the side of the plastic container. I'm wondering if these are bits of morphine, codeine, or some other alkaloid and if there is a way to get them out and use them directly. Or would the alkaloids stick to the bottom such that I could drink them out with the straw.

I can throw this batch out if it is too nasty, but this situation has me wondering if there is a simple way to extract the alkaloids from the tea. For example, if I boil the tea for a while, will alkaloids remain in the pot? It would be great if I could extract the alkaloids so that I don't have to drink the tea and also to have a sense for how potent the poppy seeds are.

Note that I only have poppy seeds and no other parts of the plant such as the pods.

Thanks and appreciate any information!
 
Assuming there is a decent amount of water remaining in the tea, it's unlikely that a significant amount of alkaloids would have separated out, except for a very small amount on the sides where water would have evaporated off.

If you simply concentrate down the tea, the alkaloids will remain in the pot. Be careful not to put direct, strong heat on the mixture when it is fairly concentrated, though, or you may cause decomposition of the alkaloids. A double-boiler type setup would work to avoid this issue.

Isolation of alkaloids from poppy seed tea has been discussed in the past in the forum. See the following threads:

Morphine extraction from PS

Poppy seed tea

Acid-Base extraction of Morphine and Methylmorphine from Poppy Seeds

poppy seed extraction
 
i used to do poppy seed tea to get off heroin long time ago. and maybe i was doing it wrong, but it didnt help with the withdrawals although i remember feeling more "vivid" on it. it might be the other alkaloids present in there, like theabaine? i was told not to overheat it and to pour lemon juice for better extraction but how much that work is questionable.
 
Poppy seed tends to have such a widely variable amount of morphine and other alkaloids in it that it makes extraction (or use as a drug) quite a gamble.

Probably techniques similar to extraction of poppy straw would be useful, namely ion exchange resins used to bind the alkaloids. But that's a bit above and beyond what the average person can access.
 
Thanks so much for this info. Honestly, reading through all of these linked posts makes me feel like I need to re-take some basic chemistry classes and most info I don't quite understand! Would love to have something in laymen's terms or even a video. That is how people learn how to do things these days, right? :)
 
if there was a way for the layman to extract opiates from poppy seeds, every one would be doing it all the time and poppy seeds would be illegal.
 
Xylene seems to work well as a nonpolar solvent when extracting codeine (unlike petroleum ether and alkanes)... At least the extract I made from a codeine cough syrup earlier today had a clear effect. Some kind of a strange white membrane formed between the polar and nonpolar phase - I guess it's a product of some ingredient of the medication getting fried by the high pH. Codeine has a surprisingly mild bitter taste compared to many other alkaloids, when it is present in a water solution in equal concentration.
 
I'd like to ask about solvents and adding acid to the process - if you wanted to dry it out and smoke the extract, wouldn't you want the freebase?

Street heroin is usually in salt form, so most people smoking it are smoking the salt. I'm not sure whether smoking the freebase would be preferable or not.

Are the freebase alkaloids water soluble?

No.

And do you need heat or no?

Heat is usually not a strict requirement in acid-base extractions, although it can help increase yields.
 
...opium is not acidified to my knowledge...

Alkaloids in nature are rarely in freebase form as the pH of most parts of most organisms is quite a bit lower than the pKa of alkyl amines. Presumably the opium latex that comes out of the plants contains morphine as some kind of salt.

Would these freebase alkloids be soluable in alcohol/any nps?

Yes, they should be quite soluble in alcohols and in most non-polar solvents.
 
Did the xylene extraction of codeine again, more carefully with a real separatory funnel. I can feel from the effects that I got at least about 80% of the original codeine extracted to the final citric acid solution. Not really something I would want to do on a regular basis - outside a real lab there would be some kind of accident sooner or later, especially if you have even a little bit of addiction and tend to be impatient when working with the material. The codeine cough syrup contains something (possibly intentionally) that tends to form an emulsion when separating the xylene layer from the basified water solution - adding table salt made it break a bit faster.

Aromatic hydrocarbons seem to dissolve in water in trace amounts that are large enough to be detectable by taste. Shaking the final water-citric acid-codeine solution two times with cooking oil seemed to remove most of that impurity.
 
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