Purifying Heroin - Pictorial

[sammydaze]

This is not written by me. SWIM does not know the original source. If it is you or someone you know, please let me know and I will pass along due credit.

With that said, enjoy purifying your opiates. If only SWIM knew where to get chloroform or ether.......................... *sigh*

Pictorial - cleaning opioids.

The following pictorial was done using things like water, sugar, cacao (for color), milk-powder. No illegal substances were used.

Needed:

- distilled water
- ether (or any other NP)
- Hydrochloroc acid (HCl), 25%
- ammonia (=ammonium hydroxide), 25%
- pipette 10ml, pipettes 1ml to add liquids dropwise
- magnetic stirrer with stirbar
- 2 small test tubes
- 1 glass
- evaporation dish (petri dish)
- sodium bicarbonate (or tricarbonate)

Time: about 1 hour


1. The opioid, for example street heroin, is put into a small test tube together with some drops of 25% HCl, 10ml of water and dissolved.
start.jpg

2. The solution is poured into a small vessel and placed on a magnetic stirrer. Stirbar is dropped in. Diluted Ammonia
(1 drop ammonia on 1ml dH2O) is now added dropwise. [The liquid is normally clear before ammonia is added, the pic was taken after the ammonia step because I had to retake the pic.]
000_0057.jpg

3. After a certain amount of ammonia has been added drop by drop the liquid will look like this from one drop to the other.
prec.jpg

4. The solution is transferred into a testube again and ether is poured on it, about 1/3 of the amount of liquid. You can see the two layers.
testtube1.jpg

You can see how something white is settling down on the bottom within the bottom layer. This is the spirit of the substance that we had bought on the street. The clear layer on top is the ether. If we had used chloroform, the NP layer would be on the bottom.
testtube2.jpg

5. After it was shaken for 3 minutes, two new layers form. You can see the top layer now contains something, while the lower layer is almost clear. In between them you see brownish stuff. We call this a gross shit a** emulsion, that we want to get rid off. So we wait.
emulsion.jpg

6. After a while we pipette off the top layer an put it into another test tube. We pour the solution, which is now clear again, from tube 1 into the little vessel, place it on the stirrer, add ammonia and see if precipitate forms again.
secondrun.jpg
If yes, then we shake it with ether again. If not, we can discard it or shake another two times with ether to make sure everything is collected. So on the above pic we have: tube 1, which contained the solution which was shaken with ether. Tube 2, which containsthe ether layer and to which we add any ether from further NP washes on the mother solution that we had pipetted off. And we see the glass with the mother solution, in which we repeat the
adding of ammonia.

8. We then make up a little diluted HCl with 15ml dH2O and 15 drops of HCl 25%.
15mlhcl.jpg

We add 5ml of that to the ether in tube 2 and shake it.

9. We pipette off the water layer on the bottom of the test tube and our it on something flat to evaporate it down.

10. But before we evaporate it, we add Bicarb to neutralize any acid that is not bound to product. This happens:
HCl + Na2CO3 -> NaCl (Table Salt)+ H2O (water) + CO2 (Carbondioxide).
bicarb.jpg

It will bubble. The bubbles are the CO2 that is freed. The volume of the liquid will raise cause of water and Table salt beeing formed.
bubble.jpg

Reputation Comments on this post:

	Good to know.
	good
	Good informative stuff
	Very informative and good pictures

[sammydaze]

11. After the bubbling stops, it is dried in the oven for 30 minutes at 40 - 50C.
drying.jpg

The final product.
finish.jpg

[Richard_smoker]

What other opiates will this technique isolate?

Is it just a heroin extraction procedure?? or will it work on, say, cooked-down poppy pod tea? what about crushed pharmies?

Just curious... maybe just wishful thinking. Sounds a lot like something I've read about extracting morphine from poppies, but obviously no acetoacetate(?) step to convert morphine-->Heroin.

[sammydaze]

I imagine this would work for pods and powder, but I don't know... unfortunately I'm not up to par on basic chemistry. I'm curious aswell though. Anyone?

[BlackCook]

hmm
when swim tries this...the watery phase is very brownish (cause of paracetamol i guess) and when bicarb is added, it bubbles and some foam comes to the top and is like melted sugar...
lets see what happens next to swim, he will tell me.

[BlackCook]

swim has dried everything he told me.
but there is a lot of salt know in it...
the salt is white... the h brown...

dont know.. perhaps because its european h, no. 4?

