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Heroin Heroin and Morphine Freebase - Help with calculations and method

acetic.crusader

Greenlighter
Joined
Jan 3, 2019
Messages
3
Hi everyone

I live on the west coast of BC in Canada. There has been so much fentanyl and unknown fentanyl analogues being brought in from China and sold as dope here lately, in all colours of the rainbox and is really scary. Thank god I still have a good connection for high grade dope from the city that hasn't been tainted with fentanyl.

The dope we get (used to get more) is the salt best for shooting from Asia, unlike our neighbours down south that get a lot from South America and some from Afghan. Unlike my cousins in England that get the brown dope that is good for smoking, when the stuff we get here is smoked I am sure a lot of lost to it being burned despite being somewhat mixed with Caffeine.

I would like to freebase the H that i get so it could be better smoked. Also would like to possible freebase Morphine extracted from pills that may also potentially be smoked.

From what I have read Morphine and Heroin both freebase at a PH of 9.1. The dope I get is golden but clear when disolved in water filtering not really needed. The Morphine in pills I would plan to soak in water, then filter until clear and evaporate to get the much more pure Morphine from the fillers. Then it could be disolved in a much smaller amount of water. I have both Sodium Hydroxide crystals and 10% ammonia solution. I was wondering if anyone could help me figure out which of those two would be best to use and how much of either would be required to get a PH of 9.1 in 1ml or 10ml etc of water.

I am not sure if it would then fall out of solution or if a polar/non-polar extraction would be required. It seems chloroform is used to extract, I do not have access to that. I can get naptha, xylene or toulene. Does anyone know which of those would be the best to substitute chloroform in this situation, I am thinking Xylene would that work?

Thanks for any help, I would really like to be able to turn my stuff in the base as my prefered ROA is smoking.
 
Anyone have any experience or able to provide any information? I realize a PH meter would obv be the answer but I do not have one and if im able to say 1-200 that would be ideal. Just wondering if someone is able to give a decent figure if say someone was to dissolve 1 gram of Morphine into x amount of water and how much of x alkali is needed to achieve a PH of 8.5-9.1 (if someone knows what the best PH is to basify and cause the Morphine to precipitate from solution).

I am not sure why it is such common knowledge to base cocaine which allows it to be smoked 100x better than its salt but morphine or heroin is hardly ever talked about in regards to basifying for people who prefer to smoke the stuff. It seems like people who get the brown sugar in europe are lucky fucks and people who get the salt the best they do is add a little caffeine and thats it, no body ever thinks or talks about basifying so it can vape and run so much better on foil.

I have never smoked Morphine but that is what is happening when people smoke opium. I would think with all the people who do homebake in australia and new zealand, either from codeine to morphine and then possibly to heroin, or from morphine to heroin. There would be a good amount of people with the knowledge of basing morphine. I would image that if one was to purify morphine from pills separating as much of the fillers as possible and then basify it would then be able to be smoked quite well.

Does anyone have any experience with any of which I talk about, have any methods or any input. Anything would seriously be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!
 
Finally, the morphine free base is precipitated out of the resulting aqueous solution by adjusting the pH of the aqueous filtrate to pH 8.5 to 9.5. Preferably, the pH to precipitate the morphine ranges from about 9 to 9.3, and most preferably is about 9.1

I've had decent results with solutions containing say 5-15 grams of MS in a liter of water. The concentrations can vary rather widely and are still forgiving, but the higher the concentration of MS or M HCl, the faster the precipitation into fluffy snow on the bottom of your container.

While you really should have at least pH paper strips ($2?), adding 10 % Ammonium Hydroxide dropwise to your well dissolved solution should bring about a cloudy change followed by the precip of M snow. Keep up the stirring and pause after every few drops of AH.
Once you see the reaction developing throughout the graduated cylinder you can add a couple more drops then cease. After filtering off the m base with quantitatative filter paper of say 12-20uM, you can attempt to add a bit more AH to the filtrate to see if any more m base develops but usually the lions share will have been removed in the first step.

Ammonium Hydroxide is more attractive to use vs NaOH as it's more forgiving and is difficult to overshoot pH 9 if you don't pour the whole bloody bottle in. NaOH would def require a pH meter.
It's getting late here but I'll check back in and see how your doing.

Welcome to BL acetic.crusader :)
 
The last time I bought a digital PH meter it was around $150+. It looks like you can get them as cheap as $10 on eBay (doubt quality is space grade haha) but looks like for around $30 can get a partially decent one. Again I wouldn't trust my pinky with long term accuracy but for the price worth a shot. The PH to properly base Morphine has always seemed to require a very precise PH level from what I have read. Unlike Cocaine it appears where there is a wide range.

One question I have wondered, if the PH is brought too high such as PH 12, I realize that Morphine etc is back to being water soluble. During poppy extraction at that point other alkaloids are not and can be removed. However if Morphine is the only material in the water besides fillers, is the Morphine still freebased despite still being water soluble. Such as if one where to extract using a solvent would the Morphine be smokable or not.