[sammydaze]

has swim iv'ed any yet? How is it?

[BlackCook]

No he didnt because it was very much salt and swim did not found ANYTHING about the toxic dose of salt...
he doesnt want to get a toxic shock because of iv'ing 1gr of Salt...
Swim did not find anything about the toxic dose... there must be someone who knows...

but if you put the result on an alu-foil and chase the dragon, its ok... the salt does not make it glide, but thats normal for salt...

[Freak_]

Is there a way to get rid of the salt? Using something other instead of bicarb or an additional wash? I don't want to have Tablesalt in my final product. Please help. Thank you

[Freak_]

solutability of diacetyl morphine base. i found this:

1 gram diacetyl morphine base dissolves in:
1.5 ml Chloroform
100 ml diethylether
31 ml ethanol
1700ml H2O

another page tells 1L H2O dissolves 0.2g heroin base and 1L ethanol dissolves 0,6g heroin base.

melting point diacetyl morphine hcl 243-244 °C
melting point diacetyl morphine base 173 °C

One Site told the melting-point of pure diacetylmorphine hydrochloride is listed at 229-233°C.

I hope these informations are correct.

[Freak_]

In SWIMs dream the liquid phase was brown and stayed brown, the chloro phase was brown and stayed brown and the final product was brown, too. There was a lot of salt in the final product. Smoking this sucks.

[brown_chunx]

this seems far too complex for the average junkie (who would most likely never take a chance of wasting any dope).

[muopioidagonist]

Originally Posted by Freak_

Is there a way to get rid of the salt? Using something other instead of bicarb or an additional wash? I don't want to have Tablesalt in my final product. Please help. Thank you

SWIM is a biochemist with several years of lab experience. SWIM wants everyone to know generally when supplies are limited for an expensive impure street drug, an ideal lab technique for purification of street drug(heroin) is often balanced with lab techniques devised to not only recover PURE product but also to recover as much of ANY product. With that said, the only way to limit the amount of NaCl produced with acidifying freebase diacetylmorphine as the original poster describes in step 8. Is to add another step which only makes it easier to lose final product.

Step 1:SWIY would take the ether(organic phase) which contains the heroin freebase and evaporate it so SWIY can weigh it to the ten-thousanth of a gram on an analytical balance.
Step 1a(math):Then SWIY can calculate the molecular weight of freebase heroin and use that to calculate how many moles of heroin you have(which was evaporated from ether). This is then used to calculate limiting reactant of HCl+Heroin-->Heroin-HCl. This is a one to one molaratity and since HCl dissociates completely in solution, because it is a strong acid, the moles of HCl will equal the moles of heroin used. Of course to actually work with the quantities the concentration of the HCl along with the volume will have to be known to calculate the actual mass of HCl which is finally converted to moles.
When volume of HCl is know, proceed to step 8 by dissolving the freebase heroin into ether.

With all this said, it isn't really worth it to limit all of the salt. An educated guess is enough for the purposes of SWIY who want to limit the amount of NaCl produced after neutralizing the last step with sodiumbicarbonate. SWIY must remember the NaCl is produced in the last step, but step 8 is the step where the extra HCl is added and that is the step that limits the final HCl in solution that is converted to NaCl by the addition of sodiumbicarbonate(baking soda). This is because SWIY doesn't want to snort/inject/etc.. a strong acid. However if SWIY likes smoking heroin, just stop with the ether and evaporate it on a watch glass for pure diamorphine. Otherwise SWIY is stuck with some salt if SWIY wants the water soluble heroin hydrochloride.

Reputation Comments on this post:

	great post!
	Good clarification of this method.

[Archangel]

Out of academic interest could someone explain y would swiy have to "neutrilize" the excesive HCl .Wouldnt it be common sense to just let it evaporate.Is there some obscure purpose for using bicarb?
Also , swim cant understand y one would not use litmus paper to adjust the ph more precisely so there would not be any HCl in excess?
Finaly , eventhough swim is not a biochemist , it would seem fairly simple to separate the salt from the product ,by a alchohol pull for example.

[muopioidagonist]

The point is snorting/injecting the salt doesn't matter and the more litmus paper SWIY uses, the more product SWIY is absorbing. SWIY could do an alcohol extraction, but it seems really unnecessary. I think if SWIY injected a really hypertonic NaCl + diamorphine solution, it wouldn't do much except draw more fluid into blood vessels. 5% NaCl by volume is routinely IV administered by physicians while 0.9% NaCl is isotonic in IV form.

-The best way is to add the sodium bicarb really slowly while mixing the solution and just watch for it to stop producing CO2!

[bogumil]

Hi, havent been here in a long time. I just read some of the replies to the cleaning-procedure for Heroin. I heard a cool show on the radio last week and will try to tell you what they said.

Ill reply to some questions, cant go through each question, but maybe I can help some.

1. The result of the procedure must be white. Heroin in its purest form when sold comes as a salt, just like cocaine. There will be at a good amount of pure salt mixed with the heroin-salt, but salts are soluble in water. So, the heroin itself is white (its a salt) and then there is the salt from the HCl and NaOH. (one has to add an acid to street heroin to i.v., because Street heroin is in its base-form and the base doesnt go into water. So by adding the acid you convert the H into heroin-acid on the spoon and this then dissolves in the water)

2. Try to use as few acid and bases as possible, this results in less salt beeing formed (salt in general is produced by mixing acids and bases. So the less you use, the less salt wil form. An easy way to minmize the needed amounts is using as few water as possible)

In central Europe the average heroin contains 3 - 8 percent heroin. So if you at the average in your part of the world is and do the maths you know how much water you need. Really very few water. The values of the heroin-solubility in water that you posted are for base-form of H. When we put the H-base/ the street material into the acidic water, we produce the salt-form of the H, and the salt form dissolves waaaay better in water. So for one gram you wont need much more than a few ml water. I have heard on science radio, that one would use as much water as a heroin-addict (those poor guys) use, when he injects the H. So a few ml per gram are enough. Its even better because this way a lot of the junk will stay out already in this first step. If you use too much water it will be difficult to precipitate the H out in the end, I heard.

3. The brown colour in the phases comes from the impurities. So as long as you stick to the procedure you dont have to worry that the brown colour is H.

Also, I would do the procedure with at least 5 grams of heroin, to get enough precipitate (1 gram with 3% dia-morphine givey you only 30 mg of pure product. So with 5 gr youre at 150 mg and this is better to see without a microscope. If you do it with less material, you can reduce the steps:

1. For 1 gram of H use 5ml water. HEat the water up to 30 to 40 C. Make the water acidic to pH 5.5 with HCl. Then put the H into the water and stir it gently. Check pH again and adjust carefully. 6.5 is enough at this point. Filter the solution through a fine and small filter. Small is important to reduce loss. The size of the fingertip is large enough for the filter.

2. to the filtered solution add ammonia or any other base until pH is 9. Stir gently with a glas-stick. Check the temperature of the water, thats makes the reactions of the chemicals easier. 30 - 40C. After 5 Minutes add chloroform and the filtered solution into a seperatory funnel, same amount both liquids. Shake and then get rid of the water layer. Keep it though and adjust pH again to 9.2 and shake with another fresh amount of chloroform. Put both chloroformlayers together and evaporate with a fan, no heat added. You can put it on the heater in your apartement.

Beware of the purity of the product!!! Still this helps to save a lot of lifes I think, when impurities are washed out.

Remember, that I never ever did this and that I dont have anything to do with heroin. This drug destroys lifes. Stay clean.

[m.swinehart81]

Will this procedure work with any form of street heroin? A friend of a friend wanted to try this but the only thing available to him is black tar heroin? I have read other threads pertaining to purifying heroin and in those threads it said that these processes would not work with black tar...

[Donmeka]

this works for all types of H yes? SWIM is on the west coast and sadly gets tar, can SWIM turn tar into that pure sexy wonderful good stuff?

EDIT: OOPS SWIM just saw this was asked right above him, HIS BAD!

[east_of_eden]

swim has the same question about black tar, but she would guess that because all the other swimmers (in this thread) seem to be from europe that this process wouldn't apply to tar.

although, a friend of swims has said that he has done this before (with tar) but swim thinks it must have been a slightly different procedure.

also, all the chemistry and math in some of those posts was making swim's head hurt. those were never her subjects by a long shot.

this is a typical lazy junkie question, but my lazy junkie cat is asking me if there's an easier way to clean up street heroin just a little bit instead of going through all these steps, a little bit cleaner would be better than nothing, right?