The problem I have always encountered (without a PH meter, will see once ordered) is when I add whatever base to the solution (be baking soda or ammonia etc) one drop at a time, I never experience any cloudy spots forming in the solution nor do I notice anything precipitate to the bottom. I add one drop, wait a few minutes, add another, after 5-6 drops finally I end up pushing 6 drops all at once and still nothing. I recall reading when they extract from the pods once the PH is brought back down to 8.5-9.1 from a higher PH they say to leave overnight. Does it take that long for the conversion to complete and fall from solution or does the process only take a few minutes, is temp a big factor etc.

Perhaps my solutions have always been too dilute and not saturated enough. I generally have used around 300-500mg at a time for these tests. At first I might have about 50ml or water with 500mg disolved. Currently I have some Morphine powder I separated from a bunch of fillers. Right now I have an abundance of 10mg MSIR, they are instant release which is nice to work with but they are huge and have so much filler. One pill weighs about 300mg itself! Right now I have about 1g of powder and used 30 x 10mg MSIR pills. So it should be around 30% pure, when I started around 50ml of water was used like I mentioned. Perhaps if I now dilute the powder in 3-5ml of water I would have more luck being much more saturated?

Also upon further research I believe Toulene would be the best non-polar solvent to use in place of Chloroform. Have you had any experience using a non-polar solvent to extract the base from the alkali water solution opposed to allowing it to precipitate and filter?

My other thought about trying to purify the Morphine from the fillers in the pills (unfortunately the MSIR pills have about 6 diff types of filler for some fkn reason, brand name Dilaudid IR pills only had one filler magnesium sterate). I wonder if there is a way to freeze precipitate the Morphine salt from some type of saturated solution that would leave a lot of the filler behind in solution. I am not sure if there is a liquid that Morphine disolves into that has a very low solubility mg/ml at lower temps etc. DMT very nicely will freeze precipitate from Naptha and boy o boy does it clean up them crystals nicely.
 
I'll have to dig up some references on non polar solvents as I know unlike H, the most efficient is a mixture of two solvents for morphine. For H chloroform or dichloromethane usually suffice as ethers can form peroxides and be more demanding in it's handling. Absolute C-1 to C-4 alcohols, esp methanol are very suitable for solubility and quick evap for recrystalization .

TBH I've never had all that much difficulty precipitating, even when doing it blind but I usually add like at least a mL or 2 before moving on to somewhat rapid drops with pauses to check for subtle cloudiness and then slow down with the AH addition. It can take a decent amount sometimes as if you measure the pH before starting you'll find it's around pH5. The reaction can begin at 8.6 up to around almost 10 but 9.1 precipitates with the most efficacy though . With very dilute solutions it can sometimes take 20+ mins to begin and refrigeration is always a good idea if possible. Once you get the hang of it the process is much simpler than solvent pulls.

Purposely going as high as pH 11 turns morphine back into it's soluble anionic (morphinate) form which is why it's done in opium alkaloid separation but I don't see any advantages to using it in this situation.

If your looking for some practice and having difficulty just be a bit more aggressive with your Ammonium Hydroxide as it is more difficult to overshoot the pH than with other chems, and it takes a very low concentration of MS and a lot of water to slow or inhibit precipitation. If anything the extra water helps buffer the pH change a bit making it more difficult to overshoot pH9. Carbonates and bicarbonates don't have any advantages over AH imo.

Another fun thing is to dissolve your MS into solution and let the pill binders and excipients settle out. Then decant or filter and proceed with M baseing. This cleans things up fairly well. After that if you want to do a liquid/ liquid extraction go for it but it's a little redundant depending on your needs. Recrystalization in hot alcohol works well for further purification too.

Lastly if you don't have the means for a pH pen , narrow range papers will suffice, but even blind I've had very few batches go awry. You can always add more NH3 or drop it back down with a mild acid.
 
As Jekyl Anhydride already stated, morphine will form water-soluble salts at very high pH values, and will thus stay in solution in its anionic form.

Chemically, one of morphine's hydrogen atoms is phenolic, i.e. weakly acidic. If you managed to get the pH all the way up to 12, that effectively means you've neutralized that acidity, and all of the drug is now present as morphenate anions.

When extracting morphine from raw opium, this is done deliberately (normally using lime/calcium hydroxide) to keep the morphine in solution so the other compounds can be filtered off. Adding weakly acidic ammonium salts then creates an NH3/NH4+ buffer that stabilizes the pH at a value of about 9, where the morphine can precipitate in its freebase form.

When using pharma morphine, one is basically approaching the problem from the exact opposite direction: You're starting with morphine sulfate, i.e. a water-soluble, acidic salt of morphine. Adding ammonia (the conjugate base of the ammonium cation) will likewise react with the protonated morphine cations to create an NH3/NH4+ buffer that will stabilize the pH at around 9 so the morphine can precipitate.
 
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